Guard Units Ordered to Leave L.A. : Riots: Governor takes action after police agencies assure him they can protect the public. Only a small ‘ready response’ military team will remain.

Declaring that “it’s time to bring the troops home and get on with the task of rebuilding Los Angeles,” Gov. Pete Wilson on Sunday ordered the immediate withdrawal of the remaining California National Guard, leaving the city to fend for itself in the aftermath of the century’s worst civil disorder.

Wilson pulled out about 3,000 troops--all but the final vestiges of a military presence that numbered more than 10,000 in the days after the rioting. The governor said he issued the order after being assured by local law enforcement agencies that “there are adequate resources to protect the public.”

The governor “desires that the situation in Los Angeles return to a sense of normalcy and it’s not normal to have armed soldiers on your streets,” said James Lee, a spokesman for Wilson.

Nonetheless, Wilson said a “ready response” unit of military police and infantry will be maintained in the city to back up police and sheriff’s deputies, and another 1,500 Guard members who live in the Los Angeles area will be available to respond within hours if violence flares anew.

Lee said he could not disclose the number of “ready response troops” beyond saying it will be fewer than 1,000. He said anyone considering new violence and looting might be encouraged if they felt there were not enough troops to keep order. The withdrawal, which is to begin this morning, is expected to take several days, and local law enforcement officials said they had been told that just a few hundred troops will remain.

“We obviously wouldn’t have agreed to it if we didn’t think that was the way to go,” said LAPD spokesman Lt. John Dunkin. “We have sufficient people available and in the streets to handle things.”

In ravaged South Los Angeles, weary residents hoped for the best but expressed fears that their streets would again erupt as the city’s legal system continues to grapple with the fallout from the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case.

Among other points of potential tension, prosecutors have announced that they will retry Laurence M. Powell, the only LAPD officer not fully exonerated in the beating; authorities have denied bail for four young men accused in the attack on trucker Reginald O. Denny, and Sgt. Stacey C. Koon has penned an unsold memoir of the beating that has been denounced by civil rights leaders as racist.

“They might as well leave the National Guard here, because they’re going to have to call them right back again,” said Denise Bradford, a 25-year-old licensed vocational nurse who lives near South Park in South Los Angeles.

Lee Wilson, a 33-year-old neighbor, agreed.

“I’m not going to say that people are planning to do anything (when the troops pull out),” said Wilson, as he hawked “Black Power” T-shirts near the park. “It’s just that it’s less intimidating without them.”

But at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, one of the worst-hit areas during the revolt, Jamal Smith, a 19-year-old West Los Angeles College student, was more optimistic about the pullout.

“It won’t make a difference,” Smith said, noting that the National Guard’s presence had been dwindling for several days and that their Humvees and camouflage suits had all but disappeared.

“They’re not on the street now,” he said. “I forgot they were here, myself.”

Lee, the governor’s spokesman, said the Guard pullout would begin immediately and continue through the night, to “get as many of these people back to their normal lives as possible by Monday morning.”

But Guard officials said it will take several days for all troops to pack their gear and prepare to ship the heavy military equipment that has become a fixture on Los Angeles streets in recent weeks.

“It’s going to be a phased pullout,” said spokeswoman Maj. Pat Antosh. “We’re not going to all up and leave.”

As of Sunday evening, Guard members stationed at the Coliseum had not received their orders to leave. Several said they are anxious to go home to their families, past-due bills and missed college classes.

“The feeling right now with these guys is it would take three minutes to get on our trucks and go home,” said Staff Sgt. Gary Thompson, who added that his company had been called out to assist police only once during the last 10 days.

Antosh said Guard senior commanders were advised of the withdrawal late Sunday and troops were to get the word this morning.

The pullout order came as the city was buckling down to the nuts and bolts of recovering from the rebellion. From the leveled commercial strips to the vaulted recesses of South Los Angeles’ churches, it was clear on Sunday that, with the rioting quelled, the battle for the city’s hearts and minds had begun.

* At Trinity Baptist Church on Jefferson Boulevard, police critic Warren Christopher told black churchgoers that Koon’s unpublished recollections on the King beating are a “deplorable indicator that racism lives in the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Koon, reached by telephone, declined to defend his work, explaining that he had promised “Good Morning America” an exclusive interview with his reaction.

* Throughout South Los Angeles, police monitored the progress of a fragile, post-riot gang truce, threatened this weekend by a series of drive-by shootings that left at least five dead and three wounded.

Nonetheless, a picnic at South Park was held as planned by members of previously hostile factions of Crips and Bloods, who have vied for control of the area’s neighborhoods for a generation. About 200 youths and their relatives--some sporting bandannas that were both Bloods red and Crips blue--gathered at the rap concert and food fest sponsored by the city and Community Youth Gang Services.

“This ain’t no gang thing. It’s a unite thing,” said a man whose customized baseball cap identified him as “Lou 2 of the Broadway S. Crips.”

* In an Inglewood beauty shop, relatives of a man charged with beating trucker Denny held a $20-a-hairdo fund-raiser to help defray the defendant’s legal fees.

“We just want to make sure he gets a fair trial,” said Roshelle Bailey, 39, a hair stylist whose brother, Henry Keith Watson, was charged last week with attempted murder, mayhem, torture and robbery in connection with the April 29 attack.

* In South Los Angeles, a Pentecostal minister stepped up the call for contributions to riot victims after a storage room full of Pampers, canned food and other supplies was looted by weekend burglars.

Bishop A. J. Carpenter of the Christian Bible Kingdom Holy Deliverance Ministries on 119th Street said someone drove a van up to the back door of his church, broke in with a crowbar and loaded up items intended for riot victims.

“All our stores burned down and people are coming in every day asking for food,” Carpenter said. “You hate to turn them away hungry.” But the burglar--who brazenly tried to peddle some of the loot to people in the neighborhood--left only enough to feed a handful of people, Carpenter said.

The highest-profile stumping was done by Christopher, who visited five black congregations Sunday, urging passage of the proposed City Charter Amendment F on the June 2 ballot.

The amendment, among other things, would revise the way the police chief is hired and would limit chiefs to two five-year terms. Such changes, Christopher told the worshipers, would improve accountability by police who have “repetitively used excessive violence” and who suffer from “a deep sense of racism and bias.”

As evidence, Christopher cited the 703 ethnic, racial and sexual slurs uncovered during an investigation of the Police Department by the commission bearing his name.

He added that Koon’s manuscript--which, among other things, refers to King as “Mandingo” and repeats fellow officers’ jokes that “blacks are too dumb to go into shock”--is “an unfortunate reminder” of the department’s problems.

“I would like to respond to that, but I can’t,” said Koon in a telephone interview Sunday afternoon.

“Last night, I gave an exclusive interview to Good Morning America, and promised I wouldn’t give any other comments until it airs on Monday morning,” Koon said.

But friends and relatives of the so-called “L.A. Four”--the men charged with attacking Denny at the intersection of Florence and Normandie--agreed with Christopher’s claims and worried that the criminal justice system was incapable of meting out justice for black defendants.

At the fund-raiser for Watson, many noted that Watson and his co-defendants--Damian Monroe (Football) Williams, Antoine Eugene Miller and Gary Williams--have been denied bail, while Powell, the sole remaining defendant in the King case, is allowed to walk free.

“This is not about whether you think these men are innocent or guilty,” said Gregory Robinson, co-owner of Shearmetrics beauty salon in Inglewood, where Watson’s sister works.

“We just want to see them get a fair trial. They deserve that. Everybody does.”

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Mathis Chazanov and Jim Newton in Los Angeles and Daniel M. Weintraub in Sacramento.

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