Verdicts Greeted With Outrage and Disbelief : Reaction: Many cite videotape of beating and ask how jury could acquit officers. A few voice satisfaction.

Outrage and indignation swept the city Wednesday as citizens rich and poor, black and white, struggled to reconcile the acquittals of four Los Angeles Police Department officers with the alarming, violent images captured on a late-night videotape.

“If something in you can die, that something died,” said the Rev. Cecil L. Murray, who, like countless others, sat spellbound before a television screen as verdicts were read that cleared the officers of criminal wrongdoing in last year’s beating of black motorist Rodney G. King.

Surrounded by a small group of other clergymen in a basement meeting room of his First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South-Central Los Angeles, Murray could only close his eyes, fighting back tears, and label the verdicts a tragedy.

“Not because it’s unbelievable,” he added, echoing the cynicism and bitterness that sprang from homes, streets and meeting halls throughout Los Angeles, “but because it is believable. . . . You think rational people will be at least semi-rational. You think civil people will be at least semi-civil. But to come back and see them completely whitewashing something that the whole world witnessed--this is a brutalization of truth.”

The verdicts drew fervent reaction virtually everywhere. A widely outnumbered minority voiced satisfaction with the acquittals. Among them was Barbara Williams, who stood with friends outside the courthouse after the verdict, expressing her support for the four LAPD officers.

“I’m glad they got off,” she said. “They did what they were trained to do.”

But overwhelming sentiment against the acquittals poured forth almost immediately--both in the inner city and in outlying, largely white suburbs. Rose Brown, 43, of Los Angeles, who drove to the Simi Valley courthouse to hear the verdicts, said: “I’m not only shocked, but I’m hurt for Americans as a people. . . . I don’t think Rodney King was on trial, but I think America was on trial.”

Brown then presaged the violence that would break out later in parts of the city, saying: “I am not given to riot, but you just watch. Something’s going to break.”

Linda Johnson Phillips, another Los Angeles resident who attended the trial’s final day, rushed from the courtroom in tears. “The color of your skin determines the degree of justice you get,” she said bitterly. “It’s a shame that America has gotten to the point where people believe what they hear and not what they see.”

Later, community leaders and activist groups met to urge calm, while neighborhoods around them simmered near a boil. At 55th Street and Normandie Avenue in the inner city, 31-year-old Tonia Smith, a mother of two, stood screaming about the verdicts. “It was wrong! Suspended without pay, that’s no justice!” she hollered. “They beat that black man! It’s time for us black folks . . . to reunite. It’s our turn now. We’re tired of being slaves!”

At the same intersection, someone had placed a cardboard sign in the middle of the street, alluding to the white officers: “Black men and women are fair game for shooting and beating at the hands of (Police Chief Daryl F.) Gates’ gang, known as LAPD.”

Elsewhere, a crowd that grew to 200 gathered at the Lake View Terrace location where King’s beating was videotaped by a bystander more than a year ago. Chanting “We Want Justice!” they held signs with slogans--”Honk Your Horns for Guilty,” and, “No Justice for a Brother.”

Twice, passing police cars were pelted with rocks, but the mostly black crowd limited its displays of emotion to verbal blasts.

“This shows you can’t trust the justice system,” said Anthony Ellis, a black man who talked bitterly about the message the verdicts have sent. “They just got a new license--any niggers you see you can beat.”

At the LAPD’s main building downtown, several hundred demonstrators gathered, demanding Gates’ resignation and smashing the glass doors with rocks. “There was no justice for Rodney King. Without justice, there will be no peace,” said one protester, Allen Wesley of South-Central Los Angeles. “No one in this community will abide by anything LAPD says anymore.”

At one point, protesters stormed the building. But police were able to hold off the crowd, arresting one man as he shouted, “You’re choking me, man!”

A number of major activist groups joined in the outcry over the verdicts, including the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Jewish Congress, Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation/Los Angeles.

