Law And Disorder

By Richard Lacayo

To watch the videotape of Los Angeles policemen kicking and clubbing Rodney King was to suddenly explore a dark corner of American life. For many police officers who fear that the incident could undermine their image of cool professionalism, the case quickly became an occasion for dismay, soul searching and a measure of defensiveness. For many citizens, particularly blacks and other minorities, it brought back bitter memories of their own rough encounters with police. George Bush bluntly summarized the prevailing shock: "What I saw made me sick."

The sickening glare from that grisly scene has thrown light upon police brutality all across the country. Was the beating an aberration, as Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates insists? Or did it affirm yet again that many cops resort to violence, and even deadly force, when no threat to their safety can justify it? Is racism so pervasive among police that the fight against crime all too often becomes a war on blacks? Has the criminal-justice system, which permits too many criminals to go free after serving only token sentences or none at all, become so ineffectual that officers feel the need to play judge and jury on the spot? Has police work become so dangerous that even well-meaning officers can snap under the pressure?

Those questions became more urgent last week as evidence grew that the officers involved in King's beating might have expected their behavior to be winked at, at least in their own department. In tapes of radio calls and computer records of police communications on the night of the attack, some of the officers involved could be heard swapping racist jokes and boasting to other cops about the beating. Their lighthearted exchanges, which they knew were being recorded, sound nothing like the words of men who fear they have done something reprehensible -- or even something out of the ordinary. Two nurses at Pacifica Hospital, where King was taken after the beating, testified to a grand jury last week that the officers who assaulted King showed up later at the hospital room to taunt him. One allegedly told the victim, "We played a little hardball tonight, and you lost."

In the eyes of many outraged citizens in Los Angeles and elsewhere, responsibility for the beating rests with Chief Gates. Though he has rebuffed demands that he resign, a citizens' group last week began a push for a special election to undo what practically amounts to his lifetime appointment as leader of the nation's third largest police department. Almost unique among police chiefs, Gates cannot be dismissed by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, himself a former L.A.P.D. lieutenant, or by a five-member police commission, except "for cause" -- misconduct or willful neglect of duty.

Los Angeles is far from the only place where police play hardball, dispensing curbside justice with disturbing regularity, especially in crime- plagued ghetto neighborhoods and to people whose only offense is the color of their skins. Those who live outside such areas can usually ignore that reality. Fed up with violent street crime, they are often content to send in the police force and demand that it do whatever is necessary while they look the other way. But the Los Angeles beating has shaken such head-in-the-sand attitudes. A spate of brutality cases that normally would have attracted little attention made national news last week:

-- In New York City five officers were indicted on murder charges in the Feb. 5 death by suffocation of a 21-year-old Hispanic man suspected of car theft. The officers were accused of having hit, kicked and choked Federico Pereira while he lay face down and perhaps hog-tied -- his wrists cuffed behind his back while another set of cuffs bound his hands to one ankle.

-- In Memphis a black county sheriff was convicted Friday of violating civil rights laws in the June 1989 choking death of Michael Gates, 28, a black drug suspect. Gates' body was covered with bruises in the shape of shoe prints.

-- In Plainfield, N.J., 50 people demonstrated outside police headquarters, charging that a policeman beat Uriah Hannah, a 14-year-old black. Last Sunday Hannah and his friends were playing with a remote-controlled toy car on a sidewalk near his home. A motorist stopped short at the spot where the boys were playing, and a police cruiser ran into the rear of his car. Hannah's parents, whose older son allegedly committed suicide in police custody last year, charged that the officer jumped from his car, accused the teenager of obstructing traffic and at one point tried to choke him. His parents were arrested when they tried to intervene.

Skull-drumming tactics have an enduring and dismal place in police history, not least in the U.S., where accusations of brutality commonly accompany charges of racism. Many of the ghetto riots of the 1960s were prompted by police incidents. More recently, Miami has suffered five street uprisings in 10 years, all ignited by episodes of perceived police brutality.

Spotty record keeping makes it hard to measure the frequency of police misconduct. Departments often refuse to disclose the number of complaints they receive. Citizens often bring their accusations to civil rights or police- watchdog groups, which complicates attempts to compile a comprehensive count. Allegations of misconduct can also multiply in the wake of reforms that make it easier for citizens to report abuses.

In the end, many cases doubtless go unreported, especially in cities where complaints have to be filled out at the station house that is the home base of the very officers against whom the charge is being brought. "The general feeling out on the streets is that you can't get justice when a cop mistreats you," says Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Many blacks believe, with considerable cause, that if the King beating had not been recorded, complaints about the case would have been discounted.

But while the experts cannot agree on whether abuses are up or down, few dispute that they are common -- and sadly predictable. Even in the best of times, police work is dangerous and stressful, and an officer can face several life-or-death decisions during a single eight-hour watch. The pressures have mounted in recent years as crack has poured into the inner cities, giving rise to drug-dealing gangs armed with automatic weapons -- and the hairtrigger temperament to use them.

In New York City, which has highly restrictive guidelines for when police may use their guns, the number of people shot by local cops soared in the past three years from 68 to 108. At the same time, police have been fired on by suspects in greater numbers every year since 1980. Though the number of officers killed nationally has fallen from 104 in 1980 to 66 in 1989, that is partly the result of wider use of bulletproof vests. "It used to be that arrested suspects got right into the patrol car," sighs Boston policeman John Meade, who heads the department's bureau of professional standards. "Now they put up a fight. Weapons suddenly turn up. Just like that, everything explodes."

