COLUMN ONE : Black Cops Caught in the Middle : In the aftermath of the King beating, many must suffer taunts of fellow African-Americans. The LAPD officers struggle to sort through conflicting emotions.

There were complaints of loud music at a Crenshaw apartment. Officer Garland Hardeman, an eight-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and a black man, went to the apartment and told the tenants to turn it down. They did--but the volume went back up as soon as he was out of sight.

Hardeman returned, and the insults began.

“What are you going to do, beat me like Rodney King?” the woman yelled. “You black cops are just Uncle Toms. You’re no better than the white boys!”

That was in mid-March, two weeks after white Los Angeles police officers had been captured on videotape beating a black motorist--an episode that has proven to be an especially difficult passage for some of the Police Department’s 1,150 black officers.

Beyond the disappointment and anger felt by many of the department’s 8,300 officers over the incident, some black officers say they must now endure taunts from fellow African-Americans, as well as deal with their anguish over wearing the uniform of a department being accused of institutional racism. As the taped beating is run again and again, and kept alive by the ensuing political drama, African-Americans on the force have struggled to sort through sometimes conflicting reactions as police officers, as citizens, as black men and women.

There is no uniform response. Lengthy interviews with about 20 black officers yielded expressions of love for the department and anger over how the actions of a few have tarnished their badges. Some said they were torn, not wanting to believe that the beating was racially motivated, but saying that they can find no other explanation. A few talked of quitting.

Several said that it has never been easy being a black police officer in Los Angeles. Some described how they attempt to tread a thin line between the department they serve and the community they swore to protect. Some spoke of a continual battle to defend their occupation against widespread perceptions in the black community that officers are often brutal and the department permeated with racism.

Still others told stories of internal department racism, depicting the King incident as an inevitable byproduct of pervasive racist attitudes.

“I know that police officers have not been the best friends of the black community,” said one officer. “I knew that when I stepped over the line and held my hand up. I had no illusions that I was going to change things.

“But recently, with this latest caper, I am ashamed.”

Hardeman said taunts now follow him up and down the streets, muttered by the loiterers who do not want to move on, yelled out by gang members who dare the police to bother them.

“Yeah, come on in,” they tease from the doorway of a hangout. “I want to get my $66 million like Rodney King.”

“I can understand how people feel,” said Hardeman, 34, who also serves on the Inglewood City Council. “I just ask that they not see all cops in the same light because a lot of us feel for them.” As black officers, he said, “We’re exposed to the same kind of discriminatory treatment they are.”

It is on the street, in encounters with African-American civilians, that many black officers come face to face with the extra tensions.

Don Williams, a 10-year department veteran who as a detective trainee investigates drive-by shootings, recalled how a year ago he could go to a crime scene, look into a crowd and find witnesses who, with the slightest motion, would signal they knew something and talk to him later. He said such cooperation has become harder to come by in the days since King’s March 3 beating.

“They look at us like we’re the enemy now,” said Williams. “We have to make peace with them before they’ll talk to us.”

He often must confront the animosity before he can do his job. “There’s obviously something on your mind,” Williams will say to wary witnesses. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

It hurts him to now go to a witness’s home for an interview and see children run away from him, said Williams. Their parents often want to get answers before they give them.

“Before we can get down to what they saw, they want to know my feelings about the King incident,” said Williams. “They want to know: ‘Had you been there, would you have allowed that to happen?’ ”

One Tuesday afternoon, Williams spotted gang members playing music outside a park at 35th Place and Denker Avenue. He turned down the street and the young men scattered. Williams believed he saw one stash a gun in a car. He and his partner pulled over, jumped out of their car and drew their guns.

The six men were told to put their hands behind their heads and face the fence. Two black men, one on a bicycle, the other on foot, watched it all from across the street.

“Keep your hands behind your head,” Williams’ partner yelled at the young men.

The man across the street shook his head. “That’s what you go through being black,” he said.

“Keep your hands up,” Williams’ partner repeated. The two detectives began to search the men.

“They’re getting ridiculous now,” the bystander said, disgusted. “Look at that--a black policeman.”

No weapons were found and the men were allowed to go. One of the young men paused to show the detectives his arms, scarred from what he said was a police dog attack. The attack had occurred in another division, he said. But it did not matter.

“You’re all in the same gang,” one of the young man’s friends angrily told Williams.

Later, back in his car, Williams seemed exasperated.

“Every day,” he said, “I get dressed and go to work and I have to get ready for 8 hours and 45 minutes of hate.”

Sometimes, he asks himself, why does he work the streets so hard: “Why can’t I just drive by, like I didn’t see it?”

Williams said he misses the days when a wide-eyed child would ask him for baseball cards, or when a stranger would look at him with trust instead of anger. Still, the officer said, he has made a decision to stay on the force and work in south Los Angeles “because I feel I can keep a Rodney King (beating) from happening.”

Williams said he has seen officers who are insensitive toward African-Americans, who would just as soon lock up a troubled youth as try to talk to him and help turn his life around.

“I’ve developed trust here,” he said. “None of the people who know me fear me and if I was to leave, who would I be replaced with? Someone they don’t know, or trust.”

