Word: simi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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RESIDENTS OF SIMI VALley don't usually have much contact with people from South Central Los Angeles. The lustrous suburb where the Rodney King beating trial was held and the inner-city war zone that erupted in rioting two weeks ago are separated by just a 45-minute ride. In most other respects they are a world apart. But last week, for a fleeting moment of mutual incomprehension, they came face to face...
...Tuesday a convoy of 150 activists from South Central arrived to picket the courthouse where the four policemen were tried. "Why do you bother us?" Simi Valley housewife Suzanne Heffernan shouted back at the protesters. "Let us go on with our lives, like you are down there...
...contrast between South Central L.A. and Simi Valley is typical of the city-suburban divide. South Central, a largely black and Hispanic neighborhood of 260,000 people, has long been one of the poorest sections of the city. While there are pockets of prim bungalows sprinkled among the run-down commercial streets and crime-infested housing projects, the average income is just $10,000 per adult. More than a fourth of the area's families are below the poverty line...
Meanwhile, Simi Valley -- 80% white, 13% Hispanic, 5% Asian, only 2% black -- is a pristine bedroom community of just over 100,000, where the average price of a home is $230,000. Much of it is so fresh-out-of-the-cellophane new that in some shopping malls the trees are not yet shade size. "We can see some urban pressures like graffiti start to spring up," says Mayor Greg Stratton, but he stresses that "among towns over 100,000, Simi Valley is one of the two safest communities...
...must start -- demands that the President move far beyond last week's speech to articulate what everyone knows: in a country that each day reveals itself as two nations, where almost everyone sees race first and the individual second, where there still exist children of a lesser god, the Simi Valley verdict is perfectly explicable -- not as a fair consideration of the evidence but as an expression of fear. The argument that won acquittal played to that fear -- the defense's clever evocation of the "thin blue line" that "alone" staves off chaos. "The jury's message," says Adam Walinsky...