AFTER THE RIOTS: REBUILDING THE COMMUNITY : Quayle Defends LAPD’s Role in Handling Riots : Politics: Vice president says officers responded slowly but that they are overstressed and overworked. He says law and order has high priority in Bush Administration’s urban agenda.

Taking issue with numerous critics, Vice President Dan Quayle applauded the Los Angeles Police Department on Sunday for its response to the riots and declared that law and order will have top priority in the Bush Administration’s urban agenda.

Quayle acknowledged that Los Angeles police did not move quickly enough against rioters but expressed sympathy for them, saying: “They’re overstressed, they’re overworked (and operating) under very difficult circumstances.”

Quayle noted that Los Angeles has fewer police officers per capita than many other large cities, including Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta.

“I give a lot of credit to the law enforcement officials and to the Los Angeles Police Department,” Quayle said. “I think they deserve our full support.”

Many residents of Los Angeles and some public officials have charged that a slow police response to violence following the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating trial allowed the unrest to spread out of control. The National Guard and federal troops had to quell the riots. Even Sheriff Sherman Block and Fire Chief Donald O. Manning have severely criticized the LAPD’s response.

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the vice president said President Bush would seek immediate congressional approval for legislation to provide tax breaks for businesses to invest in inner cities, to spur home ownership for the poor, to revise welfare programs and to offer greater choice of schools.

But Quayle said combatting crime is a higher priority than pinpointing the causes of the violence in the nation’s worst civil disorder this century.

“Let’s make sure that we put law and order right at the top,” he said. “Let’s recognize that crime hurts the poor the most, and minorities. . . . If you’re going to have fear in the cities, businesses aren’t going to go down and invest there.”

Quayle said he spoke to the President after Bush visited the riot-ravaged city last week.

“One of the things that came through in his trip to Los Angeles was the respect that the people had for the Los Angeles Police Department and the law enforcement folks and the federal officials that came in and restored order,” Quayle said on Cable News Network’s “Newsmaker Sunday.”

Quayle said the nation would have to build more prisons to house convicted criminals, and he brushed aside any thought of placing new controls on gun ownership.

“Many of the Koreans and other folks there were glad they had guns,” he said of the Los Angeles riots. “I don’t think we need to look at gun control . . . the problem is a people problem.”

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, appearing on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley,” said the President will ask for bipartisan support this week for congressional approval of emergency legislation to aid cities.

“We have denied credit and capital to the inner cities of America through red-lining,” Kemp said. “The President wants to green-line the inner city. He wants to flood the inner city with credit and capital.”

Kemp said Bush was right to send federal troops to California to stop the rioting, but he added: “Now I think we need a bipartisan, conservative-based, anti-poverty program designed to empower people.”

Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn and Kansas City Mayor Emmanuel Cleaver II, however, complained on the same ABC program that the federal government has walked away from urban problems for more than a decade.

“Forty-two percent of the nation’s poor live in the core cities,” Cleaver said. “We need help. We can’t deal with all of the mammoth problems without some federal help.”

Flynn proposed creation of a national commission on urban neglect. “It would be a mistake to call this a Los Angeles problem or a city problem or an urban problem or a minority problem,” Flynn said. “This is an American problem, and America has to deal with it.”

Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) said both liberal and conservative approaches should be used to rebuild cities and provide jobs through a neighborhood reconstruction corps with total federal funding of $10 billion to $15 billion a year for the next decade.

“This is not a problem that’s going to be solved just by dollars,” Bradley said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Bradley said Bush’s proposals to create urban enterprise zones that would subsidize business investment and a program to help poor families buy homes “could easily be passed in the Congress, I would think.”

Quayle said the President will seek swift approval for aid to urban America.

“Let us work together in this window of opportunity,” Quayle said. “Why can’t Congress do something by Memorial Day? They’ve had the legislation. They know what the President has talked about for these last three years. Let’s get on with it.”

Earlier, Kemp had suggested a July 4 deadline for congressional action on the urban aid package.