Safer Streets Are Priceless: Less-Painful Enforcement Would Be, Too : Police: L.A.’s force may keep us better protected than New Yorkers, but there’s a price in civilized behavior.

About a week ago, I read an article by a woman living in New York City--a place where the cops long ago lost control. In the story, titled “Being Safe,” a Manhattan mother describes how she has been robbed of her wallet 11 times; her son has been mugged and had two bikes stolen; her car has been broken into three times and stolen once; and her husband has been held up at gunpoint while walking the dog. As a result, she is now quite deliberately teaching her children not only how to protect themselves but how to be fearful as well.

In Los Angeles, those of us living west of La Brea or in the city’s numerous middle-class suburbs don’t face such problems, at least on a daily, rule-your-life basis. I feel comfortable, for example, when my wife takes our 2-year-old to parks in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills near our home. One reason is the hyper-segregation and great distances that shield the middle and upper-middle classes here from the underclass that commits so much of the street crime that we all--of whatever race or origin--so fear. And there is, in addition, another reason. The police in Los Angeles have not given up as they seem to have in New York. Instead, they continue to be aggressive, hard-working and responsive.

But as James Fyfe, a former cop and now a professor of justice at American University in Washington, has pointed out, it’s not enough for a police force in a democratic society to merely be responsive. It must, like all government institutions, be accountable as well. In the 1960s, for example, the cops in Selma, Ala., were responsive but unaccountable when they attacked-civil rights demonstrators on the Raymond Petty Bridge. So, too, with the Chicago police who attacked demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Recently, it’s been hard to pick up the Times without wondering if the Los Angeles Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department and local elected officials have any interest in accountability.

In the past several months, for example, we’ve seen the city offer $3 million in settlement of a federal lawsuit brought by the victims of a 1988 drug raid on Dalton Ave., near the Coliseum, in which 80 LAPD officers terrorized 55 citizens and literally destroyed four apartments in two buildings. The Red Cross had to provide temporary shelter, as if some vast natural disaster had occurred. In spite of all this, city officials have expressed little public outrage, leaving unquestioned the leadership of Chief Daryl Gates in the matter.

We’ve also had Mayor Bradley urge, and the City Council unanimously vote, to have the city pay a $170,000 judgment leveled against Gates personally by a federal jury in a suit by an Eastside man, Jesse Larez, whose nose was broken during a search of his home in 1986. During the trial of the suit, two years later, Gates said, “(He’s) probably lucky that’s all he had broken. How much is a broken nose worth? . . . I don’t think it’s worth anything.” As with the Dalton Ave. raid, there has been almost no criticism of Gates’ remarks by city officials or by a liberal community that has been vociferous about human rights in South Africa, Central America and the Soviet Union.

Nor have we heard any real criticism of the gang sweeps, which are, after all, just the random shaking down on a mass scale of young black and Latino men by the LAPD. Indeed, a just-published Times poll shows that more than one-third of blacks in Los Angeles and Orange counties said that “they or a family member had been intimidated or harassed by law-enforcement officers.”

And when the LAPD used brutal “pain compliance” holds and nunchaku sticks on anti-abortion demonstrators, the silence from city leaders and liberal activists was deafening.

Nor has any city official publicly questioned the latest of several stake-out shootings by the Special Investigations Section, a unit of the LAPD that recently shot and killed three robbery suspects and wounded a fourth (none of whom ever fired their weapons, later found to be pellet guns) outside a Sunland McDonald’s. One of the officers involved had shot seven other suspects since 1978; two others had each shot three suspects.

The Sheriff’s Department has, since the new year, fired 26 shots at a woman who refused to drop her gun, killing her; shot and killed a black Muslim during a routine traffic stop; and shot and killed an unarmed Lynwood man, hitting him 12 to 15 times.

The reluctance of the mayor, City Council and Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to speak up on these matters is, to be sure, rooted in the special autonomy enjoyed by both the police chief and the sheriff, and in the historically conservative political nature of Southern California.

But I have a further explanation. It has to do with Reaganomics, Proposition 13 and the failure to replace thousands of lost manufacturing jobs. It has also to do with the benign neglect of a mayor, City Council and Board of Supervisors who watched South Central and other areas fester and erupt in terrible gang violence, then told the cops to get in there and do something about it. Police accountability--always on shaky ground here--has once again gotten lost in the shuffle.

All of which brings me back to the streets of two cities.

Given the choice of walking them without fear or accepting unnecessary police violence, most people will take safe streets every time. It’s hard to fathom why, however, with police departments as highly trained as the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department, and in a nation as rich as ours, we have to choose between the two.