Dreams of LAPD Class Become Tarnished : Police: The academy’s graduates in 1965 had to rebuild the department’s image after the Watts riots. Now, after the Rodney King beating, ‘a lot of the good we did’ is gone, a member of that group says.

The day held such great promise.

One hundred Los Angeles Police Academy cadets lined up in formation, each in full-dress uniform. At the podium stood Chief William Parker, vowing to overcome the stigma of racism and brutality and return the Los Angeles Police Department to its former glory.

This was graduation day for the Class of 1965--the first academy class to don the Los Angeles police uniform since the Watts riots.

“It was probably one of the proudest moments of my life,” said Lt. Eddie Brown, a tall, skinny ex-Marine who served as the academy class president. “It was the highlight of my whole life. . . . There was so much enthusiasm.”

But for Brown and his classmates, those memories are blended now with the painful vision of the Rodney G. King video, replayed almost endlessly over the last year on their television sets.

“I thought: ‘Boom! It’s all coming back,’ ” Brown recalled. “This whole thing was just like when we came on the department. A lot of the good we did was gone.”

After Watts, the department had largely succeeded in rebuilding its reputation as one of the nation’s most efficient and professional law enforcement agencies. But some of the changes, it turned out, were on the surface.

The fallout from the King beating once again tarnished the department’s image. It also undid much of the good these 100 classmates had hoped to accomplish on the day Parker challenged them to reclaim the heritage of the Los Angeles Police Department--the same challenge given to recruits in the aftermath of the King beating.

Much has happened in the years between the Watts riot and the Rodney King incident. Today, drugs, murders and gang warfare rage on in unprecedented numbers. The Police Department, too, has changed, with more women and minorities on the force. The job of policing is a much more complex task. But in the minds of these 100 officers, the comparisons between the public outcry over Watts and the Rodney King beating are inescapable.

During the summer riots of 1965, television screens lit with black-and-white images of Los Angeles police officers clubbing black residents in an effort to regain order. Some black leaders rose in anger, decrying racism and police brutality. A special McCone Commission--headed by John A. McCone, former CIA director--was convened to review the Police Department’s practices and policies.

This year, the television images of four white police officers standing over the black motorist with batons and boots and an electric stun gun shocked the nation into a new examination of police abuse. Angry community leaders and irate citizens filled Parker Center--many of them the sons and daughters of those who had protested brutality in Watts. A special Christopher Commission--headed by a former U. S. deputy secretary of state--was created and it found that police brutality and racism not only existed but were condoned within the Los Angeles Police Department.

In most ways, the Class of ’65 was a typical group of police recruits. But its graduates made their careers during an unsettling period for the Police Department.

Of the 100 class members, at least two rose high enough to be considered possible applicants for the job of retiring Police Chief Daryl F. Gates. Another, Robert Price, would win the department’s prestigious Medal of Valor award, cited for bravery when he jumped from a helicopter in 1980 to save a woman caught in floodwaters.

Others would find the pressures of police work too much to bear, and they would retire with stress-related pensions.

Many graduates of the Class of ‘65--some now gray or balding or pot-bellied--now wonder what impact, if any, they had on public confidence in the Los Angeles Police Department. Were their careers worthwhile? Did they make a difference? These are a few of their stories:

It is something of a wonder that Capt. Noel Cunningham entered law enforcement in the first place.

A black man married to a white woman, Cunningham remembers a night in 1965, before he entered the Police Academy, when a white detective from the Wilshire district came to their home, ostensibly to investigate a complaint that his wife had been assaulted and robbed.

“The detective suggested that my wife was a prostitute and that I was probably a pimp,” Cunningham said. “That was racism. That was disrespect. And I knew right then that nothing was going to come of the case so I asked him to leave my home.”

Equally jarring for the young Cunningham were the nightly news tapes from the Watts rebellion. He heard Chief Parker “condescendingly” refer to blacks as “nigras. “ He heard the chief contend that the riots were the work of a small minority, whom he called “monkeys in a zoo.”

But Cunningham--one of only a half-dozen black recruits in that academy class--joined up primarily for economic reasons. He was a new father, and the job of a police officer paid twice what he was making as a hospital technician.

He worked patrol in the Wilshire district, handled undercover assignments during the tense summer of 1968 after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was promoted through the ranks and, in 1970, became a lieutenant assigned to Watts.

“Watts had not changed,” Cunningham recalled. “It was depressingly the same. That year was a record year for homicides.”

But the Police Department, he believed, was improving. Courts began ordering a heavy increase in minority hiring. More minority officers were winning choice assignments. By the mid-1980s, he felt that more officers were becoming “compassionate,” more “community oriented.”

And then, Rodney King.

During the week of the March 3 beating, Cunningham--recently retired from the department and with a new job as Los Angeles port warden--joined dozens of other top-ranking police officials from around the world at a law enforcement seminar on the Caribbean island of Aruba.

