Report on King Beating May Alter Gates’ Legacy : Police: The Christopher panel is expected to release its findings Tuesday, putting him in the spotlight again.

This is a time of judgment for Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, the tan and self-assured native son who for 13 years has operated as the LAPD’s commander-in-chief, leading the Police Department into what he likens to an all-out war against crime.

Now 65 years old and making noises about retirement, Gates finds himself the centerpiece of a months-long municipal debate over the attack by four of his officers on a black motorist. In its broadest context, the Rodney G. King affair has forced Los Angeles to consider the sort of Police Department it needs and wants--a debate that inevitably has raised fundamental questions about Gates’ stewardship of the department.

On Tuesday, a special mayoral commission is expected to issue its findings from a broad investigation of Gates’ department. The chief has said he will step down if the Christopher Commission finds him at fault in the March 3 beating of King, although commission sources have said their conclusions will stop short of singling out Gates.

Whatever its findings, the Christopher Commission, named for its chairman, Warren Christopher, no doubt will provide a prominent, if not dominating, piece of Gates’ legacy. The current department cannot be separated from the man who has shaped it since 1978, introducing high-tech weaponry and militaristic tactics to the mission of policing a city.

In interviews over the past two weeks, both his supporters and detractors alike agreed that Gates’ legacy will be altered by the King beating. His allies lament that all of the chief’s innovations in officer training, department streamlining and employment of technology might now be overshadowed by the misconduct of four street cops. Gates detractors see in the King incident a crystallization of their long-held concerns about department excesses as it assumed the role of an occupying force in certain crime-riddled neighborhoods.

“Our department is considered to be one of the finest, if not the finest, anywhere and Daryl Gates is one of the outstanding chiefs,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, a staunch ally. “Unfortunately, (13) years of fine recognition have been marred by the Rodney King incident.”

Ramona Ripston, head of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, sees it another way. “I think a whole generation of black and Latino children have grown up under a police force that treats them as an enemy,” she said. “The Rodney King incident is going to be his legacy.”

Gates--currently working on a book about his life, which he has sold to Bantam Books for $300,000--declined to be interviewed for this article. In an interview in the August issue of Playboy magazine, however, the chief offered some interesting thoughts of his own on the Gates legacy.

“I’m paid to produce peace on the streets,” Gates said. “I’m very good at that. Then people often are upset with my aggressiveness. We’re aggressive because the rest of the system is not.”

In the same interview, Gates said his “proudest accomplishment is that I’ve gotten through 13 years (as chief) in the Los Angeles Police Department . . . through some of the most tumultuous times in our history.” But he also made clear that the persistent King controversy has tested his resolve not to retire until he has steered his 8,300-officer force through the crisis.

“I remember Gary Cooper (in ‘High Noon’),” Gates said, “after the big gunfight where he got no help whatsoever, and he took his badge and threw it down in the dirt. I’ve gone to sleep at night saying to myself, ‘I’m going to take that badge and just shove it.’ Thirteen years of working my fanny off for this department. A super department. After all these investigations, that’s exactly what they’re going to find out.”

Gates presides over a department whose staffing has grown by almost 20% in a decade. It boasts the nation’s premier SWAT team--his own invention--and he has dramatically cut police emergency response time despite an ever-increasing crime rate.

The department’s air fleet, including more than a dozen helicopters and planes, may be the largest air force in the country outside of the U.S. military. And police corruption, the bane of many big-city departments, has been almost unknown under Gates, who displays little tolerance for it.

Gates also has drawn near-universal praise for his DARE program, an anti-drug initiative he launched in 1983 in an attempt to keep grade-school children away from drugs. The program now places nearly 100 highly experienced officers in classrooms to deliver a stern anti-drug message while also helping the children build self-esteem. The curriculum has been adopted by hundreds of schools around the country.

The DARE program cuts against the grain of what has become the standard criticism of Gates--that in his zeal to wage war with criminals he has lost sight of the police role of community service.

Councilman Michael Woo, who has called for Gates’ resignation, said the department under Gates has become a “military-style organization with a certain detachment from the surrounding communities.”

Gates’ own pronouncements reflect that view. In his annual message to his force in February, just two weeks before the King incident, Gates said, “The war is not just in the Persian Gulf, the war is here in the streets of Los Angeles.”

Gates’ enthusiastic support of a controversial motorized battering ram to smash down the walls of suspected rock-cocaine houses has not lessened the perception of the LAPD as an occupying army. The device, a 14-foot steel ram mounted on a six-ton tank, has not been used since the mid-1980s. The California Supreme Court severely restricted its use, calling it “inherently dangerous.”

This warlike buildup comes at a time when some academicians and police officials have begun to question whether police hardware and efficiently dispatched troops are the total answer to rising crime rates. They are reassessing policies that focus on emergency response to the exclusion of community work--work that might prevent crime and foster better relationships between the public and the police.

In Los Angeles, a near-complete reliance on patrol cars isolates officers from the community during working hours, and, as in big cities across the country, many Los Angeles cops have moved to the suburbs in search of affordable housing and crime-free neighborhoods.

Herman Goldstein, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, has written an influential book called “Problem-Oriented Policing” in which he argues that police agencies should alter their structure by seeking solutions to community problems. Los Angeles has made several attempts at community-oriented policing, Goldstein noted in his book, “but each has suffered because of the continuing pressure to respond first to calls for service.”

