Jail Riots Illustrate Racial Divide in California

"My first year here, I didn't believe it, but the students told me, 'No, Miss Cook, if you come to school you're going to get shot,' " said Cook, who is African American. "When I arrived at class, all the black kids had stayed home."

Experts on hate crimes also point to a worrying trend among the two communities in Los Angeles County. In the past, non-Hispanic whites committed most hate crimes. Now, 73 percent of the identified suspects in anti-black hate crimes are Latino and 80 percent of the suspects in anti-Latino crimes are black, according to a report by the county Commission on Human Relations.

"The old paradigm of black-white race relations is falling by the wayside," Vaca said.

His view holds true for battles over employment as well.

A decade ago, in Southern California, minorities taking cases to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rarely if ever complained that they had lost the job to another minority, said Anna Park, a lawyer for the EEOC's Los Angeles district office. Now, however, an increasing number of African Americans are taking and winning cases against employers who have hired Latinos instead of them, she said.

"Discrimination is not just black-white anymore," she said.

To be sure, there are optimists. Martin Ludlow, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, the county's most powerful labor organization, is one of them. Ludlow, an African American, took the reins of what was traditionally seen as a bastion of Hispanic power last year. He said the federation would soon launch a campaign to push the hotel industry, which is dominated by Latinos, to begin rehiring African Americans in what he called "a largely Latino union effort to reach out to African Americans."

Still, Los Angeles's gang scourge has only added to the racial problems. The county is home to an estimated 1,000 gangs, predominantly Mexican and some of the most dangerous in the United States. A decade ago, said civil rights lawyer Connie Rice, black and Latino gangs operated in separate parts of the city. "Then the populations merged and the borders mixed," she said, "and now the underclass is at war."

Tony Rafael, a gang expert who is writing a book on the Mexican Mafia, said so far the Latinos are winning.

"Obviously it goes both ways, but the hammer is much bigger on the Latino side," Rafael said. "Blacks are outnumbered. And they can't seem to create a united front to resist."

In the jails, the problems are further magnified by poor living conditions that often spark violence, said Jody Kent, coordinator of the jails project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which has monitored conditions in the jails since winning a lawsuit against Los Angeles County in the 1970s.

Prisoners in the jail are housed mostly in dormitory settings, with men suspected of committing violent offenses bunking with people not involved with violent crimes. Although the jails were designed to house prisoners sentenced to one year or less of jail time, at this point 80 percent of the inmates are awaiting trial or are convicted felons awaiting transfer to a state prison. Plumbing is poor, and the deputies are short-staffed.

After the racial attacks, county sheriff's deputies said they anticipated a reaction on the streets.

On a recent evening, Deputy Tim Brennan, a patrol officer who has worked the streets of Compton for more than two decades, stopped two members of warring black gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, riding in one car. "What are you doing?" Brennan asked, clearly surprised to see the two men -- one wearing red, the other blue -- in the same vehicle. "Going to get the Mexicans?"

Everyone laughed uneasily.