With Mayor Abroad, Gates Furor Quiets : King beating: Some black leaders question timing of Bradley’s trip to the Far East. Police chief defends events aimed at raising his popularity.

The clamor for the resignation of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates after the Rodney G. King beating has subsided over the last two weeks as Mayor Tom Bradley traveled abroad and Gates made a series of well-timed public appearances in Los Angeles.

Several prominent black community and civil rights leaders, who with Bradley have called for the chief’s ouster, criticized the mayor for arranging a delicate truce with Gates, then leaving for 16 days on a trade mission to the Orient. The mayor is scheduled to return to Los Angeles today.

“I think the truce was shallow and empty and meaningless,” said Los Angeles Urban League President John Mack. “It sends a message that people should be nice and quiet and return to a business as usual agenda.”

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she found it difficult to understand why Bradley left town. “The appearance of his leaving, I think, was very, very bad and unwise for a community in as much turmoil as this,” she said.

Bradley spokeswoman Vallee Bunting said that the mayor intended to use the trip to “cool the rhetoric. What this trip has done has provided a quieter time and has given people a chance to reassess the (King) predicament.”

City Council President John Ferraro, who negotiated the truce between the mayor and chief, said the trip has helped reduce “bickering” between the Police Department and the mayor’s office. “It’s pretty hard to throw rocks from great distances,” he said.

During Bradley’s absence, Gates has attended events aimed at raising his popularity, including an April 14 rally of police boosters on the steps of City Hall and an unusual “news conference-prayer briefing” five days later with a small group of black ministers and community activists at a Compton church.

Gates, an avid jogger, is expected to join a throng of backers today in a three-mile “Thumbs Up” run in his honor at the Police Academy.

“It’s very gratifying to me,” Gates said in an interview, referring to the outpouring of support. “I feel very good about it.”

The warm reception, the chief said, is a response to a behind-the-scenes political campaign by the mayor’s office to get him fired. “I think (people) suddenly said: ‘Hey wait a minute. There is a great deal of unfairness here. There is an orchestration by some political leaders to get rid of the chief and we don’t like it.’ ”

Bradley has denied that anyone in his office plotted to oust Gates over the March 3 beating of King, a 25-year-old black Altadena man. On April 2, the mayor demanded that Gates resign for the good of the city while accusing the chief of embarking “upon a public relations campaign that has only deepened our wounds and widened our differences.”

Today, black leaders say they are disturbed that Gates, despite his truce with the mayor, has pressed on with public appearances that they contend have polarized the community along racial lines.

“The chief seems to still be up to his same old business of running around whenever he can, generating crowds that support him, including a handful of people in the African-American community, which is a gross misrepresentation of reality,” Mack said.

Moreover, a Bradley official said last week that the mayor’s office is concerned that Gates may have used police personnel and facilities, including the Police Academy, to stage events.

The chief said that neither he nor his officers have played any role in organizing a public relations campaign. Gates said that his office has put people in contact with each other when they have called to express support for him and the department.

Gates recently met with Al Tortorella of Burson-Marsteller, the world’s largest public relations firm. The New York-based company specializes in crisis management and is best known for controlling the Tylenol poisoning scare in 1982.

Tortorella confirmed last week that he met with Gates “as a private citizen,” but would not elaborate. He said the company has not been retained by the chief.

The chief’s office also contacted Eric Rose, a political consultant who provided advice to a grass-roots group called Citizens in Support of the Chief of Police. CISCOP’s latest show of support is today’s scheduled run with Gates.

Such events, Gates said, are organized “to rebuild the morale in the department. I’ve never seen an incident devastate a group of people like this incident has.”

Gates said he attends functions by invitation only and as part of his job as chief of police. His appearance alongside black ministers at God’s Temple of Deliverance Church in Compton was squeezed into his schedule at the last minute, he said.

Noting that a massive anti-Gates rally is planned for the third weekend of May, Rev. E.V. Hill said the chief is entitled to appear before friendly crowds. “I can’t fault Gates for trying to show he has support,” said Hill, a Baptist minister. “We have made it a political matter.”

In a Times interview last week, Gates suggested that Bradley violated the spirit of their “so-called truce” when the mayor reiterated calls for the chief to resign during the Asian tour.

“I was very disappointed,” Gates said. “I have no problem at all raising the rhetoric. I think everyone knows I’m pretty good at it. In fact, I’m a little better than the mayor is. But I’m holding it down because I think it is in the best interests of the city.”

The mayor, Bradley spokeswoman Bunting said, has merely stood by his previous comments regarding Gates and has not “increased the rhetoric.”

“He has been asked on every stop about the Rodney King incident,” Bunting said. “What he is doing in foreign countries is not spreading some kind of disinformation campaign. He is responding to questions in the same manner that he has responded to them here.”

Before leaving Los Angeles, the mayor said the long-planned trip to Asia was necessary because negative publicity from the King beating had hurt the city’s image as well as its tourism industry. The mayor has sought to reassure Asians that Los Angeles is a safe destination for tourists, saying that drive-by shootings and gang activity occur “in a limited area of the city” and do not threaten visitors.

But statistics compiled by the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau suggest that the King episode is having little impact on tourism. During the first month after the incident, the bureau booked more than 114,000 hotel room reservations for future conventions. That figure represents a healthy booking rate, surpassing the 80,000 reservations booked during all of 1990.

“The King incident hasn’t hurt the convention market,” said Michael Collins, vice president of public affairs for the visitors bureau. However, he noted that discretionary tourist dollars may be influenced by the negative publicity.

The visitors bureau, along with the city’s department of airports and ports, paid about $400,000 for the Asian trip, which included up to 20 other city officials. The mayor was accompanied by City Councilman Michael Woo, the only other city official to demand Gates’ resignation, and City Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, a Gates supporter.

While some community leaders were critical of the mayor’s trip, others had no qualms.

Mark Ridley-Thomas, a candidate for the 8th Council District who has been endorsed by the mayor, said the falloff of anti-Gates protests is because of a “natural lull” in the aftermath of the King incident rather than Bradley’s absence.

Rev. Cecil L. Murray, pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles, said the mayor’s absence has not seriously jeopardized the community’s case against Gates. He noted that a citizens’ effort to recall the chief and an independent investigation of the Police Department are continuing.

“Tom Bradley per se can do only so much and we do him an injustice when we ask him to walk (on) water,” Murray said. “He was ostensibly (traveling) to heal a breech that has taken place in our trade with the Far East because of the Daryl Gates affair. So, he did more for the economy abroad than he might have done for the local dispute at home.”