As inner cities have degenerated into free-fire zones, many officers have become more aggressive, if only in self-defense. Danger "is something you get used to," says Officer Dennis Rhodes, a 20-year veteran of the L.A.P.D., "but every time you check in for a shift, you don't really know if you're going to go home that night." Two weeks ago, a suspected car thief pointed a 9-mm pistol at Rhodes' partner in the squad car, who then fired a shot at the gunman, forcing him to drop his weapon. "The whole incident took a minute and a half," says Rhodes, "and what raced through my mind was . . . the fact that I was going to get killed in the front seat of my car."

The temptation to administer street-corner sentences is sometimes reinforced by the frustration of knowing that many of those the police collar will get off on plea bargains or serve mockingly short sentences.

Beyond those factors, police have been saddled with a task for which they are singularly ill-equipped. Most authorities believe that urban street crime arises from a combination of poverty, poor education and a lack of opportunity in inner-city neighborhoods, problems that the police can do nothing about. Officers, who tend to be recruited from places far from the neighborhoods they will patrol, often have little in common with the citizens they must serve and protect. "The bulk of police forces are white males of the middle class," says Ron DeLord, head of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas. "Yet we send them into large urban centers that are black and Hispanic and poor, with no understanding of the cultural differences, to enforce white, middle-class moral laws. Doesn't that create a clash?"

Law-abiding residents of crime-infested neighborhoods are desperate for police protection. They, after all, are the ones most likely to fall victim to | muggers or drive-by shooters. But they also want the police's use of force kept in check, especially in poor neighborhoods where everyone is apt to be treated like a suspect. Even though many police departments have abandoned the official use of so-called drug-dealer profiles, officers may continue to carry racial stereotypes in their heads. To them, virtually any young black male with a gold chain is a potential drug courier. Any well-dressed black man in an expensive car might be a big-time dealer.

As a result, middle-class blacks, including celebrities like actor Blair Underwood, one of the stars of L.A. Law, complain that they have been harassed, and worse, during simple encounters with the law. At the University of Massachusetts, Boston, last week, the ACLU sponsored a conference that attracted 500 people to discuss the topic of police and local communities. "Over and over, black youngsters stood up and talked about how scary and demeaning it is to be stopped and searched," says ACLU state executive director John Roberts. "Even good kids now see police as the enemy. They shun cops."

Hassled cops, in turn, often retreat into a bipolar outlook: us vs. them. "Police see the sorry side of it all," says Mark Clark, former president of the Houston Police Officers Association. "A policeman can start out bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but it goes away quickly on the street. It takes a mature officer not to stereotype people." Immersion into the police culture can quickly strip away a rookie's idealism. Says Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation: "Many officers will say, the moment I graduated from the police academy my partner told me, 'Forget all that stuff they told you at the academy; this is the real world.' "

Many of the best cops are no longer willing to pay the physical and psychological costs. Take Paul Wyland, who is planning to quit the Washington force after 20 years. "How many dead bodies have you seen?" he asks. "I've lost count. I'm not burned out. But you look at yourself and you say, 'How long can I keep doing this and not get messed up?' " Partly because so many seasoned officers have retired, departments around the nation have found themselves seriously understaffed. Others have expanded too rapidly, filling their ranks with inexperienced -- and sometimes poorly trained -- officers. Because the L.A.P.D. grew from 6,282 to 8,382 in the past three years, 38% of its field officers and 36% of its sergeants have less than three years on the force. )

Experts on police psychology insist that most officers are attracted to police work by the opportunity to protect and serve. But a certain number of rotten apples, predisposed to brutality, make it through psychological testing that can be woefully inadequate. Ed Donovan, who runs a counseling service in Plymouth, Mass., for police suffering from stress, warns that police supervisors -- and other officers -- must be trained to be on the lookout for misfits as they move through the ranks. "Police are out there looking for troubled people," he says. "They ought to be able to spot troubled cops."

A few cities have revamped their training and supervision to make abuses less likely. Since 1988, all 2,400 police officers on the Metro-Dade county force have undergone violence-reduction training to school themselves in ways to defuse potentially violent situations and to avoid overreaction to typical confrontations.

Critics of the police say that legal-damage suits are a more useful deterrent to police brutality and that they would work even better if jury awards were paid out of individual officers' pockets instead of by city treasuries. While courts have decided that public employees are not individually liable for most of their actions on the job, taxpayer concern about the rising cost of lawsuits has revived the popularity of civilian review boards. Such panels are at work in 26 of the nation's 50 largest cities, up from 13 seven years ago. The boards save municipal dollars by providing complainants with an alternative to the courts. They can also help departments identify and weed out problem officers before they strike again.

Rodney King, the victim of the Los Angeles beating, is bringing a $56 million civil suit against the L.A.P.D. -- according to his lawyer, $1 million for each blow against him. As it happens, Chief Gates appeared before the city council last week to testify about the sums being paid by Los Angeles -- about $10.5 million in 1990 -- to successful plaintiffs in police-misconduct suits. One was a $265,000 judgment to an 18-year-old white youth who was dragged from a car and beaten severely enough to suffer permanent ear damage. Although a civil-court jury found six officers at fault, Gates told the council that after a nine-month investigation, his department could not determine which officer had actually done the beating. "If you can't identify them, it's difficult to discipline them," he insisted. Members of the council were incredulous.

In the end, discipline must come from rank-and-file police with courage enough to break the so-called Blue Code, which prohibits one officer from ratting on another. A few encouraging signs exist that some officers are abandoning the tradition of blind loyalty to one another in misconduct cases. In Houston more than half of all complaints now come from other officers. During the King beating, two California highway-patrol officers reportedly took down the names of those involved from their breast-pocket name tags. They have since testified to investigators.

Episodes of police brutality are likely never to vanish entirely. But they could be significantly curtailed if more officers concluded that as long as their fellow police take the law into their own hands, there is no law at all.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami, Sylvester Monroe and Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles