RIOT AFTERMATH : Experts Hope Riots Will Yield ‘Vaccine’ Against Violence

As police catalogue the criminal side of last week’s violence and business leaders tally its toll in dollars and cents, a team of local and federal medical investigators is applying the science of epidemiology in an unprecedented effort to find ways to “vaccinate” communities against such devastating social mayhem.

Experts in injury prevention from the federal Centers for Disease Control joined counterparts at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services on Tuesday to begin studying the infectious violence that overtook Los Angeles, killing 58 people and causing property damage approaching $1 billion.

Dr. William Roper, director of the CDC in Atlanta, said that Los Angeles’ tragedy offers a unique opportunity to track causes, study symptoms and develop lifesaving preventive measures. These could include educational programs for youths, steps to limit handgun access, and more effective strategies to deal with racism, poverty and joblessness, according to those involved in the study.

The definition of violence as a public health threat equivalent to measles, cholera and other diseases with epidemic potential is relatively new. It was not until 1985 that the federal government dedicated a division of the CDC to the study of injury prevention. The division tracks disability and death from accidental injury, such as auto accidents or drownings, as well as from intentional injury, such as assault and murder.

CDC’s injury control division is now one of the fastest growing in the agency, fueled by data showing the enormous toll that violence takes on lives and human potential in the United States, compared to other developed countries.

“Injury may be the leading public health problem facing the United States,” said Dr. Mark Rosenberg, division director. “It is a leading killer of children and of all persons under age 44. For young people, age 1 to 19, injuries are responsible for more deaths than all diseases combined.”

Young men are especially vulnerable. In the United States, they are murdered at a rate five to 17 times higher than their counterparts in other Western industrialized nations, Rosenberg said. When domestic murder rates are broken down by race, the rate for young black males approaches eight times that for white males in the same age group.

In Los Angeles County, about 5,400 people die annually from injuries. Of these, nearly 30% are classified as homicides, said Billie Weiss, the county’s injury prevention director.

The deaths that occurred in last week’s chaotic and apparently random violence, however, fall outside the patterns of murder and accidental death previously studied by violence experts. The Los Angeles riot will be the first to be studied using the disease model, CDC officials said.

As the turmoil in Los Angeles escalated into the costliest civil disturbance in U.S. history this century, CDC and Los Angeles County health officials recognized an opportunity to expand scientific knowledge about violence. The investigative team was assembled even before calm was restored to take best advantage of the evidence of destruction--and the lingering agony of the city’s riot-torn neighborhoods.

Much as epidemiologists descend on an outbreak of measles to try to pinpoint and isolate the source of infection, so the public health team studying the Rodney G. King verdicts’ violent aftermath hopes to discover why people reached for guns, knives and torches to express their outrage.

And, like the vaccine or disease-preventive diet that doctors might recommend against an illness, so these health experts will try to sketch a blueprint for violence prevention.

“We want to come up with suggestions that we can offer to community leaders,” Roper said Tuesday in a telephone interview from Atlanta.

It may seem obvious that poverty, joblessness and racism are dry tinder for social unrest, but scientists need “hard data” to pinpoint solutions, said Dr. Caswell A. Evans Jr., Los Angeles County’s chief liaison to the CDC effort.

“How do violent incidents occur?” Evans asked, enumerating questions the investigators are likely to address. “How do they cluster? Is one violent incident likely to lead to another? Under what conditions? Is one age group more prone to violence than another?”

Although this is the first such epidemiological study of a riot, similar studies have led to improvements in automobile safety--saving about 300,000 lives a year, compared to the rate at which people died in car accidents in 1960.

“The steering wheel now protects you rather than impales you,” Rosenberg said. “The front of the car now crushes, rather than smashing you on an anvil.”

Experts concede that societal factors fueling last week’s violence in Los Angeles will be harder to correct, and that solutions might take a generation to show results. Roper cited a program in Birmingham, Ala., designed to teach elementary school children how to resolve conflicts without resorting to violence--training whose value will only be seen over the long term.

Besides studying its causes, the medical team in Los Angeles also will be looking at consequences of the violence. Besides the dead, about 2,300 people were injured, 227 of them critically, according to public health officials. How many of these people will be permanently disabled? How many will never return to productive employment?

A study in this month’s issue of the American Journal of Public Health indicated that women living in violent neighborhoods have a five times greater risk of developing pregnancy complications such as toxemia or miscarriage than women living in safer environments. The study, by researchers at UC Berkeley and the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, focused on 161 healthy, pregnant women living in high violence areas of Santiago during 1986.

“Frankly, not enough is known about violence,” Evans said. “In order to prevent it, we have to understand it much better.”

10 Leading Causes of Death

These are the death rates and percentage of total deaths for the 10 leading causes of death in the United States in 1989. Rates are expressed per 100,000 population.

CLASSIFICATION RATE % OF TOTAL DEATHS 1. Heart disease 295.6 34.1 2. Cancer 199.9 23.1 3. Stroke 58.6 6.8 4. Vehicular and other accidents 76.6 8.8 5. Asthma and other chronic lung diseases 34.0 3.9 6. Pneumonia and influenza 30.8 3.6 7. Diabetes 18.9 2.2 8. Suicide 12.2 1.4 9. Liver disease 10.8 1.2 10. Homicide 9.2 1.1 TOTAL 866.3 100

Source: Centers for Disease Control