COLUMN ONE : Training: a Casualty on Street : The LAPD teaches officers to use only ‘reasonable and necessary’ force. But some say drug and gang violence create a siege mentality.

About a week before some of them participated in one of the most ignominious chapters in Los Angeles police history, the officers of Foothill Division received a routine training drill during roll call.

Subject: the proper use of the Monadnock PR-24 baton, a two-foot-long piece of solid aluminum that can break a limb or even kill a man. According to an officer who attended the roll call, the sergeant conducting the training told the officers they shouldn’t hesitate when using the weapon on a belligerent suspect.

“If you’re going to stick ‘em (hit them with the baton),” the trainer told the officers, “do it right, so you don’t have to come back and do it again.”

Not long afterward, some of those Foothill officers were captured on videotape as they used their batons to strike Rodney G. King more than 50 times, a nationally publicized incident that has been condemned by the department’s highest officials.

The beating has focused attention on how officers are trained to subdue and arrest suspects, with critics arguing that the Police Department’s precisely worded policies on use of force are often ignored by officers.

Indeed, from the shooting death of Eulia Love in a 1979 dispute over an unpaid gas bill, to the death of more than a dozen people in police chokeholds in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the use-of-force policy has repeatedly thrown the Police Department into controversy.

When and to what degree police officers can use legally sanctioned violence is perhaps the most sensitive subject taught to cadets at the Police Academy in Elysian Park. Training bulletins that detail department policies and tactics also are regularly distributed to each of the Police Department’s 8,400 sworn officers.

Among the variety of weapons and self-defense techniques introduced to cadets during their six-month academy training are the PR-24 baton, the Taser stun gun and “the swarm technique,” in which four or more officers surround a suspect, each grabbing a limb. All three techniques were apparently used on King during the March 3 incident.

“We have to stay consistent (in our training),” said Sgt. Fred Nichols, officer in charge of physical training and self-defense at the Police Academy. “The area of use of force is what gets our officers in trouble.”

The Foothill sergeant’s admonition to his officers to “do it right” is standard fare during the department’s baton training, Nichols said. Such statements are meant to remind officers of the risk they face if they fail to correctly disarm or subdue a suspect.

If an officer fails to employ the baton aggressively, Nichols explained, “somebody could take your weapon away from you and blow you away.”

According to department policy, officers are permitted to use whatever force is “reasonable and necessary to protect others or themselves from bodily harm.” Any use of force that does not follow this definition is considered excessive. Verbal threats alone are not enough to justify physical force.

Four Los Angeles police officers were indicted Friday in the King beating, including a training officer and a rookie with less than a year on the force. In the wake of the incident, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates has ordered a review of all department training materials on the use of force.

Although three of the indicted policemen were veterans, Gates noted that many officers on the streets today are relative newcomers. He said that over the last three years, 2,150 men and women have graduated from the academy and 38% of all patrol officers have less than three years experience.

“You’re going to have a failure here and there,” Gates said of the new recruits. “It’s going to happen. You can’t bring in that kind of new talent without having a failure from time to time. We’ve got one--we’ve got several apparently.”

A source close to the indicted officers said they will almost certainly argue in their defense that their actions conformed with department guidelines on the use of force.

In an arrest report submitted by one of the indicted officers, Sgt. Stacey Koon and officers Timothy Wind and Laurence Powell were said to have ordered King to lie down. King was struck with the baton until he complied with their orders, the officer’s report stated.

Department officials have said the officers’ actions were clearly an excessive use of force in violation of department policies. But indicted officers are likely to argue that King resisted arrest before videotaping began.

Darryl Mounger, an attorney for Koon and himself a former Los Angeles police supervisor, explained his understanding of the baton’s use:

“The Los Angeles Police Department teaches you not to fight with suspects,” Mounger said. “They teach you to disable your opponent. It’s kind of like war. You do what you have to do to the enemy.”

Given the ever-escalating “war” on drugs and gang violence, it is perhaps not surprising that military metaphors are invoked by both police officers and their critics in discussing both the King incident and the department’s use-of-force policy.

“The cops (in Los Angeles) are trained that they are soldiers in the war on crime, rather than members of the community who are there to arrest people and bring them to court,” said James Fyfe, an American University professor and former New York City police officer who has testified at several civil and criminal cases involving Los Angeles police officers.

Like most observers, Fyfe agrees that the training received by Los Angeles officers is among the best in the world. But like many department critics, he says the professionalism officers learn in the academy has been compromised by a “siege mentality” that has descended on Gates and other Los Angeles police officials as they wage their war against drugs.

Los Angeles police “see themselves as vastly outnumbered soldiers in the war on crime, the ‘thin blue line’ that saves the city from anarchy,” Fyfe said. “If police officers see themselves as the outpost of civilization in a sea of hostility, they will lash out.”

The “war” on the streets of Los Angeles had, in fact, claimed several police victims in the month before the King beating. Five Los Angeles police officers were wounded by gunfire in a single eight-day period culminating with the Feb. 11 killing of Tina Kerbrat on a San Fernando Valley street corner. Kerbrat was shot only a few miles from the Northeast Valley street where King was beaten three weeks later.

Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington-based research group, likened the situation in Los Angeles to an “arms race” between criminals and the police, where battlefield horrors like the King beating almost become inevitable.

“They’re building up their weapons, we (police) are building up our weapons, and our democracy is falling apart,” Williams said. “We’ve got more people in jail than South Africa and more guns on the streets than on many battlefields.”

Los Angeles police officials respond that their academy training, which includes 76 hours of instruction in crisis intervention, is designed to help them cope with even the most violent and unpredictable situations.

Nichols said a variety of Police Department guidelines--outlined in more than a dozen training bulletins--should prevent excessive use of force. At all times, officers should be guided by the dictum that they should use only that force which is “reasonable and necessary” to accomplish their goals.

Officers are trained to “escalate” and “de-escalate” their use of force according to a scale that begins with verbal commands and ends with the use of deadly weapons.

The side-handle baton and the Taser gun, which fires 50,000 volts of electricity into a suspect, are at the “intermediate” level of force authorized by the department, Nichols said. Less severe levels of force include a variety of arm grips and “compliance holds,” such as the wrist lock.

The baton can be used to ward off blows or to intimidate unruly protesters. Officers are trained in more than 20 different techniques for using the weapon, including the “Power Chop,” the “Pool-Cue Jab” and the “Yarawa Strike,” which an officer can use to ward off an attack from the rear.

Nichols said a skillful officer can use the baton to generate blows with about 30 pounds per square inch of force, three times the force necessary to break a human bone.

King suffered numerous injuries from his beating at the hands of the Foothill officers, including a fractured eye socket, a broken cheekbone, a broken leg, facial nerve damage and a severe concussion, according to a doctor who examined him. The bones at the base of King’s skull were broken in 11 places, the doctor said, and the force of the baton blows knocked several fillings from his teeth.

Nichols said Los Angeles police officers are cautioned about the baton’s inherent dangers: “We tell them the baton can inflict great bodily injury, and even death.”

Officers are also trained to “assess” the impact of each blow or set of blows before continuing to use the baton against a suspect.

“Once you give a good stroke, you’ve got to stop,” Nichols said. “You can’t hit anymore.”

Department training materials also emphasize that the baton should not be used against the head, spine or kidneys, except in cases when an officer’s life is in danger. Nor should the baton be used “to gain compliance to verbal commands absent combative or aggressive actions by the suspect.”

In the videotape of the King beating, however, two officers pause only briefly as they hit King. The Altadena man does not appear to be fighting back. Only at one point in the tape does King raise his arm, apparently attempting to ward off the baton swings. One officer strikes the baton across King’s midsection.

The baton became the department’s most commonly used weapon after the chokehold, officially known as the “carotid control hold,” was blamed for 14 to 16 deaths of people at the hands of police in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

Although the chokehold is still taught at the academy, it can only be used by officers in life-threatening situations.

The restricted use of the chokehold is described in one of many training bulletins contained in a folder with more than 80 pages of diagrams and instructions on the department’s use-of-force policies. The bulletins are themselves reviewed and rewritten periodically as new controversies and other issues arise.

Nichols concedes that many officers he trains are frustrated by the voluminous guidelines and that many feel they are fighting a war with “one hand tied behind their backs.”

“It makes it hard for the officers to be involved in a physical confrontation and remember the guidelines at the same time,” Nichols said. “But for the most part, our officers do an outstanding job.”

Others argue differently. Tom Barham, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy and now an attorney who represents alleged victims of police abuse, said that once new recruits leave the academy, they discover an ethic far different from the ideals of the classroom.

“Where the training breaks down is in the field,” Barham said. “When a person goes out to a patrol assignment, they are assigned to field training officers. Almost without exception, they will tell the trainee, ‘Forget what you learned in the academy, I’m going to teach you to be a real cop.’ ”

In the King incident, Barham points out, 11 officers and a sergeant stood by and watched as the beating continued.

“There are dedicated people teaching these policemen, but that doesn’t mean a thing when they get out onto the field (and) you’ve got a weak-kneed sergeant who stands by and does nothing,” Barham said. “The sergeant wants to have the approval of the officers. He wants to be known as a kick-ass guy . . . a guy who backs up his officers.”

Still, most officers seem to think that even though real-life patrol duty rarely resembles a textbook, the videotaped beating goes against everything they have learned about police work.

“I’m sure that there are officers who might think they can get an extra punch in here or there,” said a 21-year department veteran. “But we go over it a hundred times--you don’t strike a defenseless person.”

Despite the controversy, training on use of force continues at the Police Academy. On one recent afternoon, 60 cadets practiced martial arts kicks and other self-defense techniques in a gymnasium where the department motto--”To Protect and to Serve”--looms over the exercise floor.

One group of 20 cadets practiced the use of the baton, moving in unison to the orders of their trainer, Officer Charles Duplessis.

“Front punch! . . . Rear punch! . . . Short-end stroke!” Duplessis called out. “I want to see a little more aggression here, not just going through the motions.”

The officers then practiced the “power stroke” by using their batons to strike wooden ax handles, filling the gym with the sound of metal cracking on wood. With four quick baton strokes, one burly cadet broke an ax handle in half.