LAPD goes from oppressor to partner

Angie Kwon, a cashier at Penny Pinchers Liquor on West Boulevard in South Los Angeles, greets LAPD Officer Gary Verge. “We used to go to block club meetings and we’d be the problem,” said Verge, who grew up in the area. “Now they trust us to solve the problems.”   (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

LAPD Officer Gary Verge, left, and Sgt. Rick Arteaga walk down a hallway inside the department’s 77th Street Division station. Both were working the day the riots erupted on April 29, 1992. They and other officers are the face of a more enlightened department. But they share the legacy, too, of its darkest hours.   (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

LAPD Officer Michael Shea visits with Robert Cush, 75, at his 22-year business called Cush Garage Sale on Figueroa Street in South Los Angeles. Shea, a member of the force since 1987, learned that the line between good guys and criminals can be blurry and shifting.   (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

A man calling himself Divine the Great, left, argues with LAPD Officer Gary Verge outside his tattoo parlor on Crenshaw Boulevard. Capturing the exchange on cellphones is Sean Douglas, second from left, and Jahkese Allen Pircer. Verge, who works out of the 77th Street Division, has been with the department since 1989.   (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

LAPD Officer Michael Shea visits with Brandon Harris, left, his father Lew and his mother Dianne in front of their home on 62nd Street. When the fires started two decades ago, Shea couldn’t believe it. “I had no idea. Why would people burn down their own things? That didn’t make any sense to me.”   (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

LAPD Officers Catherine Durant and Tim Wunderlich search a man who was handcuffed for grabbing a woman, right, against her will on Broadway in South Los Angeles. He wasn’t arrested because the woman didn’t want to press charges. In 1992, the thugs who attacked white trucker Reginald Denny pelted black officers with racial slurs. “They were calling them Uncle Toms, traitors, all that stuff. They had it harder than we did,” Wunderlich said, “because they were on the side of the ‘enemy.’ ”  (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

LAPD Sgt. Rick Arteaga, left, watches as Al-Winston Babb, 29, greets Officer Gary Verge outside of Top Donuts at the intersection of Hyde Park Boulevard and Crenshaw Boulevard. In the background is Babb’s friend, Deyontie Austin, 25. “There are fewer shootings,” Verge says of the area where the riots erupted 20 years ago. “Not so many people running with guns. People aren’t turning and fighting as much as they used to.”  (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

LAPD Sgt. Rick Arteaga navigates his patrol car along Vermont Avenue. In 1992, the “not guilty” verdicts in the Rodney King case had reached the streets in minutes. Arteaga had never seen anything turn so bad so fast. People were cursing and shouting at him: “Four hundred years! You¿ve been suppressing us for 400 years!” Arteaga, just 29, was thinking, “What did 400 years have to do with me?” Everything. Because he wore the uniform of a force that had ruled South Los Angeles like an occupying army.   (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)