Area Chiefs Try to Minimize Fallout From King Beating

As the national controversy brewed over the beating of Rodney G. King at the hands of some Los Angeles police officers, Santa Monica Police Chief James F. Keane began getting messages of support from members of his own community.

Keep up the good work, some people told the chief. Don’t let the Los Angeles Police Department controversy get you down, said others.

Keane had all the messages, many of which arrived via the city’s innovative public computer network, printed up together, and made sure they were read aloud at roll calls and meetings so that every one of his department’s 161 sworn officers could hear them.

Fearing that the resulting cloud over the LAPD might spread west to his department, Keane said he wanted to make sure his officers knew that they were not viewed with scorn and suspicion by everyone in the community. “I’m sure the officers on the street get (angry) comments made at them,” Keane said this week. “So I think these messages were appreciated.”

As Los Angeles police try to weather the turbulence that has come with the King beating and the furor it has created, Keane and the police chiefs of the Westside’s other two independent police forces--in Beverly Hills and Culver City--said this week that they have felt the need to address the issue as well.

So far, four LAPD officers have been charged and entered not guilty pleas in the March 3 beating of King. As the investigations continue, the incident has exposed an undercurrent of tension between the LAPD and segments of the community it protects.

LAPD officers say their rules of engagement have informally changed since the videotape of King’s beating became national news. They say they have tried to be more cautious and even more courteous, perhaps, and that they have encountered more hostility than usual from the public.

In the relatively peaceful enclaves of Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Culver City, however, the police chiefs say that much of that tension is, and always has been, absent.

Each of the three police forces has fewer than 200 officers, compared to more than 8,300 on the Los Angeles force. Each department is therefore far easier to manage, with much more direct supervision of officers. The three cities are considerably more affluent and less vulnerable to violent crime than Los Angeles, and citizens are appreciative that serious crimes in many cases actually has decreased during the past few years, the chiefs said.

Keane, Beverly Hills Police Chief Marvin D. Iannone and Culver City Police Chief Ted Cooke said their departments have taken no special measures or issued any directives in the wake of the LAPD controversy.

Iannone and Cooke said they too have talked to their troops in an effort to keep morale up, and to remind them of the need to make sure the appropriate use of force never escalates into police brutality.

Keane brought up the LAPD controversy in meetings with his training officers because, he said, “I wanted to make sure that nothing even close to that happens in this department.”

“It’s certainly a black mark on law enforcement,” Keane said of the videotaped beating. “I was on the streets 20 years, and I never saw anything like that my entire career.”

Iannone and Cooke both served as high-ranking LAPD officers before taking over their departments, and both refused to comment on the King incident.

Because of the international allure of Beverly Hills, its 132 police officers are constantly in the spotlight, and have endured controversies in the past. The Zsa Zsa Gabor cop-slapping trial, for one, made headlines around the world, Iannone said.

And although he always stresses the “ever-present necessity for doing the job professionally,” Iannone said he and his lieutenants “have tried to drive that message home” doubly hard in recent weeks.

“We’ve talked about this, but we haven’t experienced anything profoundly negative,” Iannone said. “The citizens treat us very well, and we try to reciprocate.”

The Culver City Police Department is especially sensitive to its image in the community, Cooke said. His department has been sued for alleged brutality, and a federal judge late last year cleared the way for a constitutional challenge to a department policy that limits the ability of citizens to register complaints of police brutality or misconduct.

The lawsuit, which accuses Culver City police of violating a West Los Angeles man’s civil rights, is expected to get under way as early as next week.

Cooke said he has seen no need to tell his 117 officers to do anything different in the wake of the LAPD incident, except that they should expect some adverse and unwarranted media publicity and reactions from the public.

“Nothing has happened in the last few weeks that indicates any kind of a substantial problem in law enforcement or in this department,” Cooke said.

“But when anyone of us does anything wrong we have legions of people that say . . . it was all the police’s fault. It is popular to hate police officers.

“We have to deal with this. I tell (the officers) that they have to expect it, that they are not going to be appreciated.”