Amnesty International Ends L.A. Visit in Probe of Brutality Allegations : * Human rights: International group was here to investigate the police and sheriff’s departments. They focused on systematic abuses and not on personalities or opinions.

It was last fall, before anyone knew the name Rodney G. King or the stories of police brutality became an everyday topic of discussion in Los Angeles, that a slight, soft-spoken human rights researcher in London first wondered if something terrible was happening here.

In an Amnesty International office crammed with legal documents and reference books, Angela Wright, the organization’s principal researcher on the United States, was reading newspaper stories about questionable shootings by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

In the slow, methodical manner that typifies Amnesty’s inquiries, Wright began to search out more about alleged lawlessness among law officers in Los Angeles.

After contacting attorneys and civil liberties groups here, she soon had lawsuits on about 50 alleged brutality cases involving sheriff’s deputies and others involving the Los Angeles Police Department. By the time King’s March 3 beating was captured for the world on videotape, Wright was already preparing a report on her findings about Los Angeles.

The next month, Wright submitted her report to Amnesty’s top officials. For the first time ever, they decided in May, a three-member team of inquiry would visit a U.S. city for a firsthand probe of alleged police brutality.

That one-week inquiry, which ended Saturday, was extraordinary in its scope and the public attention it generated for an organization perhaps best known for its quiet probes and detailed reports on political repression and torture in Third World dictatorships.

The Los Angeles investigation, which included about 20 meetings with politicians, police officials, prosecutors and civil rights groups, focused on the Police Department and the Sheriff’s Department and looked not only at specific allegations of brutality but at any evidence that excessive force is permitted, even unwittingly, by law enforcement.

“We are here to look at the question of police brutality,” the group’s spokeswoman, Anita Tiessen, told reporters on the first day of the group’s inquiry. “We are going to be looking at the questions of when is force used, under what criteria is the use of force justified, what are the rules?” she said.

Significantly, she added, the group would not base its report on what may or may not be acceptable in Los Angeles, but rather what international conventions, including the United Nations, deem appropriate. “I can’t emphasize enough that we are looking at international standards.”

That statement alone was enough to rile local police officials, including Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and Sheriff Sherman Block, who both rejected the notion that their departments should receive the same sort of inquiry Amnesty has conducted in far-flung--and violent--corners of the world.

“When they are talking about looking at some of the Third World countries, where an awful lot of atrocities have occurred, lumping us in with that, I think that’s outrageous,” Gates said after his one-hour meeting with the group on Monday.

Block, after his meeting with Amnesty’s investigators, said: “I feel it’s almost irrelevant when they say that they’re evaluating law enforcement in L.A. County based on established international standards . . . or by U.N. standards. That’s almost laughable when you look at what’s going on around the world.”

As they shuttled between meetings, the investigators said there was nothing light about their inquiry and no reason to dismiss claims of brutality here anymore than elsewhere.

“We don’t just do investigations for the sake of gathering information,” said Tiessen, 28, an Amnesty staffer and former Canadian journalist. “And at the end, what we want is for the human rights situation to improve, whether it is in Los Angeles or other parts of the world.”

While this was Tiessen’s first investigative mission for the organization, its other participants are experienced in such inquiries. Wright, 42, a researcher who has spent 14 years with Amnesty, has participated in numerous inquiries, including a probe of prison conditions in Ireland. Rod Morgan, 49, a criminal justice professor at Bristol University in England, previously participated in four investigations for Amnesty since 1987, including one at a women’s federal prison in Lexington, Ky., which led to the closure of its small, underground high-security unit.

Still, according to Amnesty’s investigators and other officials familiar with its operations, the mission in Los Angeles was unique, both for its scope and attention.

In 1990, Amnesty officials reviewed court documents that alleged police brutality in one Chicago precinct and in the early 1970s intervened in several civil rights cases in North Carolina and elsewhere.

Throughout a whirlwind series of meetings and 14-hour days, Amnesty investigators in Los Angeles were dogged by reporters pressing for progress reports or accounts of private talks. That “circus” of attention, Morgan said in an interview, not only created a “false inference” that the group had reached some conclusions, but made fact-finding more difficult.

“Some people are uptight . . . it (the attention) creates a cloud, a noise,” Morgan said.

Interviews with those who met with the investigators suggest that the group focused on lawsuits alleging police brutality as well as police training techniques, officer disciplinary procedures and the like. The group, which prepared for its visit with weeks of research and reports, including the Christopher Commission study, was not interested in opinions or local politics.

For example, during a four-hour discussion with the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, investigators focused on specific cases and statistics on police shootings, alleged beatings, and ACLU charges that police dogs have frequently mauled arrestees, most of them African-Americans or Latinos. The group also discussed the 1979 shooting of Eulia Love, whose killing by police sparked new LAPD policies on the use of deadly force.

At other meetings, the group asked only for information that could be documented.

“It seemed very clear to me they were here on a fact-finding mission,” said Viviana Andrade, regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “So we spent the bulk of time talking about very specific cases as opposed to policies or opinions or conjecture.”

The reason for that focus is clear.

“We are looking at procedures. We are looking at systems. We are looking at attitudes throughout the departments,” Amnesty’s Tiessen said during a break between meetings.

“I’m not saying that problems go beyond particular people,” Tiessen added. “What I’m saying is that human rights issues are not personality issues. And by focusing on personalities, you can forget what the issue really is.”

While Amnesty officials here and in London declined to characterize the significance of the inquiry, one former official of the organization said its import is obvious.

David Hinkley, a former Western states director for the group who chaired its international conventions four times, noted that in any given year, Amnesty will conduct scores of inquiries around the world but may launch only 30 to 40 missions with a team of investigators. And that alone, he said, illustrates its concerns about Los Angeles.

“It doesn’t mean they have taken any positions or formed any conclusions,” Hinkley said. “But they are taking the allegations seriously enough to take a step that is quite rare.”

To get beyond questions to conclusions, however, will not be easy or quick, officials said.

“We had very, very conflicting reports,” Tiessen said. “Some people, credible people, are saying this has taken place, and equally credible people are saying it is not systematic, that it is not the policy” of departments to encourage or ignore the use of excessive force.

As such, Tiessen said, the group will spend months soliciting more information and preparing its report, with another visit to Los Angeles possible.

Morgan stressed that the team was not here to duplicate the investigations already conducted into the best known brutality case--the beating of King.

“We are concerned with the general set of allegations which tie into a lot of very complicated issues, which are not capable of easy resolution or clear conclusions,” Morgan said.

Whatever the conclusion, local law enforcement officials, including Gates, have said their departments are guided by local lawmakers and commissions, not the findings of an outside organization.

But even if Amnesty’s report does not carry the official weight of a government inquiry, the international recognition of the Nobel Prize-winning group is such that a critical report could create lasting embarrassment for Los Angeles and law enforcement.

In the end, Hinkley said, that may be more than enough to shake local law enforcement if Amnesty finds evidence of widespread brutality.

“That is going to be a statement, if it comes about, that will resound around the world,” Hinkley said. “Nobody is going to say things (in Los Angeles) are not as bad as in Sri Lanka or the Soviet Union, because people expect that in a democracy, those kinds of actions are abhorrent.”