Looking Into a Police Raid

The Los Angeles Police Department must quickly determine what actually happened last week during a police raid just west of the Coliseum in Southwest Los Angeles. The extensive damage to four small apartments prompts serious questions. The most troubling question is not whether the LAPD was doing its job--the area is rife with gang activity, and there is sufficient reason to suspect drug dealing--but how the individual officers involved were doing their jobs.

Did overzealous cops overstep the department’s bounds while searching for narcotics and weapons during an investigation of drive-by shootings and gang activity? Did police secure the apartments or alert the owners after the raid? Did gang members enter the homes after the raid and do additional damage, as some authorities believe? Was there police misconduct? There are conflicting reports. The internal investigation--already under way, to the department’s credit--must determine precisely who did what.

During the operation, which included the detention of 25 youths in the area, the Los Angeles police confiscated a sawed-off rifle, six ounces of marijuana and a small amount of crack cocaine, but the damage was excessive to the apartments on Dalton Avenue. Walls and ceilings were torn apart. Windows and mirrors were smashed. Television sets and items of stereo equipment were broken. A toilet bowl was shattered. Furniture and clothing were ruined. The destruction was so severe that the American Red Cross took the unusual step of offering disaster relief.

It was indeed a disaster for the families, and for the tenuous partnership between the LAPD and a black community wary from years of mistreatment. That distrust had been replaced more recently by successful demands for more police in black neighborhoods. The raid, however, angered residents who question if their homes will be next, if police are reverting to their old siege mentality, and if anything goes in the war against drugs.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley can make it clear that the city will not tolerate police misconduct. Bradley, a former cop, has already instructed the Los Angeles Police Commission to make an inquiry, but it is up to the LAPD to provide the strongest reassurances.

Councilman Bob Farrell, who visited the apartments along with representatives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, is helping tenants to find temporary shelter and property owners to make emergency repairs. The city should provide both services to defuse tensions and to switch attention from the victims of one controversial police raid back to the victims of drug traffic and gang violence.

Los Angeles has a severe drug crisis and gang problem, but there can be no justification for a police raid that results in damages so excessive that disaster relief is offered. The Los Angeles Police Department must come up with solid information quickly, hold its officers accountable to department standards and put the focus back where it belongs--on battling murders, drugs and gangs.