COLUMN LEFT : Police Abuse: Fronting for the Haves : War in Iraq, war on drugs--it’s all the same exercise of power.

“Rogue cops” overstep the line from time to time. What this actually mostly means is that officers ordinarily engaged in the execution of their duties get caught, as in the case of Rodney King, who was on the receiving end of a nightstick, boot and stun gun.

When they do get caught there’s a hullabaloo, with calls for indictments of the offenders, better supervisory powers, eviction of the police chief and so forth. But the real function of these unpleasant incidents is to affirm the system.

In our society the police operate under a social mandate. If society--meaning in this instance the Haves, the Overdogs and kindred beneficiaries of present political arrangements--truly found the sort of violence exercised upon King unacceptable, it would have stopped long ago.

It wasn’t as though we had to wait for George Holliday to focus his video camera on King’s assailants from the Los Angeles Police Department to disclose what law enforcement often adds up to in practice. The blotter is replete with evidence of institutionalized police violence.

Not long before Daryl Gates was sworn in as police chief in 1978, the so-called “Masked Marvel,” a white ex-cop who had served five years in the 77th Street division, appeared on local TV programs to describe the violent and racist rampages of his colleagues.

Gates ridiculed “liberals” upset by the allegations. Soon thereafter he was busy defending the 12 bullet holes left by his men in the body of Eulia Love, a 39-year-old black woman in default on her gas bill.

Most of the many exculpations since then offered by Gates have been equally as hollow, but the message also offered by his flourishing career is that he has been proceeding along the right lines. The “ugly incidents” serve to remind people of what the police feel themselves empowered by society to do.

Though he’s deemed it prudent to throw three or four of them over the side, Gates would have been eminently justified in claiming that his men, along with himself, were acting under orders. President Bush himself, fragrant and glowing from a blood bath of Iraqi lives designed to banish the “Vietnam syndrome,” let the other boot drop by publicly commending Gates’ efforts against crime--at just about the time King was being beaten--and by calling for abundant new death penalties in the war against the dangerous classes.

Now these are “war aims” to which those Los Angeles liberals now denouncing Gates have long since subscribed, never more exuberantly than in the “drug war.” “Tonight we pick ‘em up for anything and everything,” an LAPD spokesman announced on April 9, 1988, the start of Operation Hammer in South-Central Los Angeles. Gates himself announced that “We want the message to get out to the cowards out there . . . that we’re coming in to get them.” By 1990, Operation Hammer had picked up 50,000 suspects. Obviously more than one ethnic group was involved, but there are only 100,000 black youths in Los Angeles.

In August, 1988, 88 police from the Southwest Division raided a group of apartments in the 3900 block of Dalton Avenue, destroying them and forcing 32 captives to run a gauntlet of fists and long steel flashlights. But by then liberals, with a few heroic exceptions, had abandoned all pretense of a search for any progressive agenda on crime. They had become choristers for the “drug war” and any other war designed to keep the Have-Nots in their place.

If Gates were straightforward, he’d simply distribute to reporters some elementary statistics about the city and its economy. The press release would include details of the destruction of the Los Angeles labor market for young black men, the surge of unemployment in South-Central by nearly 50% since the early 1970s while purchasing power has fallen by a third, the drainage of money from social programs, the decay of the school system.

Then Gates would be able to say, with considerable justice, that the manner of law enforcement is consequent upon decisions with which--beyond vigorous lobbying for a bigger police budget--he had little to do. Do nothing about youth unemployment in South-Central and sooner or later cops inevitably will become rogues.

In the end, police act upon their estimate of what the Haves want, whether it is search-and-destroy missions in South-Central, conspicuous deterrence by random violence, beatings of striking janitors or, to go back 70 years, the arrest of Upton Sinclair in 1921 for reading the Declaration of Independence in public. In this version of democracy we get the police the Haves want, at least until the Have-Nots force something different.