LAPD Sins Are Old Hat to KABC : Television: Channel 7’s aggressive police coverage in 1977 presaged findings of the Christopher Commission. It won the station acclaim--and enmity.

Daryl F. Gates speaking:

“One of the things I’m concerned about is, if we’re going to be harassed and be the butt of attacks, our men could take the attitude of just putting in their shifts and not seeking out crime.”

That was Gates, not in 1991 but in 1977.

Not when he was chief of the Los Angeles Police Department but when he was still assistant chief.

Reacting not to the recent Christopher Commission Report but to aggressive, critical LAPD coverage by KABC-TV Channel 7, much of which now appears to have been corroborated these many years later by the blue-ribbon commission charged with investigating the Police Department.

There’s more than a whiff of deja vu in the air.

“It’s a profound and exacting echo of what we did 14 years ago,” said Wayne Satz, who was the Channel 7 investigative reporter whose stories on the LAPD helped earn Channel 7 a 1978 Peabody Award and the enmity of much of the police community, including Gates and his boss, then-chief Edward M. Davis.

It’s somewhat ironic that the same Davis who then stonewalled critics and accused Channel 7 of aiming to “tear down the reputation of the Police Department” with “yellow electronic journalism,” himself slammed Gates recently for not immediately saying he would step down in response to the Christopher Commission’s severe criticisms.

Channel 7 was not the first Los Angeles station to air reports of allegedly abusive police behavior. In 1966, a year after the Watts riots, KNXT (now KCBS) Channel 2 aired a 90-minute documentary on life in South-Central Los Angeles titled “Black on Black.” The program’s hottest item was a section in which blacks described being “constantly harassed” by police, recalls Joe Saltzman, who conceived and produced the documentary.

“This was the first time to my knowledge that blacks were heard on television saying what they thought about the Police Department,” says Saltzman, now a broadcast journalism professor at USC. “The Police Department went berserk, pulled my press credentials for six months and threatened a law suit.’

Responding to pressure, the station ran several shows lauding the LAPD, Saltzman says, and when “Black on Black” was initially rerun, KNXT added a softening disclaimer saying nice things about the police.

It was the latter brand of gentility that was largely to characterize the Los Angeles media’s coverage of the police for the next decade until Satz began probing on assignment from then-Channel 7 news director Dennis Swanson, who had become suspicious about three LAPD shootings of unarmed citizens.

After the LAPD ignored the station’s request for a list of persons shot in 1975-76 and the officers involved, Satz aired a series of reports noting that the LAPD, in effect, investigated itself in shootings, and he included interviews with persons contradicting police accounts of some shootings.

The most dramatic component of Channel 7’s almost nightly LAPD investigations was Satz’s interview with a policeman who wore a mask and a scuba diver’s hood to protect his identity while charging that most of the officers he worked with were racist and “extremely eager to be in a shooting. . . .”

The whistle-blower later came forward to reveal himself. He was John Mitchell.

“Maybe this (the commission report) validates what I was saying,” says Mitchell, now a math teacher at Carson High School. He resigned as an officer in 1978 before disclosing his identity. “I really don’t follow what is happening to LAPD anymore,” he says.

Davis angrily dubbed Mitchell “the lying masked marvel.” And he called Satz and KABC “dishonest.”

“We were kicking ass for two years and raising all the issues of accountability that are being raised today,” recalls Satz, “including an arrogant police chief (Gates succeeded Davis in 1978) who responds to no one.”

Although an LAPD suit against the station and its top executives and Satz was thrown out, the messenger continued to be blamed for the message.

“We were taking enormous abuse from citizens, from conservative Republicans along with the lovely Bruce Herschensohn--who did a commentary (on Channel 7) lauding Chief Gates--and from police,” Satz says.

“At the Police Academy range where cops practiced shootings, the bad-guy target was labeled Satz, and an image of my face was put on the bad-guy burglar that needed to be shot. Bumper stickers saying ‘Satz Sucks’ were put on squad cars. I was getting calls telling me I was undermining law enforcement and telling me to back off if I wanted to stay alive. We changed my parking arrangement at the station so I could park by the guard shack.”

In addition, Satz remembers, Gates taped video messages to his department calling the newsman an “enemy” of the LAPD and urging officers to stop watching Channel 7.

With the exception of one cataclysmic blunder by then-Channel 7 reporter Larry Carroll--who erroneously implied on the air one evening that LAPD officers had finished off a wounded black suspect during the ambulance ride from a shootout scene--the station’s police coverage was judged by many to be first-class muckraking. Also, it was arguably the finest hour in the history of an “Eyewitness News” operation that was, and still is, best known for self-promoting pop journalism.

These days it’s also getting a reputation for amnesia.

“I was amazed,” says John Severino, who was Channel 7’s station manager throughout this period, “that none of the television stations, in particular Channel 7, ever went back and resurrected that information (about Channel 7’s police coverage).”

Stations are loath to say anything nice about a competitor. “And the L.A. Times won’t mention it because, God forbid, it should be said that a TV station broke ground,” Satz complained. What of Channel 7, which seems to have never met a self-promotion it didn’t like? Satz: “They exploit stuff that’s not genuine, and here’s a chance to toot their horn and it’s legitimate.”

The station is uncharacteristically silent this time, however. That’s because in tooting its own horn, it would also be lauding Satz, whose acrimonious split from Channel 7 four years ago was ultimately followed by a settlement of a suit he had filed against his former employer.

Channel 7 doesn’t forget old foes, much like the LAPD it clashed with 14 years ago.