It is striking how little progress has been made in fulfilling the demands made by Latinos after the riots. The percentage of Hispanic police officers has doubled, to nearly 5 percent, but the force still struggles to recruit them. Police say they still lack Spanish-speaking officers in Mount Pleasant. The task force had demanded that Hispanics, who made up less than 2 percent of the city's workforce in 1991, receive government jobs and programs reflecting the size of their population. Today, with Latinos making up about 8 percent of the city population, there is not even a system to track how many are among the 33,000 city employees.
Activists speculate the number is still low.
Ten years after the riots, there is only one Hispanic in Mayor Anthony A. Williams's 50-member Cabinet the head of the Office on Latino Affairs. There are no Latinos on the D.C. Council or school board. And the Office on Latino Affairs is struggling to recover from spending cuts in the 1990s, which slashed its staff from 13 to two. Its budget shrunk by about one-third again this year, though the mayor has proposed an increase in the next fiscal year that would offset that cut. The office recently increased to four employees.