Officer Floyd A. Henry grew up in south Los Angeles and he too has chosen to stay and work there. He runs the Southwest Division’s Law Enforcement Explorer’s program, which teaches young people skills needed to become officers.

He has no desire, he said, to go back to patrolling the streets.

The King beating, Henry said, has further strained an already taut relationship between the department and the people of Los Angeles. He said he recently experienced some of the increased tensions firsthand at a diet center where a woman, discovering that he was a Los Angeles officer, began cursing at him..

“This lady called me every name in the book, some I hadn’t even heard of,” Henry said. “That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to work the streets because I don’t want to be labeled. . . . I don’t want to deal with the public.”

In addition to dealing with angry community members, some African-American officers said they also must contend with racism within the Police Department.

Officer Janine Bouey said it is a tiresome battle, fighting for the trust of her community as she fights against discrimination within her department.

She recalled how, as a new recruit at the Los Angeles Police Academy, she was taken aside by a Latino officer who offered some advice.

“Who do you think are the people most discriminated against in this department?” he asked Bouey, a fair-skinned black woman.

“Blacks?” she responded.

“Black females,” he replied. “It would help you to change your ethnicity.” She could pass for Polynesian maybe, he said, or American Indian.

Angered and insulted, Bouey ignored him. Since then, Bouey said she has found his description of the department to be all too accurate.

In her nearly five years with the force, Bouey said, she has witnessed several racist acts. She said she once discovered a Knights of the Ku Klux Klan business card on the windshield of her car parked in the officers’ secured lot. Bouey said she has heard racist comments uttered by a white training officer and broadcast over the police radio. She said she also has seen derogatory remarks flash across the computer screen of her patrol car--similar to ones exchanged by officers on the night of the King incident.

“Being black is a liability in society and being black is a liability in the LAPD,” said Bouey. “The King incident didn’t surprise me at all,”

African-Americans represent 13.8% of the 8,345 officers, and their experiences within the department have been varied. While some speak of being denied promotions because they are black and having witnessed racist misconduct that goes unpunished, others talk of an institution that is committed to promoting minorities and discouraging discrimination.

Former Assistant Police Chief Jesse Brewer, who retired earlier this year as the highest-ranking black officer in the history of the department, said he watched the force transform itself from one in which black and white officers were not permitted to ride in the same patrol cars to one where “anything that hinted at racism would be singled out, investigated and dealt with immediately.”

Brewer said he personally made sure, as head of personnel and training, that minorities and women received fair treatment in terms of promotions and assignments. Other African-American officers have said that merit, not color, is the department’s criteria for moving up the ladder.

“They give you a road map to success,” said Detective Kevin H. Williams, who said he has been promoted rapidly. “It wouldn’t make a difference if you were a Martian, you could be successful in the LAPD.”

There comes a time each day when officers are off duty. Some black officers who live or socialize in the neighborhoods they patrol said the King incident follows them home.

One recent Sunday, a black police officer sat in a church’s front row as a member of the congregation stood in the pulpit and derided the men and women in blue.

“Big Daddy Blue was finally caught beating a brother,” the man preached. “Is Big Daddy Blue out of control? A little child cries: ‘Big Daddy Blue is coming. Black man, run for your life.’ ”

After the videotape of King’s beating was first broadcast, some black officers said they had to defend the department to old friends, relatives, even spouses.

Bouey said even her children have not escaped fallout from the King incident. Her 10-year-old daughter was told by a schoolmate that Bouey was probably one of the officers involved in King’s beating. Bouey said acquaintances of her 17-year-old daughter now call Bouey “Sgt. Kickass.”

Even before King, Bouey said, several of her friends questioned how she could rise each morning and put on an LAPD uniform.

“In the beginning, they were embarrassed to be seen with me,” said Bouey. They told her, “ ‘I don’t want my friends to know I associate with a cop.’ It takes a while to be accepted, to be trusted.”

Some black officers said they can understand the distrust, the outrage, and offered their own experiences that produced the same emotions.

Hardeman recalled the 1967 riots in his hometown of Detroit, when he watched parts of his town go up in flames on the family’s television set.

“They’d interview people and it would be, ‘Pig this and pig that,’ ” he said of the riots. “And you’d see police officers chase people who’d been looting and beat them down to the ground. It was brutal.”

Still, the police officers he saw in his neighborhood and on his favorite television shows were his childhood heroes. At 11 years old, in the wake of the Detroit riots, Hardeman said he made a decision.

“My thing was, when I’m an officer, I’m going to be different.”

Williams, too, is not without empathy for those who distrust police.

“I know what it feels like to be a Rodney King,” said the tall, muscular plainclothesman.

Williams said that he was beaten by two white Long Beach police officers in 1984 after being stopped before dawn one morning. It was a random stop, Williams said, and he was never charged with any wrongdoing.

“You had a couple racist young officers who felt they were going to have some fun,” he said. When he told them he was an officer, they refused to believe it.

The Long Beach officers accused Williams of provoking the beating, but Williams said he was later exonerated during an internal investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department. He sued the city of Long Beach, but let the matter drop.

“I felt betrayed,” Williams said of the incident. “It’s like, no matter what you attain in life, the fact that you’re black is always going to make a difference.”