Violent Police Searches Often Yield Fear, Anger : LAPD: Department defends its tactics. But hostility lingers among residents subjected to nighttime raids.

Memories are keeping Tracy White away from her old apartment; the recurring scenes of windows shattering, armed men in black hoods rushing up the stairs, her children screaming in bed.

It all happened so fast at 2 a.m. on June 29, when a Los Angeles Police Department special weapons team stormed her two-story apartment in the Pueblo del Rio housing project in South Los Angeles. They were searching for a cousin suspected of robbery and of threatening a patrolman. The man, a reputed gang member, did not live in the apartment and was not there when officers burst inside.

For weeks after the raid, a fine dust covered everything inside Unit 418. The windows were almost all gone, smashed out by police as they battered their way inside. Crystal glassware was reduced to shards, a chunk was missing from a couch armrest.

Tracy White and her family at first were forced to move because of the damage. Now, even though the windows have been replaced, she says she is still too unnerved to live there. She will return only when accompanied by her mother or one of her sisters.

From the LAPD’s point of view, the raid on White’s apartment was a standard operation.

There were no post-mortems, no follow-up investigations to suggest that the department was dissatisfied with the actions of its Special Weapons and Tactics officers that morning. The officers had seemingly done what they were trained to do, moving with surprise and speed to guarantee their own safety and preserve potential evidence.

But for White and other family members who were startled out of their beds that morning, the raid was a horror show that she says has left her with nightmares and left her children with fears of police. “Look at the way they treat us,” White said. “Like dogs.”

The Police Department’s most notorious raid was in 1988, when 80 Southwest Division officers, searching for drugs, ransacked four apartments at 39th Street and Dalton Avenue. So far, the raid has cost the city $3.4 million in legal claims. Three officers, including a captain, were charged with criminal vandalism but were acquitted because jurors said they could not determine which officers were directly responsible for the damage.

Although the 39th and Dalton raid was unusual in its level of devastation, the fact is that police execute scores of searches each year.

Most occur in the city’s less affluent areas, where crime is more prevalent and the relationship between police and residents is both closer and more strained. Although the house raids are designed to swiftly nab criminals and grab evidence, along the way the lives of law-abiding families--like White’s--are often disrupted, leaving them angry and scared.

In the long run, their perceptions of police are tainted, especially those of impressionable children subjected to the sound of shattering glass and the sight of armed officers streaming into their homes.

Some city officials and police critics say that as the Police Department undergoes reform, officers’ conduct during raids deserves greater scrutiny.

“Sometimes, these (raids) can really backfire and leave long-term negative impressions on people,” said Jesse Brewer, a city police commissioner and retired deputy police chief who believes that the concept of “community policing” will eventually reshape police attitudes, influencing officers to conduct their operations with more sensitivity.

“If you’re caring and helpful to people in the aftermath of these kinds of traumatic events, if you take time to talk to them and explain things, you can prevent bad feelings,” Brewer said. “It’s especially important with children, because some of these kids grow up with hostile feelings toward the department.”

Community activists say that few families seek counseling or complain to police after raids because “they figure they have to take it, that it’s just part of life in the inner city,” said Leon Watkins, who runs Family Helpline, a phone resource center in South Los Angeles. “We don’t know our rights and we don’t recognize when we get scarred inside. . . . We’re just invisible people here. We’re the Police Department’s training ground.”

Attorney Stephen Yagman, an LAPD adversary who represents plaintiffs in the 39th and Dalton case, said officers routinely ignore laws governing their conduct during searches. Among other things, he alleges that officers rarely identify themselves before bursting into dwellings and enter too quickly in violation of state “knock and notice” laws.

“These raids,” Yagman said, “are the most obvious manifestation of police as bully boys.”

Although police officials would not discuss details of the raid on White’s residence, SWAT Sgt. Albert Preciado insisted that searches are handled with care and sensitivity. He said that the mere presence of unwelcomed police officers in a home provokes “a reaction from some people.”

It is not lawfully executed searches that leave residents with bad impressions of officers, he said, but rather distorted images of cops on television. “They see the police on TV all the time,” he said. “And the police on TV are more violent than we are. That’s what they see as good or bad. . . . The kids are influenced by TV.”

Just as on television, real-life police raids often begin in a chaotic rush of bodies and the jarring noises of invasion. White’s case was no different. The first thing she remembers hearing is the boom of a diversionary grenade in a trash can outside her front door and then, seconds later, the crack of glass. She says she never heard officers identify themselves or order her to open her door.

It was about 2 a.m., and the 24-year-old unemployed mother had nodded off to sleep two hours earlier, after playing cards with her sister Yolanda. White slept in an upstairs bedroom with her children, ages 1, 3 and 5. Yolanda took a rear bedroom with Precious, her 12-year-old daughter.

