Police Throughout U.S. Feel the Effects of Events in L.A. : Law enforcement: Excessive use of force and racist computer messages that have tarnished the LAPD’s image are sending a powerful warning to other cities.

The Christopher Commission Report, and ensuing developments involving Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, are already having a wide impact on law enforcement throughout the United States, according to many officials.

The impression of a revered institution like the LAPD being tarnished by excessive use of force and the department’s failure to monitor racist messages sent over patrol car computer terminals is sending a powerful warning to police chiefs and mayors throughout the nation.

“There is no police chief at this moment who has the automated message terminals in his cars who isn’t telling his deputies, ‘Maybe we should do an audit,’ ” said Patrick V. Murphy, former police commissioner of New York City.

Murphy, who is now a consultant on police problems for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, noted that in most cities the mayor has the power to hire or fire the police chief. So, he said, most mayors realize that a repeat of the control breakdowns in Los Angeles could have a dramatic adverse effect on their own political fortunes.

“We’re not going to let what happened (in Los Angeles) happen here,” said San Diego Police Chief Bob Burgreen, who has ordered that strict monitoring be implemented when computer terminals are installed in that city’s police cars later this year.

In New York, the chief of the 4,000-member Transit Police, William Bratton, had summaries of the Christopher report distributed to 75 deputies and sent them a memo stating: “See, this is what we’ve been telling you, to keep your people out of trouble by supervising them carefully.”

“The Los Angeles situation is such that there’s a lot to be learned from this report,” Bratton declared. “If your officers are going to be in harm’s way, you’ve got to equip them not only with weapons, but with philosophies and values based on our Constitution.”

He recalled that when he was on the Boston police force, communications were monitored and officers who were found to have sent hate messages received suspensions.

Bryce Nelson, press secretary to the Christopher Commission, said that among the departments requesting copies of the report were those in New York, Phoenix, Tucson and Philadelphia. The county prosecutor in Indianapolis also asked for one.

Philadelphia Commissioner Willie Williams was so anxious to receive the report that he ordered it sent Federal Express collect to his department.

“From the chiefs I’ve been talking to, no one is surprised at what the report had to say,” said Cassandra Johnson, executive director of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.

“Everyone had been predicting that if patterns were found of derogatory remarks, and behavior not held in check, there would be nothing for Chief Gates to say,” Johnson added. “The only way things like this happen in a department is if officers feel they will not be held accountable for it.

“Every police chief is now sitting around hoping that they don’t ever have to face a situation like this,” she said. “They want to take every step possible to make sure it doesn’t happen in their back yard.”

Hubert Williams, former police chief of Newark, N.J., and now president of the Washington-based Police Foundation, said that at a meeting he attended late in the week, both New York Police Commissioner Lee Brown and U.S. Justice Department officials had displayed a keen interest in the Christopher report.

“It is a very impressive document,” Williams said. “I don’t know of any community in the U.S. who has taken as hard a look at their department, unless it was New York in the Knapp Report in the early 1970s.

“That report had a great deal to do with changing that Police Department, and this report will lead to changes in many departments, because no one will want the embarrassment that has befallen the LAPD,” he said.

Two experts interviewed, however, said they felt that in some respects the Christopher report could have an adverse impact on the attitudes of officers.

Mark H. Moore, professor of criminal justice policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said he felt the report could encourage such stringent command controls that “police would feel so hemmed in and under close scrutiny that they’d be afraid to act at all.”

Moore, who has been moderating discussions on policing problems by a panel of police chiefs--including Gates--at Harvard three times a year, said he feared that police officers “could also see a kind of hypocrisy and betrayal” in the attitudes incorporated in the report.

“Many of the police have had the feeling that the public actually supports a certain kind of roughness in their conduct, and then, when the community says, ‘We don’t support that,’ the police feel both betrayed and sense hypocrisy in community attitudes toward them,” he explained.

Dewey Stokes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, an organization representing police officers around the country, said that while “there are some things in the Christopher report of value,” he is concerned that “the public is going to overreact.” After all, he remarked, only a small minority of Los Angeles officers were found in the report to be prone to brutality.

“I don’t believe that’s the basis for condemnation of a Police Department that has produced some very good programs that have been emulated across the country,” Stokes said.

As for the computer messages, Stokes said: “Some of those remarks were very unprofessional, but at the same time the majority were probably off the cuff, when the adrenaline was high, and should not be considered indicative of those officers’ attitudes.”

John Eck, associate director of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, said he thought that while a small number of police executives will read the report several times, “for the most part, most will hear about it by rumor and news accounts.”

“The secondary and tertiary interpretation will have the most impact,” he predicted. “It will show up in the academic literature as well, but it’s too early to say what that impact will be.

“In a way, the impact of the events in Los Angeles already happened before the report. The videotape (of the Rodney G. King police beating) did that.”

But, Eck added, the release of the vulgar and racist computer messages in the Christopher report means that “any department that doesn’t monitor its airwaves already will probably be under pressure to do it now.”