LOS ANGELES — Living near 54th Street and Van Ness Avenue in South L.A., Wilford Howard, 73, has seen a lot. He’s seen his neighbor Charlene spiral from a gainfully employed college graduate into a toothless crack addict wandering the streets. He’s been startled awake many nights by the noise of the Bloods and the Crips battling for domination. The staccato of gunfire has almost become the soundtrack of his dreams. He locked his doors and stayed inside when pandemonium broke out on April 29, 1992, even as the Los Angeles Police Department set up its command post just a few yards from his house.

He lives at the same house on Van Ness as he did five years ago, when the Korean owner of the liquor store next door, 54th Market Van Ness, was slain in a robbery-murder. The store is under new Korean management and Howard still buys bread, luncheon meat and soda there.

“The Koreans, they’re all right,” Howard says. “They treat you nice.”

By many accounts, the liquor stores that populate much of South Los Angeles are viewed as neighborhood stores, where the owners know their customers by name and patrons call the cashier “Pop.” The stores usually carry diapers, milk and bread — daily necessities that residents, some of whom don’t have cars, would otherwise have to make a trip to the Ralphs supermarket more than a mile away.

But some prefer that the “very unfriendly Koreans and their liquor stores” would just go away. The proliferation of the “iron flowers,” as one resident calls the liquor stores, is a blight on the community. Korean Americans have thus become implicit in peddling a legalized drug, some say.

In California, more than 8,000 Koreans — about 10 percent of all state licensees — hold some type of liquor license, says Scott Seo, an investigator with the state’s Department of Alcohol and Beverage Control. And Koreans own about 30 percent of all liquor stores in California, he says.

Koreans comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, but own more than 11 percent of the country’s retail grocery stores, many of which include money service businesses (such as check cashing), according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Large sums of cash and late operating hours make the stores especially vulnerable to crime. An average of 15 Koreans running liquor stores were killed every year in the early 1990s — “the height” of such robbery-murders, says Edward Chang, an ethnic studies professor at the University of California, Riverside.

“It is a heavy toll,” Chang says. “Even one person is too many. Typically liquor stores are under siege constantly, every day, because they’re prime targets by criminals.”

And especially in South Los Angeles, says Paul Park, president of the California chapter of the Korean American Grocers’ Association (KAGRO), a 4,000-member association comprised mostly of liquor store owners.

Officer Lucio Arreola estimates that “80 to 90 percent, easily” of the liquor stores in his precinct are Korean-owned. Arreola has worked more than seven years at the Los Angeles Police Department’s 77th Street Station, which patrols most of South Los Angeles, where more than 80 percent of the city’s homicides occurred last year.