Police on Beat--Tense Job Gets Tenser : Law enforcement: Officers encounter cool looks and even video cameras. But some residents flash thumbs-up signs.

On Friday the LAPD troops saw their chief’s “I’m coming back” message, every squad room showing the videotape of Daryl F. Gates urging them to rise above the furor over the beating of Rodney G. King.

“Go out and do your job,” Gates said.

But, over the weekend, it was hardly business-as-usual in police-citizen interactions throughout Los Angeles. Cops turned each corner not knowing whether they’d be greeted by another video camera monitoring their actions or by a thumbs-up show of support.

At the North Hollywood Division, the 7:30 a.m. Saturday roll call starts with the usual briefing on the previous night’s activities: an officer-involved shooting, two robberies at burger joints and a drive-by involving the local gang, the Vineland Boys.

But there’s also a training session in handling “hot pursuits.” The best practice, a sergeant says, is to have two squad cars chasing the suspect and another carrying a supervisor, whose job is “to make sure it’s not causing a danger to the public.”

There’s no need to mention that the King incident followed a high-speed chase in the Foothill Division, which borders them to the north.

“Officers are totally preoccupied with it,” says North Hollywood’s commander, Capt. Bruce Mitchell.

Downtown, meanwhile, protesters gather for a march to Parker Center police headquarters for speeches by Jesse Jackson and others.

Steve Lomas, a 37-year-old black man from Hollywood, shakes a bag at helmeted officers watching on horseback. He says it contains his dreadlocks and a corduroy jacket that police tore from him when he was stopped as a bank robbery suspect several years ago.

“The police have a mentality that all blacks must have a (jail) number,” he says.

Although the chant of the marchers (“Hey, hey, ho ho, Daryl Gates has got to go”) grows louder as they near cops, the officers look on impassively or offer only slight smiles in return.

In North Hollywood, Capt. Mitchell attends a memorial mass for Tina Kerbrat, his rookie officer and mother of two who was shot dead in February. While driving back to the station with Sgt. John Stilo, the radio broadcasts a Fire Department call for help in dealing with a white male, 380 pounds, reported banging his head against a wall, possibly under the influence of PCP.

When they arrive, paramedics are already at the scene--as is a neighbor, videotaping them.

Stilo waves to the camera.

“We feel a little picked on,” Mitchell comments later. “Everybody’s treating us like an occupying army.”

Even his own mother asked him, after seeing the infamous videotape of King being beaten: “Your officers really don’t do that, do they?”

Back at the station, two boys are getting bicycle licenses. A few feet away, a man takes one of the red, white and blue bumper stickers stacked on the front counter. “We Support Chief Gates,” they say.

At afternoon roll call, Sgt. Chris Vasquez ribs the captain about buying two car mops from an officer. “You see it on Amazing Discoveries?” Vasquez asks, referring to a television show that sells gadgets.

But the usual squad room banter ends when the sergeant reads a “support and gratitude” letter from a local couple. It speaks of “the many officers who are out risking injury and death” and concludes, “May God bless.”

“A lot of people out there still like us, folks,” Vasquez says as he sends two dozen officers out for the evening shift. “Don’t forget that.”

In Watts two hours later, just as it begins to grow dark, Noah Carranza, dressed in a dashiki and a necklace of shell beads, is carrying in merchandise from the front lawn of his small Avalon Boulevard business.

The 74-year-old “junkologist,” who sells used furniture, refrigerators and other second-hand wares, says he has noticed fewer police cars on patrol lately. “You used to see them parked up and down the street, and now you don’t see them,” he says.

Like many others, he thinks the cops are being more cautious.

An hour later, a white patrol officer passes two black women and a small boy. The officer raises his hand in a wave. The women and child wave back.

In Hollywood, in the midst of a gridlock of cruisers at Highland and Sunset, three young black men say they’re certain cops are less aggressive than usual.

“Usually when they see one or two black guys in a car they harass you,” says Howard Heath, 22, standing in front of his blue 1989 Mustang convertible with white leather seats.

Police normally would stare “like we don’t belong in the car, like we should be drug dealers and all,” he says. But he’s a mail carrier, he says, and enjoying the breathing room.

“We had the top down and everything,” he notes. “Matter of fact, we didn’t have our seat belts on.”

In North Hollywood, Sgt. Stilo, 42, is on evening patrol. He pulls up to a one-story apartment complex where a 911 call was dialed but no one spoke. It might be a domestic dispute, where a woman started to call, then was stopped.

Two officers walk ahead of him along the small units, all occupied by Latino families. Finally, a woman in one of them says it was a false alarm, that “the baby dialed the phone and knocked it off the hook.”

When a little girl cries at the sight of the uniformed officers, Stilo comforts her, then leads her to her mother up the alley.

“She was crying. We just want to make sure everything’s OK,” he tells the relieved woman.

“You scared me,” she says. “I thought. . . .”

Moments later they leave, after a call that provided a dose of good will.

Half an hour later, however, Stilo is greeted with cool formality at a two-story gray apartment building, where someone reported seeing a man wanted for arson.

“No problems, officers,” says a man tending a barbecue, two families around him. “We didn’t hurt nobody, sir. “All we do is drink, have a little beer, have a party.”

“Just tell them you invited us,” Stilo says.

“Are you kidding? Everybody would run.”

While other officers try to find the person who phoned police, the sergeant turns to a second man wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, with tattooes down his arm and a face that looks like it’s been in a few scuffles. Stilo asks whether he’s ever been in prison.

“All over the county system, sir. Isn’t one I haven’t been in,” he says. A heroin problem, he explains, but he’s clean now.

The police computer, however, reports an outstanding arrest warrant. Moments later he’s in handcuffs.

“This is my daughter’s birthday,” he says, shaking his head as he’s led off.

While Stilo heads back to the station, his radio reports that the West Los Angeles Division has reserved one of the tactical frequencies so it can communicate without interruption.

“I wonder if they’re having a protest,” he muses. In fact, it’s not that type of emergency--but it’s the type of thought that goes through a cop’s head these days.

As he speaks, he passes a pudgy, gray-bearded man in a jogging suit who has a gesture for the police car--a thumbs up.

So it continues on Sunday: On the beach at Venice, a homeless man named Charles White, 33, sits on the grass and comments on how the cops have “kind of mellowed out.”

“They used to harass us a whole lot,” he said. Not this day, not now.

Across the city, the commander of the troubled Foothill Division speaks at the Tujunga United Methodist Church.

Capt. Tim McBride doesn’t try to defend the officers who beat King. The videotape of the incident revolted him, he says, adding, “I’m sure we’ll change some tactics.”

But “political hay-making” over the incident is taking a toll on the cop on the beat, he says. “It’s difficult to stay focused with all this other stuff going on.”

For now, the Foothill commander said, “We need some healing time.”

Times staff writer Ken Garcia contributed to this story.