COLUMN ONE : Jury Still Out on Life as Usual : The city has breathed a collective sigh of relief that violence did not follow verdicts in the King case. But normalcy may prove elusive in light of upcoming events, racial tensions and a battered economy.

The police chief of Los Angeles was caught off guard.

There he was, just hours after two of his officers had been convicted of violating Rodney G. King’s civil rights, fielding questions from an eager press corps. Will there be calm in the city, the reporters shouted. How long will the state of readiness last? What did he think of the verdicts?

Then came the curveball:

How, the chief was asked, should Angelenos spend the rest of the weekend?

Willie L. Williams hesitated, pondering the question’s sheer simplicity. “Well,” he replied slowly, “I think the men and women of Los Angeles should go about their daily lives, go to school, go to movies, go shopping, get in the pool, do whatever they had planned to do. . . . This community will always have crises. Hopefully not crises of this dimension. But we have to learn to live with this.”

It may not be that simple.

So much has gone before: the King beating itself, little more than two years ago but, for Los Angeles, ancient history all the same. The not guilty verdicts in state court of Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and Officers Laurence M. Powell, Timothy E. Wind and Theodore J. Briseno. The riots. The federal civil rights trial. Anxious weeks of rumormongering, gun buying, tension building and waiting, waiting, waiting for Verdict Day.

So much is yet to come: the trial of three black men accused of beating white trucker Reginald O. Denny, seen by some as the racial flip side to the case of the four white officers tried for beating King. The sentencing in August of Koon and Powell, both convicted Saturday. And who knows what other potential flash points in a city where flash points have come to be expected.

As one woman said: “What’s happened is that the abnormal has come to be accepted as normal. . . . We’ve lived a very distorted reality in the last couple of months.”

Though some say the worst has passed, unsettling questions abound. When do police officers go on tactical alert again? Is riot preparedness just as important as earthquake preparedness--or more so? Will we always feel the urge to carry extra cash in our wallets? To keep a full tank of gas in the car? Will racial tension ever dissipate? Can normalcy exist when we are careening from one crisis to another?

Just how do we learn to live with this?

“The key challenge facing us is how to maintain preparedness without maintaining the anxiety,” said Los Angeles City Councilman and mayoral candidate Michael Woo. “We all agree that we want to be prepared for any possibility of trouble, whether it comes from the Reginald Denny verdict or the sentencing in the King case, or all sorts of things that could happen. . . . That’s the real trick. Will we be able maintain that state of preparedness without exhausting ourselves in the process?”

The balancing act will be difficult, according to psychologists, community activists, politicians--and the ordinary people struggling to live their lives in a community already staggering under the burden of high crime, joblessness, a deteriorating school system and a government that seems incapable of providing relief.

All agree that the real answer lies not in a temporary show of police might or mayoral pronouncements, but in solutions to the fundamental social problems that brought about last year’s riots.

“Los Angeles is a sick patient,” said Gloria Romero, a Cal State Los Angeles psychology professor who chairs the LAPD’s Latino advisory council, after the verdicts Saturday. “We’re happy today because we survived the operation, but we have got to get out of the hospital, get out of the bed. We are feeding ourselves intravenously by the presence of police. We are lying to ourselves if we think that all is calm and peaceful. All is calm this morning, but the trial continues.”

Angela Oh, a prominent Korean-American attorney, contends that “we should reject the whole notion that we can learn to live with this. It really is unhealthy. You are asking us to give up our humanity.”

Unhealthy indeed, says Chaytor Mason, a psychologist at USC’s Institute of Safety and Systems Management, which teaches safety techniques to military pilots, hospital workers and other professionals. Mason sees a city of “walking zombies,” an emotionally exhausted citizenry trapped in a state of collective post-traumatic stress.

He points to a psychology experiment in which words are flashed across a screen so rapidly they cannot be seen by the viewer. But when a series of neutral words is followed by an obscene word, there is an immediate physiological reaction: The heart rate speeds up, perspiration increases.

“Now suppose you have a full day of exciting words like riot, death, murder, zip gun,” Mason said. “Even if the person doesn’t pay attention to it, that increases the tension level. But what if he does pay attention, because people in the office are talking about it? He is likely to become more disjointed, uncomfortable, dyspeptic.

“And then on top of that, if he lives in a society where other people are like that, irritability increases and so do tendencies toward fighting, disagreement, misunderstanding. That heightens the possibility of maybe not an all-out, burn-down-the-city riot, but it does create more flash points.”

Thus, Mason concludes, the city is working at cross-purposes: At the same time that residents are hoping to overcome racial strife, this constant state of edginess is making the task more difficult.

Different people cope in different ways.

Some, feeling their lives tumbling out of kilter, rush out and attempt to buy control with a gun. Some retreat into the quiet safety of their homes. Some turn to religion. Some try drugs and alcohol. Some escape by going out to dinner, the movies or skipping town altogether.

