At Leimert Park, a gathering place for demonstrations and rallies in south-central Los Angeles, the thunder of djembe drums adds a dramatic accompaniment to a long queue of local protest speakers. As each steps up to a microphone planted in the grass, their words seem to ring with echoes of an earlier violent era in the battle for civil rights.

"The time is now," yells one protestor to the crowd of about 350 holding placards and signs. "No more police terrorism."

The occasion, a community-wide gathering to protest the killing of a 13-year-old African-American youth by Los Angeles police, has become another major flashpoint in Los Angeles race relations. For several weeks, black leaders have held meetings and marches to draw attention to the shooting as evidence that the LAPD has not budged in its decades-old culture of riding herd over ethnic residents as adversaries rather than citizens to "serve and protect."

It's been more 10 years since the LAPD became the international poster child for dysfunctional policing - first in the Rodney King beating, then with two trials of O.J. Simpson. Now, the high-profile incident of Devin Brown - who was shot and killed by police when he refused orders to stop fleeing in a stolen car - once again raises the question of how much police reform, if any, has occurred since the largest riots in US history here raised public consciousness of the problem of police abuse.

Despite the anger in Leimert Park, there is some consensus that much improvement has been made throughout American police departments. Yet there is also consensus that the patterns of racist behavior exhibited by police have not been adequately addressed.

"You might say the policy, training, and equipment side of American policing has come a long way since Rodney King but that the human side, police interacting with residents, has come less far," says Mary Powers, director of the National Coalition on Police Accountability (NCOPA).

Accomplishments include policy changes regarding how and when to use force and in what form. They also include better cultural and sensitivity training, and community-based policing. All have brought more police into direct contact with the neighborhoods they serve.

In addition, more cities now have civilian committees with the leverage to formally hold police departments accountable for questionable actions.

At the same time, not enough has been accomplished to better police-community race relations, say experts. In this regard, they say, Los Angeles is a case in point for problems nationwide.

"I think racism is the problem here," says Mary Alice Jones of the Congress of Racial Equality. She points out that 83 percent of LAPD officers do not live within city limits and many appear to have had little exposure to racial diversity.

To her and others, the Devin Brown shooting is only one incident in a much larger pattern of negative police actions. Just four days prior to that shooting, officials here announced they would not prosecute a June incident in which a LAPD officer struck a car thief suspect 11 times with a flashlight. And in January, two white cops won a jury verdict of $2.4 million in a discrimination suit for being wrongly terminated following a 2002 beating of another black suspect.

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