THE CROOKED BLUE LINE

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

[My partner] is so hung up on the rules and stuff. I get pissed sometimes and go, "You just don't even [expletive] understand. This job is not rules. This is a feeling. [Expletive] the rules; we'll make them up later." --Former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman in a tape-recorded conversation

ON NOV. 22, 1988, A POLICE officer obtained a routine warrant to search Joseph Morris' Philadelphia steak house by claiming he had watched a teenager sell marijuana outside a local high school, had followed him into the restaurant and had seen him hand a roll of cash to Morris. The officer said he saw Morris hand back a brown paper bag. The officer said he then followed the teen to the street and bought some marijuana, which the teen pulled out of the bag. After breaking down the door of the steak house with a sledgehammer, officers said they found marijuana there and arrested Morris. Based on the sworn testimony of officer Steven Brown, Morris was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to three years in prison.

But Brown's testimony was a skein of lies. There was no teenager, no exchange of cash or drugs inside the shop, no brown paper bag and no drug buy. Last March, Brown, a 13-year veteran on the force, pleaded guilty to federal charges involving 25 cases, including the illegal search of Morris' steak house. After nearly 2 1/2 years in prison, Morris was released. While he has his freedom, peace of mind is a little harder to come by. "It takes a lot away from you," says the 53-year-old father of five, now a self-employed carpenter. "I can't understand why these people can do anything they want and get away with it."

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times for police departments and the citizens they are sworn to protect. News of declines in the rates of violent crime nationwide has been drowned out by the sound of Mark Fuhrman's voice filling a Los Angeles courtroom--swaggering and all too believable as the former cop describes the brutalizing of suspects, fabrication of evidence and abuse of minorities. Although the O.J. Simpson jury will hear only two small snippets of the Fuhrman screed, to the rest of America the tapes provide a profane voice-over to real-life police corruption and brutality dramas that have been playing out not only in Los Angeles--where last Friday two officers were implicated in evidence tampering in a murder case--but also in New York City, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Detroit and Washington.

The surprise here is not that police corruption exists or that there are, to use law-enforcement officials' favorite metaphor, always "a few bad apples." The question is why police departments appear locked in a perpetual cycle of scandal, repentance, pledges of reform and fresh scandal, seemingly unwilling or unable to police themselves. The answer in part lies in the way departments are set up and managed, and also within the hearts of the officers themselves. "The people in a position to do something about brutality and racism are products of the system," explains James Fyfe, a former New York City cop who teaches criminal justice at Temple University." There's a sense that their loyalty should be to the department, not to the public."

As offensive as Fuhrman's words may be, they are nothing when compared with the scandal in Philadelphia. To date, along with Brown, five other cops have pleaded guilty to such charges as setting up innocent victims, selling drugs and beating and threatening people, primarily poor blacks in the 39th District. As a result, 46 of their criminal convictions have been overturned, with many more still to come. Last week federal investigators expanded their search to include the Highway Patrol, subpoenaing logs of as many as 100,000 arrests over 10 years. "It's nothing new," says Jerry Day, sitting on the steps of a house a few blocks from the 39th District headquarters. Day, who is African American, claims that he has been falsely arrested and released and that he and the rest of the neighborhood have known for years about the crooked cops. Day and his neighbors never complained, he says, because they felt there was no one they could trust. "Cops lock you up, beat you up and then dump you off at the hospital," he says. "They just lock you up to make their quota."

In the 1980s, more than 30 Philadelphia cops were convicted for shaking down drug dealers. Police Commissioner Willie Williams--now chief of the Los Angeles Police Department--held a press conference in which he vowed to supervise officers more closely. But defense attorneys say no significant reforms occurred. "Unless the institutions change, having prosecutions every five years is not going to be the answer," says David Rudovsky, a civil rights attorney and a University of Penn syl vania law professor. "You can't wait until somebody complains. You have to be pro-active, and every good police department knows that."

The citizens of Los Angeles too did not need Fuhrman to illustrate how vows of absolution are followed by disillusionment. In the wake of the 1991 Rodney King beating, then Mayor Tom Bradley established the Christopher Commission, a blue-ribbon panel entrusted with the job of recommending police reforms. Chief Daryl Gates, who was frequently criticized for closing ranks with his officers rather than being accountable to the public, retired under pressure, and Williams was brought in. Still, 3 1/2 years later, many of the Christopher Commission's recommendations exist only on paper. For instance, the commission identified 44 "problem" officers, all of whom had a history of six or more excessive-force cases during the five years before the King beating; until recently 33 of them remained on the force, with 19 still on the streets dealing with the public. One of the 44 was Andrew Teague, who confessed to forging a key document in a murder case and last week, along with his supervisor, turned in his badge. And in July, another of those 44 officers, Michael Falvo, shot and killed a 14-year-old Latino boy in the Lincoln Heights section of Los Angeles. The police version is that the boy, Jose Antonio Gutierrez, pointed a TEC-9 pistol at Falvo as the officer arrived, responding to a report of teens with a shotgun. Witnesses insist Gutierrez had already thrown his gun over a fence when the police approached and was holding a flashlight. Falvo has been temporarily assigned to a desk job.

