State Attorney General Says Verdicts Left Him Stunned : King case: But Daniel Lungren warns against not looking at ‘the total context of the entire trial.’ He also criticizes TV for its treatment of gang leaders.

In his first extensive public comment on the case, California Atty. Gen. Daniel Lungren said Friday that he was stunned by the Rodney G. King beating verdicts, but urged an audience of lawyers to educate the public not to base opinions on “any one piece of evidence,” such as the videotape of police clubbing King.

Lungren also criticized television broadcasts in which gang leaders were treated as “if they were leaders of sovereign nations,” and given air time to make statements about “peace agreements and nonaggression pacts.”

Lungren, whose office has played only a minor role in the case--deciding not to prosecute King on speeding and resisting-arrest charges--told a Sherman Oaks audience: “I will confess to you I was stunned at the verdict.”

“It is incumbent on those of us who are lawyers to express some words of caution about looking exclusively at any one piece of evidence in any particular case,” he added. “All of us have been fooled, I think, by our own assessment when we have looked at one piece or several pieces and not at the total context of the entire trial.”

The Republican attorney general also expressed doubt that gang members will carry out a recent pledge to end the warfare that authorities say resulted in 770 deaths last year in Los Angeles County. “If it’s true, God bless ‘em,” he said. “We’ll all be better off for it.”

Lungren spoke at the Valley Community Legal Foundation’s annual Law Day Luncheon, normally a forum for unrestrained praise for law enforcement and the courts and the handing out of awards to top police officers.

The state’s top law enforcement official defended the vast majority of police officers, and said he was “sick and tired of seeing peace officers maligned and insulted and portrayed as some kind of monsters.”

But Lungren, a former Long Beach congressman whose political career was built largely on support for anti-crime legislation, also laced his speech with denunciations of officers who “stain the shield.” He described as “aberrant” the actions of the four officers who were charged with beating King, although he avoided describing the beating as a criminal offense.

Three were found not guilty April 29 by a Ventura County jury, and the fourth, Laurence M. Powell, is to be retried on a single count of using excessive force, on which jurors deadlocked 8 to 4 in favor of acquittal.

Despite his surprise at the jury’s verdicts, Lungren said he believes in the “essential worth of the jury system.”

But he said widespread looting during the Los Angeles riots served as a warning that “we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that social and economic discrimination and discouragement can lead to a serious sense of detachment from the law and our institutions.”

As an antidote to such social ills, Lungren endorsed proposals by U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack F. Kemp aimed at alleviating poverty.

These include a plan under which residents of public housing would be allowed to buy their units, and creation of federal enterprise zones, which use tax breaks and other inducements to attract employers to low-income areas.

Lungren spokesman Jim Robinson said the attorney general had been “busy in Sacramento” the past two weeks and had not been asked for comment on the King trial or the ensuing riots, which devastated not only portions of Los Angeles but parts of Long Beach, which Lungren represented in Congress from 1980 to 1990.