AFTER THE RIOTS: REBUILDING THE COMMUNITY : Frustrated Officers Try to Sort Out the Crisis : LAPD: As morale suffers and their sense of purpose is tested, the rank and file attempt to deal with the criticism.

The recruiting ads used to declare that they come in only one color: blue.

Yet the officers of the Los Angeles Police Department mirror the city they protect and serve. Like the rest of us, then, they too are worn out, angry, perplexed and heartsore.

This weekend, after 10 days that shook the city, morale seemingly dropped about as low as their energy reserves. Officers have thrown themselves unsparingly into double shifts, as if to make up for their top brass’s initial hesitation on the afternoon of April 29.

“I think that there is plenty of blame to go around,” said a veteran Hollywood Division officer. “The media’s to blame, the police are to blame, and the politicians are to blame. Nobody’s going to come out of this clean. We’re going to be living with this stain for decades.”

The LAPD of “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” was upright and righteous--the one big-city police department, comedians joked, whose officers did not take tips. But the mission and the reality of that LAPD have been shaken up and scrutinized, never more than this past year. And to each man and woman who pins on the badge with its silhouette of City Hall, the sense of purpose and job satisfaction have never been more tested than in recent weeks.

Out in the street more than a week ago, not far from her home in the ravaged Wilshire Division, Officer Rhonda Mitchell found herself poised in riot formation and riot gear, “flames behind us and flames beside us and people in front of us throwing things at us. It wasn’t what I want police work to be.”

For the first time in his 22-year career, Hollywood vice officer Tony Yancey--in uniform and taking reports Sunday--said he feels like “the overall morale of the Police Department is in the toilet.”

At Parker Center, training officer Michael Serafin said: “I’m getting all these mixed signals--’When we needed you, you weren’t there,’ and ‘Why don’t you just leave us alone?’ We’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t. I came on this job to do one thing: to serve the community and help the public. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to do that if nobody’s even speaking to me.”

The Riot

For Sgt. Paul Enox, 46, a 17-year veteran and a black officer who was a National Guardsman during the Watts riots, his enduring bleak memory of this riot “will be sitting at home watching Florence and Normandie.”

He called Harbor station--should he come in to work? No. So he kept watching, full of rage and frustration, and he remembers addressing the screen, saying: “When are you guys going to get there? . . . I felt that at any moment I would see a line of black-and-whites charging in on the location.”

After all that training and field work, the unabated looting was like a slap in the face for Sgt. Ron Batesole.

“My jaws were tight. It was such frustration. We couldn’t arrest anybody,” he said. Police would run the looters out of one building, and they “would just run off to the next shopping center. It was like trying to step on a glob of mercury.”

Last Thursday morning, at the Korean-owned indoor swap meet on 104th Street and Central Avenue in Watts, Enox arrived with four officers. Five of them to handle 150 to 200 looters.

“People just didn’t seem to have a fear of the police. I felt astounded by the number of people that, when we rolled up, had a very casual attitude (about looting). It wasn’t like: ‘Drop what I have and run.’ It was: ‘I’m just going to quicken my pace and not let go of what I had.’ ”

No one was shooting looters, “so no one had fear of use of deadly force,” Enox said. And he was not about to tell his officers to start. “That certainly was not something that would have contributed to the situation.”

It is not like they were invisible. “People did make an effort to leave. But what surprised me the most was that people didn’t drop what they had. I was able to make several people drop what they had only because I blocked their exit.”

The Criticism

Blame has been dealt as readily as hands of poker this week--blame within the LAPD and outside it, blame high and low.

Batesole, 47, said street officers feel like victims of the news media.

“It gets them down, working 12-hour shifts day after day, then reading in the paper how their department is ineffective,” he said. “Everyone’s out there pointing fingers and placing blame when they should be trying to figure out what’s to be learned.”

At Rampart Division, Assistant Watch Cmdr. John Vanelli feels like the department’s “overall image” was “tainted.” But “I don’t think a lot of people know the job a police officer does. There were a lot of heroes here, in the Southern Division and Western, and no one will ever know what they did. It’s frustrating.”

A Hollywood desk officer said firmly: “Some things should be left to professionals; that’s what we are.” Police should not have to follow recommendations “dictated by someone from the comfort of their house or their living room couch. You don’t see them doing that to doctors, lawyers or engineers.”

William Owens is a grandfatherly looking 51-year-old detective pressed into a rarely used uniform and even rarer guard duty outside the Rampart station Saturday.

“It kind of hurts when everyone turns against the department, and I don’t think it’s right,” Owens said. “We’re just normal people trying to do their job.”

He and other officers have not yet listened to Chief Daryl F. Gates’ remarks about police deployment on the first day. But to Owens, anyone who criticizes the department is a “little person.”

The Brass

In the first frantic hours after the rioting began, some of the LAPD’s ranking officers, scattered as far away as Ventura County, were scrambling like Mack Sennett cops to get a response together.

Vanelli can understand why people are aggrieved about that; he, too, wonders what went wrong at the 77th Street station. His own men and women had been training for just such circumstances. “If it would have started here at Rampart,” he said, “we would have reacted, taken the necessary steps and possibly there would have been a different outcome.”

Wilshire’s Batesole spoke of Mike Moulin, the 77th Street lieutenant who ordered troops from the riot’s epicenter: “I’ve worked with Mike over the years, and he’s no better and no worse than the average lieutenant on this job. Other people given that same responsibility probably would have acted the same way. . . . He’s protective of his people and he felt they were going to be overwhelmed and injured.”

