Officials Concerned About County’s Image : Simi Valley: Some say the verdict may reinforce the perception that the area is extremely conservative.

Only minutes after a jury in Simi Valley found four police officers not guilty of assaulting Rodney G. King, Ventura County Supervisor John K. Flynn got a phone call from a man who was furious.

“Is this the kind of justice you have in your county?” the San Bernardino County resident demanded before angrily hanging up.

Since November, when the King case was moved from Los Angeles to a new, nearly vacant courthouse in Simi Valley, critics have said the move to the affluent bedroom community in eastern Ventura County enhanced the officers’ chances of acquittal.

Because the four Los Angeles officers are white and King is black, race has been an issue in the case. Ventura County is 66% white, compared with 41% in Los Angeles County. It is 2% black, compared with 11% in Los Angeles County.

And the level of crime in Ventura County--the safest urban county in the West--is not comparable to that in most of Los Angeles, critics noted. The FBI reported just this week that two Ventura County cities, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, were the safest large cities in the United States in 1991.

In ordering the trial moved to Ventura County, Judge Stanley M. Weisberg rejected the prosecution’s argument that the trial should be moved to a more racially diverse, less conservative area such as Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is 17% black.

Among the strongest early critics of the move was John R. Hatcher III, president of the Ventura County chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, who predicted acquittal and denounced Ventura County as “the home breeding ground for the David Dukes, Tom Metzgers and skinheads of America.”

“Rodney King is on trial, not those officers,” Hatcher said. “King will lose and the officers will win.”

Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury and others immediately denounced Hatcher’s comments as ridiculous, and Bradbury said nearly 90% of criminal defendants are convicted in Ventura County regardless of their race.

Ventura criminal defense attorney George Eskin echoed the sentiment of many Wednesday in expressing concern that the verdict of acquittal could hurt Ventura County’s image.

“I’m fearful that this will reinforce a perspective that we’re an extremely conservative, redneck community,” he said.

The verdict rattled some county residents who said they wanted to believe that a Ventura County juror is just as capable of a fair verdict as any other.

“When the case was moved here, some civil right leaders . . . said that was like moving it to Mississippi, and people kind of laughed at that,” Oxnard civil rights lawyer Barbara Macri-Ortiz said. “Well, maybe they were right.”

Ventura County Public Defender Kenneth I. Clayman, a defense attorney in Los Angeles for 17 years, said it was unfortunate that the King case was moved from central Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, the chances were greater that a racially diverse jury with more personal street experience with police would be chosen, Clayman said. The King jury was made up of 10 Anglos, one Asian and one Latina.

“I’ve always been astounded at how fair Ventura County juries are,” Clayman said. “But I would say that if the case had been tried in downtown Los Angeles, there could have been different verdicts.”

Even in the Ventura County district attorney’s office, there was almost unanimous disbelief as the verdicts were read.

“There were probably 50 prosecutors watching in our conference room,” Bradbury said, “and the overwhelming sentiment was that they would all be convicted.”

Bradbury, however, said the acquittals speak more to the effectiveness of the defense attorneys than to the perception or bias of the jury.

“They had the awesome task of getting the jury to look beyond the videotape, and they accomplished it,” Bradbury said.

Simi Valley Councilwoman Judy Mikels also warned against drawing conclusions about the county from the verdicts.

“I don’t know that there’s truly any significance to the verdict other than 12 people making a collective decision,” she said. “It wasn’t rich against poor or conservative against liberal. It was just a case of those hard-working, honest people making the best judgment they could make.

“Was it right? I don’t know.”

Times correspondent Kay Saillant contributed to this story.