Will They Step From the Shadows? : Law Enforcement: Black leaders must take the gag out of their mouths and confront the issue of arbitrary force.

Where are our leaders?

In the past year of gang sweeps and expanded police budgets, members of the community have complained about the frequent and arbitrary use of force that African Americans find themselves subjected to by law-enforcement officers in Los Angeles County. But with the exception of a few grass-roots organizations, black leaders have remained silent. There is no coalition of established black civil-rights organizations pressing for police review boards or other possible solutions to the visible rise in violence by police. With the exception of Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) and Danny J. Bakewell, leader of the Brotherhood Crusade community group, who has been publicly critical of the police?

Black leaders must help fulfill promised economic, educational and employment opportunities forgotten in the years since the Watts riots. These problems underlie greater tensions that police behavior can inflame. Black leaders must support an independent regional body to investigate and make impartial rulings on allegations of police misconduct.

Black youth are looking for the leadership and protection that might move them past their endangered-species status. Our leaders should be pressing for job funds so that our youth won’t have to depend on the drug trade--the biggest equal-opportunity, full-time employer in the inner city. A traveler going through places like Encino finds banks and lending institutions everywhere, but in the inner city, liquor stores and gun shops pepper the landscape.

Black leaders need to dispel the law-enforcement Establishment’s tendency to regard all black youth as criminal. Not all of our kids are smoking crack. A recent study pointed to whites as the biggest users of illegal drugs.

Will Councilman Gilbert Lindsay step from the shadows and seek an end to the fruitless gang sweeps? Though the sweeps have provided high visibility for Police Chief Daryl Gates, the streets of South-Central Los Angeles are no safer, and statistics will bear that out. The sweeps have been the chief catalyst in a rapid dismantling of civil-rights protections.

Will Councilman Robert Farrell participate in protests at Southwest Division Police Station? Some police vehicles at the station, located in his district, were discovered to have South African army emblems on them. Southwest also made headlines for an ill-advised drug raid that spawned a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that the City of Los Angeles settled Monday for $3 million.

Can anyone find Councilman Nate Holden? As chairman of the council’s Police, Fire and Public Safety Committee, his silence is the most disturbing. Holden has not suggested any alternatives to the cry for more police and jails. With blacks already comprising 33% of the prison population in California, it would seem that more police and jails aren’t the answer.

The past decade was littered with scars of brutal police tactics--the victims are often innocent people and people who support the police. Police violence is not only tragic and unjust; it’s expensive. Los Angeles, the county and other Southern California cities have paid millions in tax dollars to settle police misconduct suits.

Now there is a chance to heal some of the wounds on both sides. The two meetings last month between members of the Nation of Islam and law-enforcement officials were the impetus for a series of talks between the authorities and a coalition of African American groups. There appears to be sincerity on both sides.

But these meetings can have only a temporary impact on law-enforcement practices as long as police and sheriff’s deputies internally resist efforts to control their conduct. Law enforcement must do away with the code of silence, an informal pact among police officers not to reveal misconduct against one another; “creative report writing,” or falsifying police reports to support misconduct or abuse against citizens, and “testi-lying,” perjury by police officers in support of bad arrests. People who question an officer’s authority must not be subjected to “attitude adjustment” or curbside justice.

One thing is certain, African Americans stopped by police on today’s streets do fear for their safety. Fear on both sides will lead to life-threatening confrontations.

Meetings with the police will perhaps reduce community fears about police tactics. Meetings will not restore trust, which has eroded as a result of the past actions of some law-enforcement officers in dealing with the black community. That trust can only be restored when the good cops, who are in the majority, stop protecting the small percentage of abusive officers who account for most of the misconduct claims.

In addition, black elected officials will have to speak to the issue and pull the gag out of their mouths.

Racism and police violence were a flash point in Watts in 1965. We are all going to have to break the code of silence if we are to avert a similar violent tragedy.