“We spend most of our time losing ourselves in our work or going out more--to dinner or stuff like that,” said Brad Hale, 35, of Hollywood. “We’ll probably be taking more vacation time to get out of town. . . . If you sit at home and watch TV, it’s horribly depressing.”

Some throw their nervous energy into preparing for the worst. The Cassidy family of Pacific Palisades likens planning for urban crises to gearing up for the Big One. Maureen Cassidy, 44, and her husband are purchasing a portable phone for emergency communications.

“When flash points are apt to occur at any point, you think of where everyone is when that might happen,” she said. “You have to have in the back of your mind more contingency plans.”

But not everyone can afford a car phone or an out-of-town trip. Social workers say the heaviest toll is on poor inner-city residents, who constantly worry about violence regardless of what is happening in a downtown courtroom. Said Robert Le Cesne, a mental health counselor from Compton: “Back to normal for them is everyday experience with crisis.”

Now that experience is spreading across the city, prompting people, both rich and poor, to make subtle adjustments to daily routines.

A Lake View Terrace man thinks twice about what he says to strangers and tries to be more tolerant of racial differences. A Long Beach woman, worrying about the potential for violence after the King verdicts, delays bringing her newborn daughter to see co-workers in downtown Los Angeles. A Coldwater Canyon man goes out of his way to avoid driving through a racially mixed neighborhood to get to the Santa Monica Freeway if he senses unrest is imminent.

With the verdicts only hours old, thoughts quickly turned to this summer and the fate of the so-called L.A. Four implicated in the assault on trucker Denny. Although the moniker has stuck, the trial set for July actually involves three defendants; a fourth already has pleaded guilty.

“If they jail the L.A. Four, just wait, I’m telling you,” predicted Charlotte Bell, 39, of the Crenshaw district. “It’s not going to be right. It’s not going to be good.”

Sonya Gentle is a 23-year-old mother of three who lives just blocks from the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues where Denny was dragged out of his truck and beaten during what became the most infamous incident of last year’s riots. The immigrant from Belize said she felt a sense of calm preceding verdicts in the King case. She does not expect that feeling to last.

“What I’m worried about is when the trial for Reginald Denny comes up,” she said. “Boy oh boy. I just feel scared when that comes up.” And when it does, she said: “I will stay in my house and try to lock up as good as I can.”

Law enforcement is worried too. So are elected officials. Already, Gov. Pete Wilson has pledged to send in the National Guard, if need be, during the Denny trial. And LAPD Chief Williams, who mustered the most massive mobilization of police in the city’s history for the King verdicts, said similar preparations are in store.

The show of force may or may not be as dramatic next time; police officials say their movements will depend on the tenor of the city.

“Decision making will be predicated on the events of the day,” said Cmdr. David Gascon, the LAPD’s top spokesman. “I can’t get specific with the Denny case. I can tell you that a tremendous amount of planning and preparation has already occurred for that case.”

But some critics say it is precisely this emphasis on police preparedness, this ever-present sense of living on the edge of disaster, that detracts from Los Angeles’ most important mission: repairing a battered economy, a troubled school district and a broken inner-city.

“I have to say it’s unfortunate that the kind of money that has been put in place for an emergency plan could not have been used in investing in people,” said David Jimenez, a psychologist who works extensively with Latino residents in South-Central Los Angeles. “My whole point is that we are not preventive enough as a society. We are crisis-oriented, managed by crisis.”

Romero, the psychology professor from Cal State Los Angeles, complains that the heavy police presence “whips up white fear of changing demographics,” creating distrust among racial groups and further dividing a city that needs to be united.

“It’s good public relations, it keeps the peace, it avoids violence,” she said, but added, “you cannot relax, you cannot be yourself when you are on tactical alert. It allows certain behaviors or stereotypes to get played out that perhaps would be dealt with if we addressed the real problem.”

Curing such ills as joblessness, poor education and high crime, however, is certain to take years. In the interim, Los Angeles residents will, as Williams suggested, “have to learn to live with this.”

Despite the preoccupation with what the next crisis may bring, not everyone is preaching doom and gloom about life in Los Angeles. Some say that with the King verdicts behind us a crucial corner has been turned, that the memory is no longer of violence but of a city that pulled together to rise above it.

“I don’t subscribe to the theory that (police) readiness was the reason that nothing happened,” said Jackie Dupont-Walker, an urban planner with Rebuild L.A. “People have come together and seen a kind of kinship in the way that we have not seen in Los Angeles. . . . That’s a new phenomenon here. That’s what we need to seize.”

H. Eric Shockman is a USC political science professor who has been keeping tabs on the mood of the city and how its people live with one another. He sees the future in rosy terms.

“We’ve come through the valley of death,” he said, “and I think we have looked at the other end. . . . I think as a city we made it. We confronted our evil side, our dark side, and we came through it.”