‘The Officers Are Down’ : Pacoima: On the day that four members of the force are indicted on brutality charges, Foothill Division police go grimly about their business.

At noon on a cold gray Friday, Police Capt. Tim McBride stood in front of the Foothill Division Station, where he has been commander for 2 1/2 years. He looked tired.

An hour earlier, officers had crowded around a television set in the watch commander’s office as indictments were announced against four of their co-workers in the March 3 beating of motorist Rodney G. King. The mood at the Los Angeles Police Department station in Pacoima was quiet and somber.

“They were all watching TV,” McBride said. “The officers are down. They knew it was coming, but they’re still distressed.”

Seeing the dramatic mug shots taken when the four officers were booked on brutality charges was extremely painful, said Officer Ken Roth, a senior patrol officer assigned to the Sylmar area.

“Basically, I feel a lot of regret that the King incident ever happened,” he said. “And a lot of regret that they were indicted. The way they portrayed the pictures on TV, with the booking numbers under their chins, it was a sickening feeling for me.”

That feeling grows out of the powerful bond that exists between all police officers, Roth said. But referring to the beating of King, he added, “There’s also a reality that none of us enjoy seeing someone injured like that when they are not fighting back.”

McBride did not watch the news report Friday morning. Instead, he met with a Neighborhood Watch captain active among Latinos in the area, part of an all-out community relations campaign launched to calm tensions in the wake of the King case.

Foothill Division officers feel with particular intensity the public anger and media fervor focused on the Police Department because the incident happened in Lake View Terrace, less than two miles from the station on Osborne Street. And 11 Foothill officers are still under investigation because they were present when King was beaten.

Despite their horror at the incident, leaders of local organizations in the tough, ethnically mixed community of the northeast San Fernando Valley have lauded McBride since the beating for his efforts to work with them in the past. The videotaped beating has battered a relationship that was improving, McBride said.

“I sat down the other day at home and I wanted to cry,” he said. “I’m an emotional Irishman. I can cry watching Marcus Welby. But the tears wouldn’t come. There’s a lot of people in the station ready to cry. There’s a lot of people who are hurting.”

A psychologist has attended roll calls periodically to talk to officers about their feelings, McBride said.

At the front desk and outside the station Friday, officers went grimly about their business as a television crew pointed a camera at them. Several declined requests for interviews, saying they feel the media coverage has escalated into an all-out assault on the police force.

There was a basket of flowers on the front desk with a card expressing “love and support.” The station has received many such messages from people who feel the men and women who work there should not all be lumped together, officers said.

“The vast amount of the public recognizes this for what it is, an isolated incident,” McBride said. “I’ve had well over a hundred calls of support a day.”

And Roth commented about the furor: “My concern is that it’s going to take months, possibly years, before the public realizes ‘hey, this isn’t the norm.’ We have got to work together. If people don’t call us because they are scared, everyone’s going to suffer.”

But a few hours later, a horde of television crews and reporters descended on a quiet middle-class street about two miles away in Arleta to cover a news conference held by a lawyer who alleges that 30 of his clients were brutalized by 10 Foothill officers at a party there in April, 1989.

Attorney Leon P. Gilbert filed a lawsuit last March, but said he is only now moving forward with the case because misdemeanor charges were recently dropped against five clients. He said he was taking advantage of the supercharged atmosphere surrounding the King case to publicize his clients’ allegations that officers beat and abused them as police broke up a party at the house in the 9800 block of Mercedes Avenue.

“If this case had gotten the attention and outrage that the King case has gotten in the nation and the world, the King case probably wouldn’t have happened,” Gilbert said. “We’re coming out with this now because the public should know this is not an aberration. It happens all the time.”

Alejandro Chavez, who lives at the house, and the other plaintiffs allege that the officers arrived at the baptismal party on the night of April 1 and clubbed party-goers after ordering them to disperse, leaving them with missing teeth and bruises.

A Foothill captain said in 1989 that the officers were assaulted when they went to the house, responding to complaints by neighbors of a noisy party. Several officers suffered injuries in the ensuing melee, he said.

Gilbert said he is trying to determine if any of the 10 officers he has sued, or any others who were present that night, may be among those who were present during the King incident. None of the 10 are among the four officers indicted Friday.

McBride dismissed the news conference as “sensationalism.”

Deputy City Atty. Carol G. Miller said she could not comment on the case but said the city is contesting the lawsuit.

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