VENTURA : Chief Gates Urges Stricter Controls on Paroled Prisoners

Speaking Friday in Ventura, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates proposed tighter controls on paroled convicts, saying crime has made the United States “a nation that is the most oppressed in the world.”

Gates also called for construction of a prison in Los Angeles, during his address before about 200 people at the Ventura County Kiwanis Club’s annual Law Day luncheon.

The embattled chief made only one brief mention of the widely publicized beating of motorist Rodney G. King by Los Angeles police officers.

“It is unfortunate that the Los Angeles Police Department contributed to a national kind of downturn in people’s opinion of law enforcement,” Gates said, without mentioning King’s name.

But public opinion of the police has improved in recent weeks because “people recognized how we depend on law enforcement too much,” he said.

Gates then criticized Mayor Tom Bradley and the Los Angeles City Council for not supporting expansion of the County Jail or construction of a prison in Los Angeles, which he said would allow the city to keep more criminals off the streets.

Criminals are “a finite group,” Gates said. “If it’s finite . . . then you can reach out and grab it and control it, if you will. And I think that is what we do not do.”

“You don’t want it the way it is in Los Angeles,” Gates told the group, which included dozens of Ventura County lawyers and police officers. “I had 1,000 body bags in the city of Los Angeles last year . . . most of whom did not deserve to die.”

Gates said convicts should be controlled differently inside prison and outside.

He proposed that released prisoners be required to carry passes and that judges be empowered to revoke probation immediately if police or residents complained that the probationers violated conditions of their release.

In a reference to prisoners, he said: “I’d change the way we house people. I’d put them in Quonset huts out there, and barbed wire around them and land mines around that.”