COLUMN LEFT : Blind Before, How Can They Lead Us Now? : The City Council backed Gates until the day the Christopher Commission report came out.

Throughout the Rodney King tumult, the majority of the members of the Los Angeles City Council supported Police Chief Daryl Gates. By their acts and deeds they gave the impression that the King affair was an aberration.

Councilman Richard Alatorre, in fact, attacked critics of the chief, saying that he was waiting for the evidence to come in. Now that the report of the Christopher Commission is out, Gates’ defenders--the Alatorres, the Joy Picuses, the Nate Holdens and the Richard Ferraros, along with the rest of the gaggle, are acting as if they were as pure as the driven snow--and that they didn’t know how bad it was.

Pure hypocrisy. The tensions between the police and minority communities are nothing new. Alatorre, one of my good friends, lived through the 1968 East Los Angeles walkouts and the 1970 Chicano Moratorium. Throughout the 1970s he was an advocate for prisoner rights and he condemned police abuse. Why the change? Why did he cavalierly dismiss Gates’ racist remarks about his own people?

You’d also think that Alatorre and his council buddies would have questioned why police malfeasance was costing taxpayers millions of dollars. When the city settled the Police Department Intelligence Division case for $1.8 million in the early 1980s, council members took a “boys-will-be-boys” attitude, leaving the department to the caprice of the chief.

Now it will be left to the City Council to implement the recommendations of the Christopher Commission. The question is whether council members are morally capable of leading, in light of their tendency to pander to well-heeled voters-- the people who prefer that those less fortunate stay out of sight and out of mind. Middle-class Angelenos, conditioned by the Reagan years to scorn the word liberal and the idea that society has a social responsibility to the poor, avoid hearing the facts lest they feel a moral duty to act.

The truth is that it is the police who make middle-class citizens feel safe from those who do not have the means to reside in gated communities. And it is middle-class voters who have long rejected a civilian police review board, which is at the heart of any meaningful reform of the Los Angeles Police Department.

It would be wrong, however, to single out the City Council. The district attorney’s office has also lacked the courage to prosecute officers involved in shootings. The D.A.’s method has been to raise a wet finger to see which way the political winds were blowing. In 202 Sheriff’s Department shootings from 1985 to 1990, including 56 officer-involved incidents in questionable circumstances, the D.A.’s office prosecuted not one of them. The criminal prosecution of LAPD officers accused of using excessive force is almost as rare.

If the Christopher Commission had been tasked with looking into the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, it would have found the same level of abuse of authority as it did by LAPD officers. The Sheriff’s Department patrols 42 cities plus unincorporated areas such as East Los Angeles, and runs the county jails. It is one of the largest police forces in the nation.

Rarely do county supervisors exercise any control over the Sheriff’s Department. Even liberal Supervisor Kenneth Hahn gives Sheriff Sherman Block carte blanche--despite the fact that 87% of the victims of deputy shootings from 1985 to 1990 were minorities.

Perhaps new Supervisor Gloria Molina will take the lead in pressing for Sheriff’s Department reforms. The department patrols a large portion of her district, and the record shows that Latinos suffer disproportionately from deputies’ racism and use of excessive force.

While Molina should be commended for showing extraordinary courage in defending the right of women to control their own bodies in the face of heavy Catholic lobbying, she did not show the same courage, when she was City Council member, in checking police abuse.

It is heartening that the 10-person Christopher Commission was dismayed by conditions in Los Angeles’ Third World, and that its report may result in long-needed change. What is more important is that City Council members, the district attorney and our county supervisors be held accountable. A first step would be to make them walk the streets of Los Angeles. Maybe they, too, will have their eyes opened and will work to right conditions that their cowardice has perpetuated.