“The (acquittals) . . . are outrageous, a mockery of justice,” the NAACP’s executive director, Benjamin L. Hooks, said in a statement, comparing the outcome to that of the Scottsboro, Ala., “Boys Case” of 1931, in which an all-white jury convicted nine innocent black youths of raping two white women.

“Given the evidence,” Hooks said of the King verdicts, “it is difficult to see how the jurors will ever live with their consciences.”

Among many activists who expected convictions, there was the same stunned reaction: How could the videotape lie? How could those graphic, painful images--of police officers repeatedly wielding their batons on a suspect lying before them--have been wrong, or so badly skewed?

Many concluded that they could not.

“I couldn’t believe it--I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” said Myrtle City, a longtime Neighborhood Watch block captain in the LAPD’s crime-plagued 77th Division. “To arrest a man is one thing, but to beat him with four or five people, with their guns drawn? I was just shocked.”

Highland Park resident Marianne Hooper, 30, who is white, watched the verdicts at home and voiced the same consternation. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then justice is blind,” Hooper said. “I can’t believe it.”

At the same time, she said, she understands the pressures on police in a city where gang violence and drugs are out of control. “They’re being hit with assault rifles out there,” she said. “It really is a war. What kind of a normal person would not go crazy facing that?”

One white bus driver from the San Fernando Valley branded the jury’s decision “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since Kennedy was shot in ’63.” He spoke of the officers by saying: “Those guys are as guilty as guilty can be.”

Attorney William R. Moore, who watched the announcement of verdicts in a downtown high-rise, lost a $5 bet that at least two of the officers would be convicted on felony counts. Cynically, Moore said the case “only confirmed my view of policing in L.A. I’m sure it happens all the time. . . . Cops kick the . . . out of people and cover it up with phony reports.”

The real victims, he added, are the taxpayers who had to foot the bill for the officers’ conduct.

Another attorney, Nick Gedo, said he cannot comprehend how jurors failed to convict, saying, “I don’t see how you could overcome what I saw on the videotape. The videotape is worth more than 10,000 words.”

The existence of the tape, which made the King case singular among all brutality cases in Los Angeles, carried its message to every corner of the metropolis. Eric Davis and Darryl Strawberry, two outfielders with the Los Angeles Dodgers who grew up in South-Central Los Angeles, expressed their own shock and disbelief.

“When I saw (the video) I thought, ‘Hey, this guy’s got a real good case,’ ” Davis said at Dodger Stadium. “Then you turn around and he doesn’t have a case at all? That’s heavy.”

“It’s kind of hard to believe,” Strawberry said.

Film director John Singleton said: “This shows we are going backward. . . . There is still no justice in this country.”

Andy Cisneros, a teen-ager awaiting a bus in East Los Angeles, said: “A beating is a beating. I thought that then when I first saw the tape, and I think that right now.”

At Cal State Los Angeles, about 40 students watched the verdict announcements at the Student Union. For most, including black student Kim Williams, the acquittals provoked outrage. “How can you look at that video and not convict?” she demanded.

In Westwood, Alison Porter, 24, a high school teaching assistant, called the verdicts ridiculous. “Everybody has a right to a fair trial,” she said, “but it was obvious from the tape, they beat Rodney King and I don’t think there was any excuse for it.

In Long Beach, however, a woman who declined to give her name said she was “tickled as hell” at the verdicts. “I think Rodney King deserved all he got, and I am so glad the police did not get taken up,” she said. “It’s one thing when you’re not breaking the law and that happens to you . . . but when the police have to chase you because you are breaking the law, it’s quite another.”

As darkness fell over Los Angeles, about 2,000 people gathered at Murray’s inner-city church, celebrating their unity against what they considered a bad jury decision. King’s mother, Angela, appeared before the cheering crowd, saying: “I’m not one for speeches, but I want to thank you . . . for being so supportive. And we love you all.”