Some Angelenos are outraged that these cops with their histories were still on the job at all. "There are very simple things that could have been done to build a relationship back up with the members of the public in the Latino and African American communities who really felt repressed by the L.A.P.D.," says Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, which oversees the police department. "And one way of doing that was to see that those 44 officers never saw the streets again."

Los Angeles is not unique. In departments around the country, say many experts, the bad apples are left to rot on the job rather than tossed out as so much garbage. "In every department there's a small group of officers who claim a huge percentage of the complaints," says Samuel Walker, professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska and the author of several books on policing. "These are officers who can't seem to control themselves in high-pressure situations. If you had a subpoena, you could walk into any department in the country and find those officers." Fuhrman, who had a history of problems on the job and whose attempts to receive a stress-related disability pension failed, appears to have been one such officer.

To purge a department, however, requires an almost wholesale change of police culture, breaking down officers' instinctive tendency to protect their own. "The thing about the Fuhrman tapes is everybody says, 'What a bad guy Mark Fuhrman is,'" notes Ramona Ripston, executive director of the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. "But he worked with other police officers. This code of silence is still very much in existence because [none of them] seem to have come forward and complained about Mark Fuhrman." Although the Christopher Commission recommended a frequent rotation of partners to help loosen personal bonds, no such rotation has yet been established.

Given the power of the police fraternity, many experts believe the single most important tool in keeping police departments on the up and up is a strong, independent civilian review board. Internal-affairs units, while not entirely ineffective, are also not sufficient. Among the findings last year by the Mollen Commission, which convened in New York City in 1993 to look into a Brooklyn corruption case that was reported to the Internal Affairs Bureau 13 times, was the profound inability of internal-affairs departments to conduct effective investigations.

This is clearly the case in the New Orleans police department, which has been riddled with corruption for decades. When New Orleans officer Len Davis, who has been indicted for arranging the murder of a woman who had lodged a brutality complaint against him, came under investigation during an FBI sting, he allegedly learned within hours from someone within internal affairs that he was being investigated. (Davis is in jail pending trial.) The new chief of the New Orleans police, Richard Pennington, who has begun reforming with a vengeance, has since brought in the FBI to help police the newly named "Public Integrity Unit." He also moved the unit out of headquarters to a independent location.

Civilian review boards, however, are relatively rare, with only 65 police forces in the U.S. using them. Even in cities that have some form of independent monitor, however, it is hard to untangle professional loyalties. Chicago's Office of Professional Standards feels the heat from both sides. "OPS takes complaints from anybody, no matter how farfetched," says Bill Nolan, president of Chicago's Fraternal Order of Police. But others say that the OPS investigators are mediocre and that when cases are sustained, there is never any action when the recommendation is returned to the police chief. "I have never had a case that was investigated by OPS and a finding by the administrative body that the officer did something wrong, even after we get jury verdicts and large settlements," says lawyer Edward T. Stein. "Do you think the city pays $1 million to settle cases because they think the officer has done nothing wrong?"

In Philadelphia calls for an independent review board have been largely dismissed. For one thing, as Mayor Ed Rendell points out, the current charges arose after an investigation initiated by the police department led to an investigation by a joint anticorruption task force, which to his mind means that his officers are capable of policing themselves. For another, says district attorney Lynne Abraham, a special commission cannot control the force anyway. "Commissions come and go, and then when everybody folds their tent, there is a tendency to slip back again."

There is also a great deal of resistance among the rank and file to outside controls. Los Angeles will finally put in place the Christopher Commission's recommendation for an inspector general later this year. Says a 20-year L.A.P.D. veteran who is disgusted with this and other pledged reforms: "Daryl Gates, even when he made mistakes, he connected with the cops on the street. He remembered people's names. He stood up for you. Now you know you're gonna be second-guessed and have some board review you, no matter what you do. It's not worth it."

Making the job worth their while is in fact an essential issue to cops, who feel they are the brutalized, not the brutalizers. Many cops feel that much of what they do, even if it crosses some line, is justified by the stresses of the street and the need to protect the public. "A lot of times you're arresting people who are out-and-out cold, hard criminals, and they're out on the street on bail before you've done your paperwork," says Jim McDevitt, vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police in Philadelphia. "That gets very, very frustrating." What can be done to ease these frustrations? According to New Orleans chief Pennington, pay cops more and train them better. He recently handed his officers their first pay raise in eight years.

Naturally, officers around the country last week expressed frustration that they were all being unfairly tarred by the Fuhr man brush. That, doubtless, is mostly true. But when people are afraid to report their complaints, when officers work alongside acknowledged racists or miscreants in silence, when news of the latest police scandal is met with a "So what?" by jaded citizens, the system has gone awry. "It can be hard to keep your compassion," says L.A.P.D. sergeant Mike Albanese. "But we need to find a way to help people who have a problem get out of this system. It's not just an L.A.P.D. problem. It's a problem for everybody."

--Reported by Sharon E. Epperson/Philadephia, Julie Grace/Chicago, S.C. Gwynne/New Orleans, Elaine Lafferty and Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles and Sarah Tippit/New York

With reporting by SHARON E. EPPERSON/PHILADEPHIA, JULIE GRACE/CHICAGO, S.C. GWYNNE/NEW ORLEANS, ELAINE LAFFERTY AND SYLVESTER MONROE/LOS ANGELES AND SARAH TIPPIT/NEW YORK