Hollywood’s Yancey considers the slow response “pitiful. Absolutely embarrassing.” He blames command staff. “Sometimes the arrogance of the command staff of this Police Department knows no bounds when it comes to being asinine.”

The bickering and back-stabbing over choosing Gates’ successor have bothered him for months; now, “I have never been so embarrassed in my life to watch the news footage” of the unchecked rioting.

He is “not disenchanted with police work and is not disenchanted with the city.” But for the first time, “I’m disenchanted with the command staff of the LAPD.” He does not blame Gates, but “somewhere between him and my captain here in Hollywood there was a tremendous breakdown.”

Officer Fred Dahl, a 23-year veteran with 20 years in Hollywood, said early TV coverage “showed what happened. It didn’t show what policemen would want to do. Talk to any street policeman. They would all want to go down and squelch the upheaval, the initial problem.”

Arrests have been down ever since the beating of Rodney G. King, and one recently retired LAPD officer said the riot reactions are a part of that second-guessing. In upper echelons in particular, “everybody’s afraid to make a decision,” he said. “You had (line) officers who desperately wanted to go in and do their job. There was damn near a mutiny.”

Says Enox: “I feel bad for officers in particular and bad for the department in general because we have a lot of brave men and women who would have been willing to go in there (early hot spots) and didn’t get the opportunity.”

The Residents

Cops have operated for years on a simple binary principle: The good people want them; the bad guys do not.

One officer is convinced that the riots drew the lines even deeper.

They “forced a lot of people to get off the fence. Either you’re for the police or not for the police. If you’re not for the police, then you are for anarchy, which is what we had out here. They may not like us, but the people have to support us for their safety.”

Out at the Wilshire Division on Saturday, police and volunteers put together a hasty food distribution program, and more than 300 families lined up in the parking lot.

Juanita Weed, 32, waited in line with the others. The neighborhood store, behind the police station, was burned out. In the past, she complained, police “never were there when I needed them.” Her thinking has begun to change. “I feel for them having to go through all this rioting,” she said. “We’re all human beings and nobody deserves to have to go through something like that.”

Batesole has done a little rethinking himself. Before the riots, “we had a little clearer idea of where we were headed as a department. We were working with the community to head off blight. We were creating more and more Neighborhood Watch groups. We were teaching them to protect themselves, in a way, and work with us.”

Now, he said, it is hard to know what to do next.

“I think we were on the right track,” he said. “And I pray we can get back to that point. I see my own job proceeding with a little bit more empathy, a deeper understanding of how upset the community is by what it saw on the Rodney King video and the verdict on the police officers.”

Detective Owens, surrounded by a clutch of kids, stroked the head of 9-year-old Rose Phommanyvong. “Thank God for kids like this,” he said. “They know we’re good and here to help them.”

What touched Enox most out of the smoky chaos happened Friday afternoon, eastbound on Gage Avenue near Vermont Avenue. “This pickup truck pulls up alongside me. Two white gentlemen. And this driver says: ‘Officer, can I tell you something?’ And I said: ‘Sure.’ And he gets very choked up and has trouble speaking. And he says: ‘I just want to thank you for what you’re doing.’ What made it so touching was that he was so very heartfelt. I said: ‘Thank you.’ ”

Their Colleagues, Themselves

Rampart officers were treated to a barbecue Saturday in the parking lot, perhaps their first hot meal in 10 days. “People don’t appreciate the job or the organization as much as they should,” said one 15-year veteran. “It makes you doubt whether you should stay. . . . I was going to be a 30-year policeman, but now I’m wondering if I should take my retirement at 20.”

One disheartened friend wants to quit the force to get a job on a small-town police department. “I could always talk him out of it, I always could find the words,” he said, “but now I’ve got nothing to say.”

Yancey knows younger officers who have applied to other departments. “They want to get out of town--off the LAPD.” He fears “that’s going to hurt us.”

A reserve officer just out of the Police Academy said he will look elsewhere for a police job. “The problem is on the street. People are not respecting the LAPD. . . . There is a whole city of citizens that don’t respect you. It’s not worth it.”

A black officer who grew up in South-Central and feels rather like an outcast in Hollywood has jumbled feelings about the riots and his colleagues.

Although he cannot as a lawman condone the riots, he can empathize with the anger. “I’m a black officer, but how many times can you kick people in the head? I honestly feel that what was done (rioting) had to be done.” The riots were a “message from God”--one he fears his white colleagues will not get. He also feared that the new chief, Willie L. Williams, will not make much difference. “There will never be equality for blacks and minorities in California. There never has been,” he said.

Their Reputation

Police work has changed gradually since training officer Michael Serafin joined the department 21 years ago. From a job emphasizing “keeping order and putting bad people in jail,” he said, “we’re more into community relations now and we sometimes have to bend backward to meet that role.”

“And while we have to try to understand the public, they can’t put themselves in our shoes. They don’t know how rough it can be.”

For many people, Enox believes, there will be one image of the LAPD “that won’t go away no matter what happens . . . Florence and Normandie. And I think it will be etched in the mind, not only for civilians but for the officers.”

Serafin keeps a different image in his head: crowds attacking Parker Center, demonstrators climbing heedlessly on the black granite fountain commemorating officers who have died in the line of duty.

“I was angry. I was hurt,” he said. “They can’t know how we feel about that memorial and what they were doing.”

That question has summed up the past weeks: Can any of us know how the person next to us is feeling?

Said a black officer who would not give his name:

“People are looking at me different, talking to me different. I come from a diverse cultural background myself, both Korean and black, but some people think I can’t possibly understand what they feel.”