Latinos Tell Panel of Anger at Police Conduct

The citizens commission investigating the Los Angeles Police Department, whose public hearings have drawn sizable audiences from the black community, heard angry testimony and demands for reform Monday night from a large, predominantly Latino crowd.

About 300 people packed the auditorium of Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno. Speakers told the panel, known formally as the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, that police brutality has existed in Los Angeles’ Latino community for as far back as they can remember.

The police beating of Rodney G. King “resurrected longstanding wounds in the psyche of this community,” said Gloria Romero, a Cal State Los Angeles professor and member of the Hispanic Advisory Council to the Los Angeles Police Commission.

The hearing is the fourth public session by the commission since Mayor Tom Bradley formed it April 1 to perform a top-to-bottom review of the Police Department with a focus on excessive use of force. The panel is known informally as the Christopher Commission after its chairman, former Deputy U.S. Atty. Gen. Warren Christopher.

In a related development, the acting president of the Los Angeles Police Commission disclosed Monday that the Police Commission will look as far away as the East Coast for answers on how to improve the department’s system for handling citizen complaints.

Speaking before an audience of several dozen professional women in Santa Monica, Melanie Lomax said the Police Commission’s probe will include a review of police handling of citizen complaints in Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Houston and an unnamed city in Ohio.

“We are attempting to examine other jurisdictions in the middle of the country and in the East . . . so that we can get a good barometer on what other jurisdictions are doing in this area and how they handle complaints of police misconduct, because clearly our system is not fail-safe,” Lomax said. She declined to take questions from reporters after her remarks, made at a debate hosted by Women In Business, a professional group.

Also featured was Peggy Estrada, president of Citizens in Support of the Chief of Police, who argued that the officers who constitute the LAPD deserve public support.

At the El Sereno meeting, representatives of 10 community organizations and businesses addressed the Christopher Commission in five-minute statements. They included Jose Lozano, publisher of La Opinion, the Spanish-language daily newspaper; Al Belmontez, director of the Mexican American Political Assn., and Dora Alicia Alarcon, president of the Street Vendors Assn.

Many in the audience wore headsets to listen to the testimony being translated into Spanish. Some speakers were provided with interpreters at the podium.

Alarcon, an immigrant from El Salvador, recited incidents in which officers allegedly took away the goods of vendors, giving them no adequate explanation for their actions. “I never expected to come to this great country to get such racist and bad treatment from police officers,” she said.

Belmontez said Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles have been treated “like the enemy. The Police Department has acted like an army of occupation.”

The hearing was the second held in a predominantly Latino neighborhood. The commission’s last public hearing was held in Pacoima, a community described by a commission spokesman as 80% Latino. African-Americans made up the largest presence at that meeting, however.

Latinos make up the largest ethnic group in Los Angeles. Community activists and civil rights lawyers claim excessive force is most often used in the city against Latinos and blacks.

Rachel Santos, who described herself as a traditional resident of Boyle Heights, told the commission, “We have no one. You are our only vehicle. We have been truly brutalized.”

Santos claimed 11 police officers roughed her up when she challenged them when they tried to enter her front yard. She said she was later convicted of obstruction of justice.

The commission’s final scheduled public hearing is set for May 29 in Woodland Hills. The 10 commissioners and their staff will continue to privately take testimony from citizens, police officers, experts on law enforcement and others. A final report is expected by July 1.

Earlier Monday, the commission heard behind-doors testimony from Sgt. Fred Nichols, a trainer at the Los Angeles Police Academy and Prof. Lawrence Sherman of the University of Maryland’s Crime Control Institute.

On Friday it is to hear private testimony from Dallas Police Chief William Rathburn, who until earlier this year was an LAPD deputy chief, and from others whose names have not been made public.