4 Cities Stop Personal Chats Via Computers in Police Cars : Messages: The mobile digital terminals were intended for official business. But one chief says records show they were frequently used as an ‘electronic dating service.’

Concerned that police spent too much time chitchatting about their personal lives instead of tending to their duties, four South Bay police departments have banned computer communications between their officers.

Police chiefs in El Segundo, Gardena, Hawthorne and Manhattan Beach last month ordered a halt to electronic messaging between patrol cars, leaving officers to communicate mostly via their radios.

The action by the chiefs follows by several months revelations that Los Angeles Police Department officers had used their patrol car computers to send racist and sexist messages. The commission investigating the LAPD in the wake of the Rodney King beating found that computer messages demonstrated the department tolerated racism, sexism and brutality.

Few blatantly offensive messages were found in reviews of their own departments’ messages, administrators in the South Bay agencies said. But they conceded that their investigations uncovered an “amazing amount of personal communication” via police computers.

Said Manhattan Beach Police Chief Ted Mertens: “Let’s call it what it was. We were running an electronic dating service. . . . There were a number of messages that talked about social activities away from the job.”

The four South Bay departments are among a handful in the county equipped with the computers, known as mobile digital terminals or MDTs. The terminals are attached to patrol car dashboards and allow officers to send messages to each other without being heard across an entire radio frequency.

Officers typed out messages on breaks, as they responded to calls and even stopped at traffic lights. Those riding shotgun in a two-officer car even messaged while their units were in motion.

And with dispatches connected through a regional system, the South Bay Regional Public Communications Authority, officers from all four cities could send messages to each other.

The ban on computer messages was first suggested by a task force of officers in September and adopted the same month by the chiefs of police for a 90-day trial period. The patrol car computers were reprogrammed to prevent car-to-car dispatches, but the computers can still receive calls for service, conduct warrant searches and accept commands from superiors.

The police chiefs made the prohibition permanent last month, after concluding that police work had not suffered without the communications.

Officials at three of the police departments--El Segundo, Gardena and Manhattan Beach--said they approved the ban after checking messages over a period of one or two weeks. Although there was too much personal communication, no severe misconduct was uncovered, the officials said.

“There was nothing that gave us significant heartburn,” Gardena Police Chief Richard Propster said.

Hawthorne police administrators conducted a more extensive review, perusing an entire month of messages, and said that a handful of the department’s 85 sworn officers were reprimanded or counseled for their improper use of the computer system.

The Hawthorne investigation followed a request by The Times to study all of the department’s computer messages for February, 1991--the month before the King beating heightened awareness for the potential abuse of the computers.

There were several messages among the more than 40,000 sent by Hawthorne employees that could be construed as racist, sexist or overly aggressive. Others indicated minor policy violations, such as officers leaving the city without a supervisor’s permission.

In several messages, for instance, officers boasted of the aggressive stance they would take on duty. “I was sharpening my teeth with a file,” one officer said, “getting ready for tonight.” Another told a dispatcher: “I’m going out in a plain unit. Going to really play Rambo now.”

And in still another message, a Hawthorne patrolman told a counterpart in Manhattan Beach: “I think I broke my hand on a guy’s face tonight.”

There is no record of a patrol officer breaking his hand in an altercation with a suspect, or of any excessive force complaint being filed on the date of that message, said Hawthorne Police Capt. Richard Prentice, who reviewed many of the messages.

Prentice said such communications are usually simple cases of braggadocio and do not indicate any mistreatment of civilians.

“Sometimes they want to seem macho. That’s the problem we came across,” Prentice said.

The officers who sent all such messages have been admonished, nonetheless, for sending improper communications, Chief Steven Port said.

In Hawthorne, a mostly black and Latino city that is patrolled by a mostly white police force, officers made occasional references to residents’ ethnicity. Usually this came in mimicking black English--”Are you dissing me, bro?” or “It a colored thang,” or “What it be like.”

Hawthorne administrators said, however, that they were not alarmed by most of the messages. They concluded that many were sent by black officers or merely reflected talk on the streets and were not intended to be pejorative.

Administrators in Hawthorne have filed a complaint with the dispatch center, however, against an employee who made a more overt slur, threatening to “Jap slap” a patrolman.

More common than racial comments were communications about life away from the job--romantic counseling, vacation spots and life at home. Other messages were dubbed by administrators as “MDT romances.”

A male and female officer, for instance, were fond of calling each other pet names--”sexy,” “dearest” and “baby.” But they weren’t always so lovey-dovey.

“I’m not like the rest of your bimbos,” the policewoman once messaged her male colleague. “You can’t read me, nor can you have me.”

He answered: “You couldn’t own a stallion like myself.”

Police administrators said such misbehavior will be prevented by the new controls on the use of the computers. Several radio lines and limited use of the computers will assure that officers have plenty of lines of communication, El Segundo Police Capt. Tim Grimmond said.

“If we can remove distractions, we will,” Grimmond said. “And we have.”

COMPUTER MESSAGES: Officers’ favorite topics: eating, romance and leisure time. B9