Former Chief Ed Davis, Gates’ predecessor, said the King beating might not have happened if the officers involved were more accountable to the community.

‘If those officers were personally sensitive to the members of that community,” Davis said, “they would be much less likely to do what they did. It was despicable, absolutely inexcusable.”

In arguments to the City Council, Gates has maintained that the department is too short-staffed to remove a significant number of officers from patrol cars and place them on foot patrols or other types of assignments that would put them in close contact with communities.

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who chairs the council’s Budget and Finance Committee, agrees.

“People want their police involved in their communities,” Yaroslavsky said. “But people also want quick response time. One of the biggest complaints this city has had . . . is that the police don’t respond quickly enough.”

Almost from the beginning, Gates’ tenure has been measured in periods of controversy. His career has been a series of battles with the City Council, the mayor, bureaucrats, civil rights advocates, political enemies and the press. He has spoken of “persecution” and more than once has weathered passionate calls for his resignation.

Early on, when his own troops bridled under what they considered harsh and arbitrary disciplinary measures, Gates depicted himself as the Douglas MacArthur of Los Angeles.

“He was just trying to win his war, too,” Gates lamented, “but they wouldn’t let him, either.”

Gates had been chief less than 10 months when two officers opened fire on Eulia Love, a 39-year-old black woman who was wielding a kitchen knife. She was killed by eight bullets as her children watched the tragic escalation of a dispute over an unpaid gas bill.

There was outrage in the black community, and there were charges that the department was a racist and brutal force. For months, Gates fended off demands that he step down. His critics today find irony in the fact that Gates’ tenure as chief will, most likely, be framed by the not dissimilar controversies over Eulia Love and Rodney King.

One of Gates’ most arduous public controversies stemmed from revelations about the department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division, an issue that put Gates on the defensive for several years. The division gathered information on a range of groups including the ACLU, the American Indian Movement and the Southern California Council for Soviet Jews. Ultimately, it was dismantled and police spying activities were restricted under the terms of the settlement of a lawsuit against the city and the department.

Throughout, Gates defended the unit as “absolutely essential” to the security of the city. Some critics say Gates’ posture on the intelligence unit set the tone for his handling of other controversies, including the King aftermath.

“Daryl Gates, in typical Gates fashion, denied there was anything wrong, defended the past practices and got his back up,” said Yaroslavsky, who was a founder of the Soviet Jewry organization investigated by PDID. “He’ll defend his department and its prior behavior to the hilt, and then he’ll be dragged kicking and screaming for the resolution of the problem.”

The same was true of Gates’ posture on the hiring of minorities and women, Yaroslavsky said. “If it had been up to him, he never would have done it.”

When Gates took over as chief, the Police Department was overwhelmingly Caucasian and male. Eight percent of the officers were black, 12% were Latino and 2% were female. At the time, Gates rejected suggestions that racism and sexism existed in the department and said no new measures were necessary to increase the numbers of women and minorities.

But a 1980 federal court consent decree forced Gates to begin actively recruiting women and minorities. Over the last decade, the number of women has risen to about 13%, still short of the 20% goal set by the court. Latinos now make up 21.7% of the force and blacks comprise 13.8%.

Councilman Richard Alatorre, who oversees the department as chairman of the Public Safety Committee, said Gates deserves credit for aggressively implementing the court order.

“Blacks, especially, have risen in the ranks,” Alatorre said. “Credit has to be given for that. But obviously, there’s still a lot that has to be done.”

Officials of the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing think the department is still lagging in the promotion of blacks and Latinos. In the last year, the agency has drawn up complaints alleging that the department discriminates against blacks and Latinos in hiring and promotion. Department officials deny the charge.

Born in Glendale, Gates grew up in poverty in Highland Park. He had an alcoholic father who worked sporadically as a plumber, and a strong, disciplined mother who worked in the garment district and raised her three sons as Mormons. Gates has said he sees no correlation between poverty and crime.

“I don’t remember anybody telling us that just because we wanted a glass of milk for breakfast and didn’t have it,” he told an interviewer, “that we should steal milk from the neighbor’s front porch.”

Gates did not set out to become a police officer, but after two years in the Navy and three years of college he joined the force to support his pregnant wife. They had three children--two daughters and a son. He is now married to his second wife, Sima. It is a sad irony of Gates’ personal life that his only son has battled drug addiction and is estranged from his father.

In the end, perhaps Gates’ most lasting legacy will be his collection of shoot-from-the-lip comments, inflammatory one-liners that have opened him to criticism of being racially insensitive and capable of sending dangerous messages to his officers.

He had been in office only a month when he told a Latino audience that some Latino officers were not promoted because they were “lazy.” Later, in discussing a chokehold technique he favored, Gates commented that perhaps the arteries and veins of some black people “do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.”

In these cases and others, Gates has found it necessary to spend weeks, if not months, explaining what he really meant or how he was misquoted, or at least misunderstood.

Most recently, he suggested in Washington that casual drug users ought to be shot and, in the Playboy interview, conceded that he created trouble for himself in the immediate aftermath of the King beating by insisting the incident was an “aberration.”

“I really believe everybody jumped on me because I said the incident was an ‘aberration,’ ” he said. “That was a bad word. I’ve been meaning to look it up in the dictionary to find out why it’s such a bad word. I still believe it’s an aberration.”