Mayor’s Plan to Quell Fears Is Under Fire : Community: Neighbor to Neighbor program lacks focus, some contend. But organizers and volunteers say they have achieved their goals.

Billed as Mayor Tom Bradley’s key effort to prevent violence after the highly charged Rodney G. King federal civil rights trial, the city’s Neighbor to Neighbor program has no special plan of action for verdict day and is planning to pull its volunteer teams off the streets once the verdicts are announced.

City officials say no special measures are needed because community volunteers have been on the streets for several weeks urging residents to stay calm no matter what the outcome of the trial.

But some community leaders say the program has not had much of a presence in their neighborhoods and question what value the program’s actions will have in the long run.

“If you live in South-Central, Neighbor-to-Neighbor is nothing but lip service,” said Fred Williams, a South-Central Los Angeles activist who works with the Cross Colours Foundation. “I call it the hush-hush-my-people campaign.”

The program was established to avert the sort of violence that erupted last year after four police officers charged with beating King were acquitted on all but one count in the state trial.

The plan as announced by Bradley in December called for teams of volunteers to go into the streets during the King trial and the trial of three men accused of assaulting trucker Reginald O. Denny at the riot’s outset. They were to canvass neighborhoods and visit shopping centers, housing projects and schools to discuss the trial, quell rumors and channel anger into positive action.

But as the city has been swept by a frenzy of false rumors of an impending verdict, calls to Neighbor to Neighbor offices yielded little concrete information about what will happen on the day the program has been building toward.

Many organizers said they were on hold, waiting for instructions from City Hall. Others said they were told that they would be pulled off the streets to man phone banks when the verdicts came down.

Regina Render, who supervises organizers in four council districts, said she is not planning to dispatch additional volunteers on verdict day. “We have a program that’s set up, and we’re sticking to that program,” Render said. “We are doing surveys . . . and when we are getting calls, we are defusing rumors.”

The program is viewed as an admirable effort, but many critics contend it has had no clear focus.

City officials now claim the program was never intended to be a riot-control program but more a means of assessing community needs.

“Our plan of action is to continue exactly what we have been doing,” said Marcella Howell, a Bradley aide who is the program’s director. “Our plan never has been around a verdict, and it will not be around the verdict. It is to defuse tempers and tension on an ongoing basis . . . so at a heightened-tension time period, you will have people talking things out with their neighbors.”

Critics, however, contend that the program is disorganized and out of touch with the people it is supposed to represent.

The program has been marked by departures of several senior organizers. As recently as Thursday, its top organizer in the Pico-Union district--one of the neighborhoods hit hardest during the riots--was fired.

City officials said the firing stemmed from conflicts over how the program should proceed in the community. But at a hastily called meeting of community leaders and program officials Tuesday, angry residents assailed the action and said it could harm efforts to unite the community on the eve of the verdicts.

“We want to go on record as showing our concern that while you are supposed to be working for us, you want to make all the decisions for us,” said Gloria Soto, a team leader.

Indeed, a persistent criticism has been that the program has sought too little from the community and that most decisions come from the mayor’s office.

Councilman Mike Hernandez said few other city leaders were consulted when the program was established.

“What bothered me all along is that it was the mayor’s plan and that it didn’t come from the people,” Hernandez said. “It was either you were going to do it this way or you were not going to do it at all.”

As a result, said Hernandez, he and a number of other council members have made their own plans to deal with ramifications of the verdicts. They have set up rumor-control hot lines and community volunteer teams similar to measures employed by the Neighbor to Neighbor program.

Leaders in the Korean-American community--who initially criticized the program for leaving them out--say program officials have made more efforts lately to reach the community, but they complain that there is still little communication with organizers.

“We really a haven’t been working with a centralized plan,” said Bong Hwan Kim, whose group, the Korean Youth and Community Center, was given $24,000 to hire two organizers to implement a Neighbor to Neighbor program in Koreatown.

“We don’t really have a plan for verdict day,” he said. “We’re trying to work with other Korean-American agencies to set up a rumor-control network.”

Many community activists who at first were willing to give the program a chance now say the program largely has been ineffective.

“The fact that there have been a multitude of efforts that seem fairly uncoordinated says something about what Neighbor to Neighbor has not been able to achieve,” said Anthony Thigpenn, a community organizer in South Los Angeles who heads Action for Grassroots Empowerment and Neighborhood Development Alternatives (AGENDA), a new project of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

In particular, Thigpenn said, the program has not been able to overcome suspicions among many South-Central and Pico-Union residents that it is somehow associated with the police.

It is a suspicion that has caused alarm among many organizers, who have put their credibility on the line to marshal support in inner-city neighborhoods dominated by gangs. Many say they have appealed, largely to no avail, to program coordinators to forcefully dispel the so-called snitch rumors.

“We have done everything in our power to separate ourselves from the police, but (the program) has not really taken the opportunity to challenge people who are saying those things,” said a lead organizer, who asked that his name not be used. “It’s a dangerous situation that hasn’t been addressed aggressively enough.”

But Howell defended the program.

“This is a program that has almost 500 volunteers working in their neighborhoods,” she said. “It is bilingual, it represents all areas of the city. It has basically embraced what is the best in the city--people working together to bring the city together.”

It is among the volunteers that the program finds some of its most enthusiastic defenders.

Many of those hired to work for the program are professional grass-roots community organizers who came on board because they believed in the cause of empowering residents and saw the program as a significant change of course for the city.

Despite the criticism, many say the program has opened doors for residents who otherwise would not have a voice.

“When you are organizing people, you are giving them the power to make changes,” said Isaac Zambrano, who previously worked with the SCLC.

At a discussion following their trek through a South-Central neighborhood, members of a Manual Arts High School group spoke with enthusiasm about their efforts.

“People are eager to give us their names and numbers because it is an opportunity for them to become involved,” said one volunteer, an elderly neighborhood woman.

Claudio Rosas, a volunteer who is a senior at Manual Arts High, said about 20 students from his school are participating.

“It lets people express their feelings and create their own activities,” he said of Neighbor to Neighbor. “It’s a good program.”

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