COLUMN ONE : Tensions Mount on L.A. Streets : Relationships are changing between police and communities. You can see it at crime-scene barricades. You can hear it in station houses.

Dusk falls differently on Los Angeles’ impoverished and crime-scarred neighborhoods. In the ghettos and barrios, twilight is a time zone all its own, when the day’s hustles and confrontations continue apace, but with all eyes cocked toward night.

As daylight pales, Central American mothers who use MacArthur Park for daily strolls gather their children before the Wilshire District park and its surrounding streets are overrun by night predators. For the boys in the Mob Crew, a Latino gang based in Boyle Heights, dusk means changing into black clothes and stashing their guns nearby. In South Los Angeles, police officers roll out in their black-and-whites as dormant narcotics corridors spring to life and some house parties sour into full-fledged brawls.

All along the dimming commercial strips of South-Central, in the barrack housing projects of East L.A., on the crowded sidewalks of Pico-Union, dusk passes as a brief period of transition. In an hour it is over, giving way to the random firefights and street-corner encounters that occur each night in the city’s toughest sections.

But in the months since the Los Angeles police beating of Rodney G. King, the nightly ebb and flow on the street has taken on a new dimension. In a city where the war on crime has been taken more seriously--and perhaps further--than in any other American metropolis, relationships are changing between police and criminals and the community.

You can see it at crime-scene barricades, where tensions flare between police and onlookers. You can hear it inside station houses, where officers mutter about citizens who harass them and supervisors who straitjacket them with new rules. You can find it in housing projects, where residents feel suddenly empowered by the cops’ defensiveness.

It is in Los Angeles’ densely populated minority areas that the relationship between police and residents is most interwoven. Crime touches more lives there, providing a greater opportunity for interaction and conflict. Most of the Christopher Commission’s inquiry focused on that close and sometimes contentious relationship. And many of its recommendations apply most keenly to inner-city neighborhoods.

But while public officials debate the future of the Los Angeles Police Department, already there is a new reality on the street.

At dusk one night, a Newton patrolman drove past a vacant South-Central lot, aiming toward a horizon veined with purple cirrus clouds. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “You look up there and forget where you are. Then you drive by a corner where there was nobody a few minutes ago and suddenly there’s 20. And they look like they want to chew on your bones. Its zero to 90 in just a few minutes out here. You got to watch yourself.”

Something as commonplace as the Police Department’s use of yellow crowd-control tape suddenly has become a kindling point. Officers have been cordoning off houses, streets and sidewalks for years and no one thought much about it. The cops reeled out their tape like spider trails, suspending it from street lights and patrol car hoods--the only way to keep shooting and stabbing scenes clean for detectives, holding off agitated relatives and clumsy passersby who would otherwise trample shell casings, crack packets and other evidence into the dirt.

The tape was an intrusion, but most people accepted it as another small indignity. “Like we’re not smart enough to stay back on our own,” said Makungu Akinyela, a black community activist and family therapist.

By midsummer, though, patrol officers were returning to station houses with ominous tales of crowds surging past tape like determined marathon men. Onlookers trying to get somewhere--to surround a dying homeboy’s body or just to get to the other side of the street--were no longer willing to let a strip of tape stop them.

“It seems like it’s happened at every crime scene I’ve been at lately,” said Sgt. Glenn Krejci, a Southeast Division gang officer. “We tell them, ‘Sorry, you can’t come through the line; don’t you know what the yellow tape is for?’ They just walk on like they didn’t see it. And when you call them on it, they go nuts. That’s a new wrinkle, and believe me, it adds to the tension out there.”

There was a balmy afternoon when two men were gunned down in broad daylight at 87th and Central. Semiautomatic rifle casings littered the sidewalk. The tape rolled out, and within minutes, a crowd at least 100 strong pressed forward against the flimsy barrier, egged on by gang members who yelled Rodney King’s name like a stadium chant. Krejci and his fellow officers stood against the tape to keep them at bay.

Most of the time, the incidents are confined to a few crowd members and officers. But the exchanges are just as loaded.

One night on West 55th Street, a group of Newton officers bisected the darkened block with crime tape. On one side, police and paramedics milled around a wounded 14-year-old named Carlos, a Five-Five Loco writhing with a gunshot wound to his neck. On the other were neighbors, drifting outside in shorts and bathrobes to watch, and a few Locos who wanted to get to their wounded homeboy. A free-lance television cameraman filming the scene raked the street with white light.

