Gates Sees No Pattern of Excessive Force or Racism : Police: The chief defends the department in a trial over a fatal shooting in 1990. He is asked few questions about a surveillance unit.

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates defended himself and his department in federal court Thursday, testifying in a civil rights trial that there was no pattern of excessive force or racism in the department.

“I don’t believe we have an excessive force problem in the Los Angeles Police Department, and a great amount of management attention has been paid to that,” Gates said.

Gates testified for two hours but was asked few questions about his department’s Special Investigations Section, a surveillance unit whose officers opened fire on four robbers Feb. 12, 1990, after a holdup at a McDonald’s restaurant in Sunland.

Three robbers were killed, prompting the U.S. District Court lawsuit by their families and a fourth robber who was wounded.

Police have said the men pointed weapons at them. But Stephen Yagman, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, has alleged that the men were unarmed, having stored their weapons in the trunk of their getaway car.

Yagman peppered Gates with questions about his past statements on police practices and policies and the conclusions made by the Christopher Commission, which investigated the department after the beating of motorist Rodney G. King.

It appeared to be a rematch of sorts for Gates and Yagman, who specializes in lawsuits against police departments and has grilled Gates in other brutality cases.

“This is better than ‘L.A. Law,’ ” someone whispered in the packed courtroom as Gates’ testimony began.

But the actual exchanges of questions and answers were courteous and covered ground Gates has often discussed in public.

Yagman said outside of court that he hoped to show jurors that Gates sets a tone of lax discipline and control that fosters and silently condones excessive force.

The lawsuit contends that the SIS, whose officers have been involved in 45 shootings since 1965, was created in this environment and has operated unchecked by department managers.

But Gates testified that excessive force was not a wide-spread problem.

“I believe that kind of extreme violence is an aberration . . .,” Gates said of the King beating. “We make over 300,000 arrests per year, give out hundreds of thousands of citations and make hundreds of thousands of stops. A very, very small percentage of those--about 1%--have any use of force. And then only a small percentage of those result in complaints.”

Gates said while there may be a small number of racists in the department, racist behavior by officers is not a problem.

“There is no pattern of racism in the Los Angeles Police Department,” Gates said. “There are individuals, as in our society, who have racist tendencies. From time to time we see that. . . . It is an individual problem, not a pattern.”

Reading from a thick stack of newspaper clippings, Yagman repeatedly asked Gates to confirm some of the controversial statements he has made during his tenure as chief. Some of them were embarrassing--such as a well-known 1982 reference to blacks as not being like “normal people”--and Gates restated previous apologies and explanations for the remarks. Other statements he said he did not recall saying.

He often confirmed some statements and stood by them. Asked if he once told reporters that the department’s 8,300 officers would not follow Mayor Tom Bradley’s lead, he replied, “I don’t believe they would.”

When asked about the SIS, Gates said the philosophy of the squad was “to reduce violence in the city and protect human life.”

Outside of court and after his testimony was over, Gates defended the SIS officers against Yagman’s description of them as “assassins with badges.”

“That, I think, is a terrible characterization,” he said. “They work some of the most dangerous assignments and must make split-second decisions. They get scrutinized by everyone. They must be thinking, ‘Why us? Why are we typed as assassins?’ ”

Yagman, meanwhile, said jurors will weigh Gates’ remarks against the Christopher Commission’s conclusions when they deliver a verdict. “They will rip his head off,” he said of Gates.

Court documents filed in the case revealed this week that the shooting is being investigated by the FBI, and that the U.S. Justice Department has apparently taken the case before a federal grand jury.

The department asked Judge J. Spencer Letts to excuse an FBI agent from testifying in the civil rights lawsuit, arguing that testimony by the agent would compromise its investigation of the shooting. Letts has made no ruling yet on the request.

Bradley, who is a defendant with Gates, the Police Commission and the SIS unit, is scheduled to testify today.