Every night that week, the TV in his hotel room played the King videotape. Each day, during conference meetings with his colleagues, police officials from Japan, Africa and London barraged him with questions about the Los Angeles Police Department. Was it really that vicious?

“I felt ashamed,” Cunningham said. “I felt depressed. I felt sorry for my LAPD.”

Reflecting on his years in a Los Angeles police uniform, he added: “Some things, I guess, don’t change in your life. It does seem like we’re back in ’65 again. Maybe even further back.”

A large, bulky man, Detective Jay Romaine has worked the prestigious Robbery-Homicide Unit, a creme-de-la-creme assignment, for most of his career. And like the stereotypical image of the streetwise detective, he smokes, talks tough and sometimes appears rather gruff.

During a recent interview, a fly kept buzzing across his desk. He grabbed the pest in one fist and tossed it into the trash can. As the dazed fly tried to escape the wastebasket, he burned it with his cigarette.

As a youth, Romaine was thrilled with stories told by his uncle, a Los Angeles cop, and today Romaine proudly wears his uncle’s most prized possession--a diamond ring fitted with a tiny LAPD badge won at a poker game.

He thinks the department has grown tremendously in its sophistication with scientific investigations, its SWAT program and the highly praised DARE drug education project. He takes pride in a time in the late 1980s, when gangs and drugs were ravaging the city and the public was turning desperately to its Police Department to save their community.

But there are some changes he does not like. Among those is the recent emphasis on affirmative action that he believes has made it difficult for many qualified white males--including his own son--to join the Police Department. He dislikes new pension rules that do not allow officers to take early retirements and nurture a second career. He questions whether the public outcry over police abuse has unfairly raised the level of discipline for police officers.

“It used to be where we would walk into a courtroom and testify about a crime and people would believe us,” he said. “There’s not that kind of respect any more.

“It used to be where if you were arresting somebody and he spit in your face, you’d deck him. But if you do that today, he’s going to complain and you’re going to get written up.”

Despite its faults, Romaine still believes in the invincibility of the Los Angeles Police Department, even after this tumultuous year of marches on Parker Center and a blistering report from the Christopher Commission.

“It was one rotten incident,” he said of the King beating. “We will outlast it.”

When Fred Willoughby, a small-town boy from Utah, joined his graduating classmates, he thought “it was the finest police department in the world.”

The day after the ceremony, he faced a trial by fire: He was immediately sent to help patrol portions of Watts where distrust of the police was still hanging heavy in the air.

“When I hit the streets,” he said, “they put us in a car with three other officers with shotguns and I’ll tell you, they had hundreds of people in the streets.

“We were being called pigs and the Gestapo and police brutality was a constant thing you heard. The pressure was there. It was really a hostile, violent time.”

Willoughby left the force after five years, moved to Boulder, Colo., and joined the Sheriff’s Department.

His experience with the Los Angeles Police Department won him instant respect, and he soon was training fellow Colorado law enforcement officers on drug raids, riot control and self-defense. “The more I showed them, the more recognition I got,” he said. “We were making arrests like crazy.”

Eventually, he was named night watch commander. He followed that with a campaign for county sheriff. But he lost and, frustrated, returned to Utah, where today he works Saturdays and Sundays as a private security guard, and drives a truck during the week.

“I was once so proud to be LAPD,” he said. “And then when I heard the situation with Rodney King, it just about made me sick. It hurt me emotionally. It hurt my stomach. I just couldn’t believe those officers would pound and pound and pound on that guy.”

The Police Department that gave him a baptism by fire on the streets of Los Angeles, the same department whose reputation he borrowed to teach others, is gone, he said, replaced by a new breed of officers he does not recognize on the King videotape.

“It was such a great Police Department,” he said. “I really loved it.”

About two-thirds of the Class of ’65 have left the department, seeking jobs elsewhere, returning home to small-town California or Utah or Nevada.

One class member, Sgt. James Rangno, suffered a series of neck and stomach injuries on the job and once was struck by a car while working an undercover narcotics detail. Six years ago, at a meeting before the police pension board, he broke down and said the stress and strain of police work was just too much.

“I have headaches that last more than one day,” he said. “Sometimes they last two days. I have times where it’s almost impossible for me to even get out of bed. My wife has on occasion--this sounds absolutely ridiculous--put a belt around my head and helped me to sit up to get out of bed.”

Other class members found themselves in near-death situations. Ernest Malan and Joseph Dvorak put their lives on the line, forced to shoot suspects who threatened others.

And then there was Fred Early, a stocky young officer remembered for his effervescent smile. He was seven years into the job when he was beaten in the head and shot twice by a burglar. He slipped into a coma and died at age 31, a father of four children.

Today, his murder remains unsolved. But not forgotten.

Even at the height of the uproar over Rodney King, as the department was facing attack from seemingly ever segment of the community, Romaine remembered to pull out the dusty homicide file, looking for new clues into the death of his classmate. Although the detective found nothing to encourage him, his hopes were not dashed.

“You know,” he said recently. “I should look at that case again.”