The Mind-Set Is ‘Us Against Them’ : Police: Chief Gates gets away with outrageous expressions of intolerance because LAPD operates in a world of its own.

It’s all too easy to dismiss Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates’ extraordinary comment that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot” as merely the sad ravings of yet another of William Bennett’s inquisitor priests gone over the edge in our continuing holy war on drugs. It would be equally as simple to regard the chief’s refusal to recruit gay police officers as just another bout of homophobia--no different from that, say, of Andy Rooney or the rapper Heavy D.

The chief, after all, is a man whose view of the world was forged in the insular blue-collar streets of Glendale, where he was born 64 years ago. Like other white working-class communities, Glendale was then a place with many virtues, but first among them was never its inhabitants’ ability to empathize with others different than themselves.

From such neighborhoods have sprang generations of men like Daryl Gates who would proudly swell the ranks of America’s urban police departments, righteously operating under an assumption that liberals, blacks and Latinos--and then hippies, gays and career-minded women--were separate and apart from the “real” America.

The chief, often inadvertently, has said as much. Of the slow rise of Latinos through the LAPD’s ranks, for example, Gates once “joked” that it just might be because they were “lazy.” Of the influx of Soviet Jews into Los Angeles, he voiced the fear that some were agents sent to disrupt the city’s 1984 Olympic Games. Of the high percentage of blacks who died from the vigorous application of chokeholds by his officers, the chief volunteered that it might be because the “. . . veins or arteries of blacks do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.”

So to have expected him to answer a question about hiring gay cops, as he did several years ago, with anything other than a disgusted, “Who’d want to work with one?” or to have reacted in any other way to a profound spiritual problem we’ve mislabeled a “war,” would have been to expect far more of Daryl Gates than he was capable of delivering.

But granting that, I suspect there’s more to the chief’s hatred of casual drug users than mere zealotry, and more to his refusal to recruit gay officers than just an inability to accept gay men and women as valid human beings. For underlying both issues is not just a way of viewing the world, but a way of training police officers that demands that they see life with a uniformity that seems to begin and end with Gates’ limited tolerance.

In this city we have a relatively liberal, relatively weak council and mayor who are often too cowed to take on an entrenched, conservative and politically potent LAPD hierarchy. Which is exactly what makes the chief’s remarks so troubling. For as Gates thinks and acts, so, too, do 8,100 of the most powerful police officers in America.

This situation goes back to 1950, when William H. Parker became chief and made the LAPD, alone among big-city police forces, virtually immune to civilian control.

True, it is the Police Commission, appointed by the mayor, that nominally sets the department’s policy, but the part-time, frequently divided commission is no match for Gates, who plays it with the skill of a Horowitz on a baby grand.

The result: the country’s most powerful, most independent urban police department. The benefit: a police force that for 40 years has been relatively free of the corruption and inefficiency that has plagued so many other big cities. The down side: a police force that has flaunted--as it is now doing over the issue of gay officers--a remarkable unwillingness to concede that the mayor, the council, community groups or any civilian should have input into the running of the department. The message: the LAPD belongs to the police, not the people.

Over the past 25 years, on almost every occasion that a controversy has surfaced involving the LAPD, the department has responded initially as if it is answerable to no one--from the Watts riots of the ‘60s; the excessive shootings and chokehold killings during the ‘70s and early ‘80s; the large-scale, frightening and illegal spying on its critics during that period; through the fiercely fought court mandate to hire and promote women, blacks and Latinos in the early ‘80s.

When he was chief in the ‘70s, Ed Davis used to say: “I don’t want to be mayor of this city. That position has no power. I already have more power than the mayor.”

Today, it’s obvious that not much has changed when the police chief can simply say no to the mayor and council as Gates is doing on the issue of hiring gay cops; and can defiantly defend his shoot-the-users statement while the mayor refuses to get involved and most of the council reacts with an “oh, well, that’s Daryl” shrug.

Someday, the LAPD may break through the “us against them” mind-set. Someday, the department may be open to gay officers. But I wouldn’t bet on it, not as long as Gates and others of his generation are around, running things as if Los Angeles is still the mostly white Peoria-with-palm-trees of memory, not the cosmopolitan, world-class city of reality. Until then, the best we can hope for is police officers in the ranks who don’t automatically assume that someone is a “bad guy” because of his skin color or sexual orientation, or that someone who “blasts some pot on a casual basis” (Gates’ choice words) is a candidate for the death penalty.