Police Answer to Public Amid Furor Over Beating

The team of officers was explaining Los Angeles police procedures to a meeting of about 80 residents in the Lake View Terrace Recreation Center on Wednesday evening when the discussion moved to the subject of probable cause.

“Why is a person made to lie on the ground when they are stopped?” asked Melanie Bernard, a teacher’s assistant from Lake View Terrace.

An officer on the panel explained that ordering a person to the ground had to be justified by probable cause. The answer clearly did not please Bernard.

“I have seen and heard of cases, especially black and Hispanic youths, just stopped for a traffic violation and being made to lie on the ground,” she said. “I just think it’s a form of harassment. It’s very degrading.”

The meeting, called a Police-Community Awareness Seminar, included Deputy Police Chief Mark Kroeker, chief of Valley operations, and Foothill Division Capt. John Mutz. It was the second of several planned as a result of the Rodney G. King incident, said Sgt. Dennis Zine.

Kroeker has decided, the sergeant said, “that the communication between the Police Department and the community needs enhancement, and questions have to be answered.”

The racially mixed audience came from block clubs, neighborhood watch groups and other community organizations. Some said they had been attending police-community meetings for years.

“In my 26 years of police service, I’ve never seen a time that has called more for the need for eyeball-to-eyeball interaction,” Kroeker told the group. “It’s more important than ever that we talk to you.”

The 10 officers on the panel talked about using 911, anti-gang units and programs for dealing with at-risk youngsters. The queries from the audience became sharper when the question of police discipline was raised.

“There are people who are stopped and roughed up all the time, like (former NBA player) Jamal Wilkes and (baseball Hall of Famer) Joe Morgan,” said Richard Lewis of Lake View Terrace. “Was that probable cause?”

Mutz attempted to meet the question head-on and acknowledged that there are “failures.”

Lewis pressed, wanting to know if “officers have a responsibility to stop another officer when they see him using excessive force.”

Answered Mutz: “What do you do to a supervisor who doesn’t act? You punish him.”

The captain then said he could not further discuss the March 3 beating of King in Lake View Terrace because the case is in the courts. He added that “the department has admitted its failure.”

“It’s easy to say it’s a failure of the department,” Lewis said after the meeting, “but why is the system failing?”

The seminar, Lewis said, is “just a PR campaign” in the wake of the King incident.

Bernard, also dissatisfied, said she felt she was just “getting rule-book answers about how the police are supposed to act.”

The discussion of discipline brought wide-eyed disbelief from William Thomas, an insurance salesman from Pacoima, who asked Mutz: “Are you telling us that if you stop me for anything, I can demand to talk to your supervisor?”

“Yes,” answered Mutz.

However skeptical some in the audience might have been, others said they had come with open minds to learn how the Police Department operates.

“I came out to find out if the quality of police service has gone down,” Phil Tabbi of Sun Valley said before the meeting. “We’re interested in what’s going on.”

Despite his skepticism, Thomas said the seminar enabled many people to get “stuff off their chests. There have been more beatings than just the one of Rodney King.”

Kroeker, transferred to the San Fernando Valley after the King beating, told the meeting that “a lot of goodwill in the city has been wiped out” by the incident, which has resulted in four officers being charged with assault. The community seminars, he said, are “good things arising from something very destructive.”

The first session attracted only 40 people to the Foothill Division station March 26. As a result, Wednesday’s meeting was moved to the recreation center on Foothill Boulevard to reach people who might be reluctant to come to the station, Zine said.

“There is a lot of misunderstanding about what the police can and cannot do,” Officer Ken Roth said after the meeting. “We don’t have carte blanche. We have to go by the rules. A lot of the public doesn’t realize that. The forum tonight was positive because it informed the public about police procedures.”