It's not an entirely pleasant or politically encouraging thought, but one of the few ways blacks and Koreans have routinely encountered each other is through the police.

Korean merchants in South Central Los Angeles ? a significant chunk of the business community for years ? rely on cops to protect their investments from would-be thieves or vandals, as do business owners anywhere. But when the suspects are mostly black and merchants are mostly Korean, a people far more ?foreign? to blacks than the mostly white and Jewish merchant population that preceded them, and when the community has a history of disenfranchisement that persists over generations no matter who?s running the stores, the dynamic can be lethal.

Such was the case with Latasha Harlins and Soon Ja Du, the most high-profile of many charged encounters involving Koreans, blacks and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) during the 1980s and ?90s. Then of course came April 1992, variously known as the civil unrest, the riots, the rebellion, the uprising and, amongst Koreans, Sa-i-gu. More than 10 years afterward, we have not moved terribly far past the ethnically polarized view of victims and perpetrators on the one hand, exploiters and exploited on the other.

It?s telling that during a debate of the mayoral candidates this past February held in Koreatown, moderator Richard Choi Bertsch asked the four candidates present a somewhat surprising litmus question: What did they call ?92 ? rebellion, riot, uprising? What he really wanted to know was whether the candidates regarded that event as a failure of public policy or of public safety, and ? most importantly ? whether the cops could be counted on to do a better job of protecting hard-working entrepreneurs from the looters and troublemakers next time out. (The candidates, who were black, Latino and Jewish, all immediately answered riot. This was election season and they were all running on a pro-law-enforcement platform, but the quick uniformity of opinion was just as telling as the question.)

So what we had then, and what we still have now, is the question that?s always implied in discussions about law enforcement and inner cities: Whose side are you on, the cops or the community? Community in this equation often means color; race is a big part of the dichotomy and always has been.

Thanks to the lingering effects of hundreds of years of legal segregation and psychological and economic discrimination, African Americans have a very troubled history with local police and with the criminal justice system in general, a history that is actually getting worse when you look at the rising rates of incarceration, especially for black males. For many blacks, police are very often simply an extension of the social oppression they have endured for centuries, an occupying army whose job it is to keep them tamed, controlled, corralled in their own neighborhoods and away from more law-abiding and affluent areas.

Koreans immigrating to this country in the last 20 years or so very likely didn?t know this in depth, or felt it didn?t concern them. Yet when they opened businesses in traditionally black communities, they suddenly felt the full brunt of this history. Whether they took that history into account, and how, is hard to measure, but what?s certain is that the estrangement of blacks and Koreans took root and steadily grew.