When two motorists -- one white, one black -- squared off last month at a Los Angeles traffic light, neither knew the other was a 10 year veteran of the LAPD. The incident left the black motorist dead, and many black officers and black urban residents wondering just how far the city's troubled police department has come in the five years since America's worst urban riots this century. PNS commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of "Beyond OJ: Race, Sex and Class Lessons for America." His e-mail address is <ehutchi344@aol.com>.

LOS ANGELES -- What started out last month as a verbal confrontation between two motorists at a traffic light ended in the shooting death of one of them. Since violent street encounters are not uncommon in Los Angeles, the shooting may have received only passing notice in the news. But there was a twist. Both the victim, Kevin Gaines, and the motorist who shot him, Frank Lyga, were ten-year veterans of the Los Angeles Police Department. Gaines was an African American. Lyga is white.

At the time of the shooting, Lyga was in plain clothes and working undercover. Gaines was off-duty. Lyga claimed he shot in self-defense when Gaines pulled a gun. Apparently, neither man knew the other was a police officer. A spokesperson for the LAPD called the shooting "bizarre" and downplayed any possibility that it was racially motivated.

But many black officers aren't so sure. Leonard Ross, a 22-year LAPD veteran and president of the Oscar Joel Bryant Foundation, which represents black LAPD officers, says the official version of the shooting "doesn't add up. I think a lot of questions still need to be answered."

The disclosure that two complaints had been filed against Lyga in 1991 for excessive force prompted some officers to suspect that he may have seen Gaines, out of uniform, as just another black "gangsta."

There was more than a little irony in the incident. It came barely two months before the fifth anniversary of the Los Angeles riots -- the worst orgy of burning and looting in this century in America, touched off by the acquittal of four LAPD officers accused of assaulting an African American, Rodney King.

In those five years, the city's police department has been kept reeling -- by the racist revelations of officer Mark Fuhrman, a report from the Christopher Commission documenting racism and abuse within the LAPD, and the ouster of the department's first African American chief, Willie Williams, who was strongly opposed by the mostly-white police union.

Almost certainly, the city's business and political leaders saw the appointment of Williams five years ago as a public relations move that would buy social peace, calm a fearful public, placate the African American community, and put a cosmetic sheen on the tarnished image of the LAPD so the city would not blow up again.

It is fair to ask how much Williams reformed the LAPD with respect to such critical problems as increasing the representation of minorities and women, reducing abuse, and effective civilian control.

The number of women and minorities in the department has increased, but only because the department is compelled to make such hires by a Justice Department consent decree -- the result of lawsuits by the ACLU and the NAACP.

The Christopher Commission noted that reform requires an effective method for dealing with citizen complaints and weeding out "problem officers" with a high number of excessive use of force complaints. An Inspector General was recently appointed to monitor action taken on these complaints, but the authority to discipline any officers still rests firmly in the hands of the chief.

According to the department, the number of civilian complaints against officers dropped from 717 in 1991 to 496 in 1995. But the Inspector General questioned these figures, and accused the LAPD of deliberately deflating the number of citizen complaints by keeping poor records, excluding many types of complaints and summarily dismissing complaints.

The record on dealing with problem officers, however, is crystal clear. Consider Mark Fuhrman. Williams defended Fuhrman as a good cop for most of the trial -- backing away only when the world heard from Fuhrman's own audiotaped boast at the Simpson trial that he lied, beat suspects and planted evidence.

The Police Commission deemed William's report on the investigation into Fuhrman's boasts of abuse so inadequate that it smacked of a whitewash. Williams also admitted that he has not systematically monitored the conduct of the "problem officers" identified by name by the Christopher Commission and has produced no record of any disciplinary action taken against them.

There is still no word on what action, if any, will be taken on the Gaines shooting. On the fifth anniversary of the riots, however, the City Council decided Williams' final fate -- by one vote, they chose to buy out the remainder of his contract (until July 6) and sent him packing.

Odds are that the next chief will be an LAPD insider. If so, the department may return full circle to the policies and practices of the Daryl Gates era. This does not bode well for a city still desperately in search of productive solutions to the problems that brought fire and destruction five years ago.