Police Discrimination Is Charged at Hearing : Beating: Testimony at Christopher Commission session alleges brutality and racial and sexual bias.

The commission formed to evaluate the Los Angeles Police Department in the wake of the Rodney G. King police beating heard four hours of public testimony Wednesday that largely portrayed the LAPD as a white, male bastion whose practices and policies too often encourage discrimination, officer misconduct and resistance to outside scrutiny.

Much of the testimony from nearly a dozen invited organizations was strikingly similar to that heard 26 years ago by a panel investigating the Watts riots, as one speaker noted, but the changed ethnic makeup of Los Angeles was clearly reflected at the first public session of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department.

African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, immigrant rights advocates and gays took their turns one by one at the microphone and told the 10-member blue-ribbon panel that the city had changed, but the 8,300-member Police Department had not.

“The LAPD (as it is) simply cannot forge community links,” said Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific Legal Center.

One speaker, representing a group formed after the King beating to support Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, suggested that the department is fine as it is. All the other speakers called for changes--some of them radical--in the way the department and its overseer, the Police Commission, are operated.

Wednesday’s hearing was the first public forum of the panel, informally known as the Christopher Commission. Three other public sessions are scheduled in the coming weeks in the Mid-City area, East Los Angeles and Pacoima, near the site where King was beaten.

In his opening statement, commission Chairman Warren Christopher promised a “thorough and comprehensive” review of the department. He promised that the commission’s work would be “objective, independent and nonpartisan.”

He said that while the panel will examine the use of excessive force by LAPD officers, it “will not focus on a single issue or individual but on the entire length and breadth of the problem.”

Speaking with reporters after the session, Christopher would not divulge any opinion he might have formed from the morning’s testimony.

He did, however, respond to criticism from some speakers about the composition of the panel--which has only one woman--and complaints from African-Americans that the commission is too closely linked to the city’s political establishment.

“We will be very sensitive to the issue,” of how police interact with women, he said, adding that there are “six or seven” women lawyers on the commission’s 40-member staff.

He said he would not, however, honor a request by a representative of the Feminist Majority that the commission’s size be expanded to include more women.

On the questions raised by African-Americans, he said: “It’s up to the commission to demonstrate that we’ll take into consideration all these issues.”

During the session, Christopher and other commissioners gathered documents from some of the speakers after they were sworn in by former state Supreme Court Justice John A. Arguelles, the panel’s vice-chairman. They scribbled notes as speakers addressed them for 20 minutes at a time.

The president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents rank-and-file LAPD officers, said the department is inefficiently operated, needs to improve its relations with citizens and find alternatives to the use of batons and stun guns in subduing uncooperative suspects.

Lt. George Aliano said it is virtually impossible for an officer to be promoted from a patrol assignment. As a result, most officers seek more glamorous assignments in investigation or staff assignments through lateral transfers, and the least qualified officers are left on the streets.

He also said the department is severely understaffed.

“We’ve been living a lie that we can actually protect the public,” Aliano said. “I think we have to face up to the fact we are stretched too thin and that has shown up in certain areas.”

Geoffrey Taylor Gibbs, a board member of the 900-member Langston Bar Assn., which represents black lawyers, recommended that the governor name a special prosecutor to replace the district attorney’s office as investigator of police shootings. He contended that local prosecutors have been lenient to the 21 officers at the scene of the March 3 King beating and that they have been for years in other cases.

“Sufficient evidence exists to seek indictments” against the 17 officers who watched the beating, Gibbs said. “Why have no such indictments been sought?”

Some of the 11 invited speakers peppered their presentations with stories of alleged police brutality or other misconduct. Most described what they said are systemic ills within the LAPD, such as a pattern of refusing to take complaints and crime reports seriously, ineffective disciplinary procedures and racial and sex discrimination in hiring and promotions.

They also contended that Gates and his administrative staff provide weak and ineffective leadership, and instead promote a paramilitary-style of policing that has a hostile and racist tone.

Vibiana Andrade, regional counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, related a case in which she said officers refused to investigate a call about undocumented immigrants, one of whom had been raped and another killed while being held hostage.

The officer who took the call, Andrade said, told the caller it was an “immigration matter” even after consulting a supervisor. The case was looked into, she said, only after MALDEF lawyers intervened.

She contended that the LAPD has too many officers who hold “contempt and lack of respect” for Latinos.

Danny Bakewell, executive director of the Brotherhood Crusade, said African-Americans agreed that many officers harbor racial prejudices that affect the way they treat citizens. He said African-Americans “daily” bear the brunt of racist behavior by officers.

“Brutal actions against African-Americans by a certain element within the Los Angeles Police Department, if not openly condoned as necessary maintenance of the status quo, is given approval by a lack of appropriate disciplinary action,” he said.

Some of the testimony highlighted problems rarely spoken of outside the affected communities.

Kwoh, of the Asian Pacific Legal Center, said that while Asians and Pacific Islanders are sometimes victims of police brutality and sometimes “fear police more than they do the criminals,” they are more likely to suffer from being “left out of the system of police protection” because of severe language barriers.

Because they cannot and sometimes will not seek help from the police, he said, they are even more victimized by criminals.

He cited alleged incidents of Asians seeking jobs or promotions in the LAPD being referred to with racial slurs and being ridiculed because of their accents.

Kwoh recommended that officers be given incentives for learning Asian and Pacific island languages and that a court order requiring the LAPD to increase the number of women, blacks and Latinos on the force be expanded to include Asians and Pacific Islanders.

Bill Lee, a regional counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the group that represented some black officers who fought to be included in the court order, said in his testimony that while 61% of LAPD members overall are white, two-thirds of detectives are white. Among sergeants, he said, 79% are white; among lieutenants, 83%; captains, 86%, and commanders, 84%.

“To the community, this looks like a force of occupation,” said Lee.

A representative of a gay and lesbian organization also complained that the LAPD does not represent the community it serves and cited officer misconduct directed at gay people.

“There is not a single member of the Los Angeles Police Department who is openly gay,” said Roger Coggan, director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center.

Lewis Custrini of the Merchants and Manufacturers Assn., an employers organization that has been in existence nearly a century, offered what he described as constructive criticism.

Custrini called for “sharper lines of accountability at the top” of the LAPD, a better selection process for officers, improved training and what he called a “Geneva Conference-type” policy for the treatment of police suspects.

The commission heard from one outspoken defender of Gates, who said the LAPD is being “tarred with the same brush” as the four officers who have been indicted in the King beating.

“Today, officers--who day in and day out--protect the public safety, are being treated as were soldiers returning from Vietnam,” said Eric Rose, a spokesman for Citizens in Support of the Chief of Police. “They are being spat upon, called ‘gang members’ and ‘killers’ and treated like social outcasts.”