Away from the crowd, three Locos jawed with a lone black patrolman. The cop towered over the three gang members by at least a foot. For emphasis, he gripped the handle of his regulation black flashlight. The tallest of the three Locos, a Latino youth whose head was shaved in bristly patches, leaned his chest against the tape, stretching it ever so slightly.

“Hey, man, that’s great,” the Loco said. “I can’t come through and when I want to know why, you go for your stick. Why don’t you just beat me now and get it over with?”

The cop said something inaudible, prompting the Loco to fling out his arms. “Great. Just Tase me, man,” the gang member shouted, referring to the LAPD’s Taser stun gun. “Just like Rodney King. Come on.”

One of the smaller Locos spun the taller one half around, leaning on him to keep him away from the cop. The tall Loco cursed, but made no effort to turn back. He spat into a bush, careful not to aim in the cop’s direction. “You won’t be there all night,” he shouted, one last jab before he disappeared beyond the glow of a street light.

Wherever you go in South Los Angeles, you can hear the refrain from an infectious rap anthem by the group N.W.A. Recorded more than two years ago, it was given new life by the Rodney King beating.

At 51st and Avalon, the words are scrawled on the wall of a market. They blare from boom boxes. Officers driving through the Nickerson Gardens housing project in South-Central hear elementary school kids sing its taunting tag line in reedy voices:

“F--- the police.”

For a low rider who cranks up the volume as he drives past a patrol car or an Original Gangster who screams it out from the anonymity of a crowd, the refrain is intoxicating, a way of evening the score, getting under a cop’s skin.

“We all identify with it,” said Gregory Wickham, a 23-year-old man-mountain who is trying to make it as a rapper. “We got years of pent-up stuff in us. Police been jacking us up, proning us out, you name it, since time began, man. And then old Rodney King come along and now everybody knows what it’s like to come up against the police. That’s why it’s on everyone’s lips. Because we know what it’s like.”

At roll call inside the Southwest Station one night, a sergeant told patrol officers about to head out on the midnight shift that he wanted them to hear something. From a cassette recorder, it was there again, the same threatening chant:

”. . . Beat a police out of shape, and when I finish, bring the yellow tape. . . .”

The sergeant wanted them to know what was being said on the streets and to keep their cool when goaded. “I’ve heard it before and I don’t let it get to me,” said one officer of the training session. “But if you could’ve seen the eyes on some of these guys. . . .”

Glenn Krejci heard the refrain one day in Jordan Downs, where he had gone on a domestic violence call. Three teen-agers strutted up, one hefting a boom box on his shoulder. Krejci said nothing until the teen-agers rewound the tape and played it again. This time, Krejci pointed to a group of children who had begun a frenetic little dance, echoing the obscenities.

“Do me a favor, play it wherever you want,” Krejci told them, “but not where these 2-year-olds can hear it, OK?”

The teen-agers laughed. Mercifully for the officer, they found another tape.

“I love that song,” he said later, rolling his eyes. “I’ve heard it so much I’ve started to sing along with it.”

The best way to deal with the taunt was to do as Krejci did, let it roll off, smile weakly, move on. There were times, though, when cops are almost staggered by the hatred behind the words.

Lorne Gilsig, a Rampart officer, responded to a stabbing call one night at 7th and Alvarado, where he found a black man slashed and bleeding to death. Bending down to the man’s face, Gilsig asked the victim if he could identify his assailant.

The dying man drew upward, a last act.

“F--- you,” he wheezed. “You’re the police. I ain’t saying nothing.”

And died.

Although the taunts can be ignored, there are other pressures bearing down on the department’s foot soldiers, its 4,300 patrol officers, that cannot be so easily tuned out. They worry about who will replace their retiring chief, Daryl Gates. They wonder if the department will become more politicized and its longstanding emphasis against internal corruption watered down. Each week seems to bring more scorn from the media and interest groups.

Patrol officers now are being told they will have to explain--in writing--every time they order suspects to lie on the ground, the so-called prone position. Through their well-refined rumor mill, officers are hearing that their superiors will have to interview every suspect to ensure that they were treated properly during their arrests.

