When Department Integrity Suffers and Public Support Falls, the Chief Must Quit : Beating: Gates’ repeated claim that the King pummeling was an “aberration” is an attempt to escape responsibility, a tactic he’s prone to exploit.

In some ways, a police chief’s job is simple. The chief directs his officers in the proper enforcement of the laws and protection of life and property. The chief must also win support for his department’s work from the public. When people support the police, they will report crime and serve as witnesses; juries will believe police testimony. But when the people can’t tell the good guys from the bad, they will not work in partnership with the police, and the criminals win. It is thus incumbent on the chief to exert the kind of leadership that results in his troops performing their duties in a way that maintains credibility in the community. If the chief fails, he or she should resign or be removed from office.

The brutal videotaped beating of Rodney G. King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department and subsequent opinion polls indicate that Police Chief Daryl F. Gates has failed both to maintain the integrity of his force and the confidence of the public. When two-thirds of citizens polled by The Los Angeles Times believe that brutality by LAPD officers is common, and the majority think that the chief is not doing a good job, it shows that Gates has become a liability to his department and to his city.

As painful as it is, Gates should hold himself as accountable as other members of his department are. He should retire from office. It is difficult to see the LAPD regaining its credibility with him remaining as its chief.

Gates’ repeated claim that the King beating was an “aberration” is an attempt to escape responsibility. It is one thing to say that an occasional act of brutality takes place; it is quite another to concede that there is a pattern of abuse protected by a code of silence within the department. Yet the videotape of the beating shows four officers systematically kicking and beating a helpless and unresisting King without apparent fear that any of the witnessing cops would report them. Those actions and the fact that the officers coolly took turns in assaulting King make it hard to believe that this was a spontaneous flare-up, especially when the police supervisor present just watched. So far, Los Angeles has paid $3 million in damages in a similarly brutal incident in 1988, when a large group of out-of-control officers ransacked the apartments of 52 residents in South-Central Los Angeles.

At the time, Gates was mild in disciplining the officers, saying he understood their frustrations. When Gates was initially asked to comment on the videotaped beating of King, he showed similar defensiveness. Unlike the rest of America, he refused to draw any conclusions and said he would look into events leading up to the incident. The events leading up to the incident were irrelevant to the brutality. When the chief fails to quickly and firmly condemn such conduct, it further fosters the climate that leads to brutality.

Los Angeles police chiefs have the habit of sending out not so subtle messages. Gates has continued the tradition, recently suggesting that casual drug users should be shot. In 1982, he said blacks were different from “normal” people in explaining the death of a black man who had been subjected to a chokehold. And after the tragic killing of a female Los Angeles officer, Gates proclaimed that she was killed by an El Salvadoran who shouldn’t have been here. That, too, was irrelevant. The officer was killed by a drunken criminal. The chief’s statement did nothing to lessen the tragedy, but no doubt appealed to deeply held anti-minority prejudices in some of his officers.

It is the duty of the chief to appeal to the highest ideals of police professionalism. When the chief sounds more like Rambo, no one should be surprised if some officers on the street interpret the message to mean that they can administer justice as they see fit. Any city that allows the unhealthy pattern of the Los Angeles Police Department to develop can look forward to national embarrassment, as well as to a drain on taxpayer money as more lawsuits are won against police misconduct.