COLUMN LEFT : Policing By Exemplary Terror : The problem is bigger than one man, or one police department. Class and race are the root of it.

Talking to blacks and other minorities in Los Angeles about the cops reminds me vividly of similar conversations with Catholics in Northern Ireland 25 years ago about the “B Specials.” The Specials were a section of the Ulster security forces charged with the duty of keeping the “Papists” in their place. They ruled by exemplary terror.

Catholics driving down a road in Ulster knew somewhere in the backs of their minds that the headlights suddenly appearing behind them might belong to a car full of Specials, and that these Specials might stop them, beat them, frame them, maybe kill them.

The B Specials were part of the apparatus created by the Ulster elites to keep the Catholics down. The discrimination expressed itself in terms of religion, class and race. (Yes, Protestant bigots firmly believe in the racial inferiority of their Catholic nationalist neighbors.) The good jobs were reserved for Protestants; labor was kept subservient. Exemplary terror helped keep a whole system of economic and social exploitation on track.

At a far more grisly level, exemplary terror is how the elites maintain themselves in Guatemala or El Salvador or Brazil. The mutilated body by the side of the road on your way to work tells you that this is a system that can strike you down, without justice and with impunity.

When William Parker became chief of police in 1950, the force was corrupt, fat off shakedowns of Central Avenue vice operations. In its stead, Parker forged a less corrupt but brutal paramilitary force. His men, mostly white Southwesterners, behaved toward black neighborhoods like an occupying army.

Parker was fanatically opposed to race-mixing. At one level this meant busting mixed clubs on Central Avenue. It also meant the violent enforcement of race and class divisions in the city, above all telling the thousands of blacks pouring into Los Angeles from the South in the 1950s that this was no land of opportunity.

The police department was made immune to political influence, thus creating a monster beyond control and a police chief with more political power than the mayor.

Right at the start of Daryl Gates’ term, Mayor Tom Bradley did have a chance to assert control. Gates’ men fired a dozen bullets at Eulia Love, the Rodney King of her time, cut down for waving a two-inch paring knife. But the mayor wanted to be governor, so when Assemblywoman Maxine Waters and every black minister in town called for Gates’ dismissal, Bradley was mute, afraid to alienate white voters.

In the end, people won’t put up with exemplary terror, even in the name of a “drug war”. The Irish Catholics in Ulster rose in 1969. Four years earlier the people of Watts--whom Parker called “monkeys in a zoo”--had rebelled. Then, as now, there was a rising curve of exemplary terror. In the six months before the 1965 rebellion began, there were 168 shootings by L.A. police. Between 1963 and 1965, white employment in the city was rising, while for minorities the trend was the other way.

A police force institutionally dedicated to the practice of exemplary terror is not reformed with the ouster of a police chief, any more than racism in a police department is cured by hiring black or Latino officers.

Gates undoubtedly should go, but the problem is far greater, beyond the powers of any single reformer installed in Gates’ stead. All eyes are now directed at the L.A. police, but the rot in County Sheriff Sherman Block’s bailiwick is just as bad, even though Block can use sociological lingo far removed from Gates’ oafish bluster.

It was Block’s men who, in June, 1989, were confronted by Betty Jean Aborn, a homeless black woman in Lancaster waving a carving knife, and fired 28 rounds at her, of which 18 found their mark.

Years of frustration and fury are now finding their expression in tumultuous meetings and hearings as Gates is pressed toward the exit. It reminds me of the angry, excited tumult in Ulster in 1969. In that instance the Specials were disbanded. But the underlying system of economic exploitation and injustice was never threatened, and instead of the Specials came other security forces. The unaccountability and the violence grew again.

True reform here, as anywhere, will come only when there is true accountability, and that means review boards with teeth, community control and beyond that, a program for economic justice. Without a social program there will, in the end, be the same old violence program to keep the poor in their place.