Some Los Angeles police officers have reached back to the Vietnam War to make sense of it all. They are struck by the parallels: The department has marshaled its resources like a military juggernaut. It owns an armored mobile battering ram and a fleet of helicopters. Stations go through rigorous inspections each week. The command has listed its yearly goals as “battle plans.”

But, as one ranking officer observed, all of this is meaningless if the command structure is preoccupied with politics, infighting and an uncertain future.

“The LAPD in 1991 is the American military, 1968,” he said. “We used our big guns and now it’s fallen apart. The command is bickering, the program’s rudderless. A lot of people on the street took Gates seriously when he said they could win against crime. Not everyone, but a lot of us. Well, now you can’t tell anyone anymore that this is a winnable war.”

Faced with all the confusion, some cops are just hanging back until the department’s future becomes clearer, cruising past the minor violations, the crack transactions, the motel whores and alley dice games.

“We’re not sweating the small stuff,” said a Southeast Division patrolman outside a Figueroa taco stand. Not smiling, he smacked his car door. “You want us? Sorry, folks, we’re only taking radio calls.”

He is not alone. Arrests for nonviolent crimes plunged by 34,300 in the first nine months of the year, compared to the same period in 1990, down more than 20%. Publicly, the brass declined to jump to conclusions. But there were no illusions among the rank and file.

At the same time, bitching--the cops’ prerogative--is on the rise, another way to defuse their resentment.

One night on Broadway, Paul Hast, a ruddy-faced Newton Division patrol sergeant, pulled up to an auto salvage yard where two night watchmen sat, nursing bruises after being worked over by a gang of bandits who nimbly scaled a protective cyclone fence. After checking on the victims, Hast chatted up an old friend at the scene, a motorcycle cop who answered the same call.

Soon enough, the officers were deep into the usual topics: the chief, Rodney, the Christopher Commission, how to motivate the troops, what the next generation of cops will face on the street. The motorcycle cop posed a brain-twister: “Here’s a question for you, Sarge. What happens if you got a gay male officer and a female partner and they have a male suspect? Who does the searching?”

“Good question,” Hast said. “I guess we ask the perpetrator.”

Lost in talk, the sergeant and the cycle cop did not remember the robbery victims for nearly 10 minutes. “Hey,” one of the officers said, “you guys sure you’re OK?”

In the sanctity of the station house, the talk is even grittier--there is no one to misinterpret a remark, no one to monitor computer messages, no one to squawk when the humor gets down and dirty.

It doesn’t get much raunchier than in the Newton Station, a brick vault of a building hidden amid bottling and food-processing plants in a warehouse district just south of downtown. The cops call the turf they patrol “Shootin’ Newton” because of the area’s violent past and mean streets.

Inside, hanging over one of the station’s well-papered bulletin boards, is a white T-shirt with the defiant motto: “I Support Chief Gates.” Cops hunch over their paperwork while peeking at an overhead television set. Crime shows are mandatory fare.

One night on “COPS,” officers saw their TV counterparts aggressively subduing a Jamaican suspect, a Rasta with Shirley Temple dreadlocks.

“Whoa! Use of force,” one shouted, drawing cackles.

About then, another group of patrolmen swept into the room, taking seats near the TV while an older vet, a squat Marine-type with a pug face and a stiff white brush haircut, switched channels.

“Teague’s on tonight,” Brush Cut informed the others. “Channel 2’s got a videotape of him, supposedly whacking some guy three years ago.”

The officer in question, Andrew Teague, a 14-year veteran, was on duty somewhere else in the station house. “He’ll be watching too,” Brush Cut assured them.

After five minutes of other news, the tape ran.

It showed a white policeman chasing a black suspect onto the front porch of a house on 43rd Street. The cop clenched what looked like an unlit cigar in his mouth. Catching the black man on the porch, the officer staggered him with a blow to his stomach and shoved him over a railing into a row of bushes. Dazed, the man climbed out and stumbled to a garage, where the officer unreeled another series of blows.

Most of the Newton cops sat silent as the tape rolled.

“Hey,” called one voice from the back of the room, “it’s the Teague Toss!”