The sound of the “flash-bang” grenade jolted her awake.

Moments after the explosion, she heard men’s voices. Her first thought was of burglars, who often target the Pueblo del Rio projects. Residents sometimes return to find gang members snoring in their bedrooms. Intruders make off with children’s baseball card collections. White kept an old black steel handgun in a kitchen cabinet for protection.

She tightened her robe and stumbled out into the upstairs hallway. A shaft of bright light stopped her in her tracks. “Freeze,” said a man’s voice. “Police.” The officers had kicked in the front door.

“I said, ‘Oh, my Lord,’ ” White recalled.

At that moment, her bedroom windows shattered. Two men swung into the room, dressed all in black--black balaclava hoods, black parachute fatigues, black helmets. Her children shrieked in fright. “I swear,” White said of the intruders, “I thought they were ninjas.”

“Meanwhile, I can’t move because they got the guns on me from downstairs,” she said. “I don’t know what to do. My children are screaming and if I move, they could shoot me next.”

More men dressed in black bounded through the bathroom window. One ran into the rear bedroom, pinning Yolanda and her daughter Precious behind a door, the youngster said. She said she tried to squirm out, screaming, “What did I do?” The hooded man put the barrel of his semiautomatic weapon up against her head, Precious said. She closed her eyes and urinated on herself.

“I thought,” the youngster said, “he was going to kill me.”

SWAT Sgt. Preciado and other police officials refused to say whether officers trained their guns on White and the children. Speaking generally, though, Preciado said that “only when we see a weapon or a threat do we point our weapons.” As for the black hoods, LAPD spokeswoman Diane White said they are meant as protection from such hazards as flying glass--”like wearing a pair of gloves.”

White was led to her children by two officers while other SWAT members sifted through her possessions, looking under beds and furniture, peering into closets. One of the men finally removed his hood, revealing a middle-aged Latino with salt-and-pepper hair. He tried to calm the distraught mother, explaining that he and the other intruders were police officers on a search mission.

White was still seething as officers led her and the children out of their apartment. She grew even angrier when she learned why police had come in the first place: To arrest a cousin who did not live there.

A South Bureau detective who arrived later told White that the search team was looking for 21-year-old Virgil Farr, allegedly a member of the Pueblo Bishops Bloods gang. Farr, also known as “El Loco,” was suspected of robbing two people and threatening to kill a Newton Division officer who patrolled the housing project.

Farr was arrested later that night, several blocks away, as he was reeling home from a drunken party.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Philip Wojdak, who later prosecuted Farr, said an informant told police that Farr was staying in White’s apartment. The search warrant for the raid sought handguns, ammunition, a black trench coat, a color television, a video recorder, cocaine and paraphernalia.

The SWAT team only recovered the pistol White kept in her kitchen, five cartridges for the gun and a box of 12-gauge shotgun cartridges, which she insisted were accidentally left by another cousin.

Although Farr was charged with two counts of robbery and making a terrorist threat, the robbery charges were dropped Oct. 2 in exchange for a “no-contest” plea to threatening the officer.

“We had to get him on what we could,” Wojdak said. “The case doesn’t reflect what he did.” Farr was sentenced to the time he had already served while awaiting trial--98 days--and has been released.

Almost six months after the raid, White and her children are living in her sister’s house. She has refused to move back into her old apartment, unable to find peace of mind in a place that reminds her of hooded men crashing through her windows.

To get a new unit in the Pueblo del Rio housing project, she had to put her name on a list with a two-year wait.

She complains of having trouble sleeping, most often when her sister’s house grows quiet at night and the sounds from outside seem magnified and more ominous. Even after she dozes off, she said, her children wake her with their own nightmares.

On Aug. 11, White’s troubles were compounded when she suffered a seizure during a ride to a neighborhood touch football game. Doctors at White Memorial Hospital performed emergency surgery to clear blockages in two blood vessels in her brain.

After several weeks of recovery in the hospital, White returned to her sister’s house--a half-moon scar etched across the left side of her head. Today, she is back on her feet, able to drive and perform other small tasks.

Before the seizure, White had called a lawyer about filing a lawsuit against the police. The surgery has left that in limbo, although her mother vows to press on with the legal action.

Lately, White’s eldest child, 5-year-old Rodney Byrd, has begun to display an unsettling reaction to the raid not apparent in the other two children. He has become hostile toward police.

One afternoon, playing outside on the porch in front of the house, he strutted up to his mother and interrupted her as she recounted the search to a visitor.

“Hey, they didn’t scare me,” Rodney announced in a high-pitched approximation of a tough guy’s voice. “If they come back again, I’ll fight them!”

NEXT: The Bad News Bears.