Los Angeles

The killing of a black high school student by a Hispanic illegal immigrant has revived Southern California's racially fraught debate about how police should treat illegal immigrants.

Outsiders can be forgiven for imagining that LA's touchiest racial controversies follow the black versus white narrative of the Watts riots, the Rodney King beating or the O.J. Simpson trial. But locals know better -- ask the Korean grocers whose stores were torched in 1992 (a year after Ice Cube’s racist harangues against them), or the South Central blacks who federal prosecutors say were targeted by a Latino street gang bent on “cleansing” the neighborhood.