There were some titters, but the cops had little to say. Rodney King, although a symbol for the problems of an entire police force, had been beaten in the Foothill Division, a universe away, in the San Fernando Valley. Teague was one of Newton’s own. No one rushed to his defense in the television room that night. No one condemned him either.

Everyone filed out but Brush Cut, who flicked off the set. His face had reddened and his eyes were narrowed.

“You want to know what our motto is?” he said. “It’s not ‘To Protect and Serve’ anymore. It’s ‘Show me an ass and I’ll kiss it.’ ”

In the gantlet streets that wind through the Aliso Village housing project in Boyle Heights, talk of police abuse is as old as the sagging World War II-vintage dormitories that shelter the complex’s poor families. Complaining about cops was once like shouting in a vacuum--you could tell a hundred neighbors, but there never seemed to be any impact beyond the project’s borders.

The Rodney King beating has changed all that. Suddenly, inner-city residents feel as if they have finally captured the city’s attention. In places like Aliso Village, people are filing more complaints against officers and dredging out old grievances, finding suspicion in even the most innocuous encounters with cops.

Two months before the King beating, a group of mothers from Aliso and its sister project, Pico Gardens, formed a monitoring group to investigate brutality complaints. They were reacting to a spate of allegations that Hollenbeck Division cops had been harassing and sometimes brutalizing gang members and project residents.

The women tried to concentrate on current cases. But after the King beating, they found themselves waylaid by residents who wanted to talk about incidents and hurts reaching back years. One Latino gang member told of how he still nurses an ancient grudge against a cop who called him a “bean-eater.”

“It’s not that we don’t want police here,” said one of the monitors, Aurora Martinez. “We do. But when some of these cops go wild on you, you have to take your community back.”

Aliso can be as tough as any of the city’s projects. Men in hairnets and baggy pants hang out in the commons, whistling an alarm when black-and-whites from Hollenbeck glide by. Some deal crack; others just wait for trouble. On weekends, the Clarence Street Locos, Cuatro Flats, the Mob Crew and the rest of Aliso’s gang sets huddle with homegirls in their crazy-quilt turfs, downing 40-ounce bottles of Bud and Olde English 800, bracing for the night’s battles.

Many of Aliso’s brutality allegations share a common denominator--a place known as “the Factories.”

It is a manufacturing district just south of Aliso Village, where successive blocks of brick and concrete warehouses are webbed by rusted railroad spurs. The Factories’ maze-like streets are often deserted--the perfect spot, according to residents, for cops to take gangsters, kids, anyone who mouths off, for some “street justice.”

“Everybody knows the Factories,” said Pam McDuffie, one of the Aliso mothers. “The parents, the big kids, the little kids. It’s where you don’t want to end up.”

One of her cases involved Guadelupe Lopez, a hulking 19-year-old Mob Crew gang member who calls himself “Scoobie.” He came to the mothers last February, complaining that a Hollenbeck cop had smashed out his front tooth with a baton. Scoobie had to be persuaded to file the complaint, afraid that the officer would come after him again and “cuff me, take me out to the Factories and whip my ass.”

Four times in recent years, Scoobie said, cops drove him to the Factories and worked him over. Scoobie is no angel. He faces charges for assaulting a project policeman. Still, he felt he had to take his case to the Aliso mothers.

One September afternoon, moon-faced Scoobie slouched through the Factories, ticking off its most desolate corners like a tour guide to the underground. “They know how to hit you with a club where it won’t bruise so much,” he said, tightrope-walking on a steel tie. “They use the small end. It hurts for a while and then it goes away.”

Hollenbeck’s commander, Capt. Bob Medina, groaned at another mention of the Factories. He has heard the stories before. Five separate complaints of beatings there were checked out this year alone by Internal Affairs, he said, and all proved groundless.

“It’s an absolute myth,” Medina said. In the 1980s, he said, police began to use the Factories to book and process people arrested in the Pico-Aliso housing projects. The move was prompted, he said, by repeated incidents in which police were showered with rocks and bottles while trying to book suspects within the projects.

“It’s been distorted over the years,” Medina said, referring to complaints about the Factories.

In the months since the King beating, though, it is the kind of story that can come back on a police division. These days, Medina makes sure to attend community meetings to keep abreast of community concerns. His officers can no longer assume that their word alone is enough to win credibility tests.

Those days are gone.