Samoans Urged to Avoid Violence : Courts: Church officials and chiefs call on residents to express their outrage peacefully in wake of mistrial.

Leaders from Los Angeles County’s Samoan community expressed outrage but also pleaded for calm Tuesday after a mistrial was ruled in the case of a Compton police officer charged with voluntary manslaughter in the shooting deaths of two Samoan brothers.

Samoan church officials and matais , or chiefs, gathered at a Carson meeting hall to denounce a hung jury in the trial of Alfred Skiles Jr., accused in the February, 1991, killings of Pouvi Tualaulelei, 34, and Itali Tualaulelei, 22.

The leaders of the group said they would press for a retrial as well as a federal civil rights investigation into the killings.

“We are outraged by the way this trial ended,” said Chief Tua’au (Pele) Faletogo, chairman of the Samoan Council of Chiefs, which represents 36 area chiefs, including those in Compton. “But we are determined to express our outrage as a unified community in a peaceful, dignified and orderly manner.

“It will only compound the outrage if anyone from any community uses this as an excuse” for lawlessness, he said.

Several speakers at the gathering contended that the criminal justice system is biased against minorities and that justice failed, as in the trial that resulted in not-guilty verdicts against four Los Angeles police officers accused of beating Rodney G. King. Some also lashed out at Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner.

“I feel the district attorney has let us down in not prosecuting these cases successfully,” said Carson Mayor Michael I. Mitoma. He urged those in attendance to “get out and make a difference at the polls” in Reiner’s bid for reelection.

The controversy over the shooting has sparked an activism in Los Angeles County’s Samoan community that has not been seen since Samoans began arriving in significant numbers about 40 years ago. More than half of the estimated 12,000 Samoans in the county live in Carson, Compton and Long Beach.

“The community is shocked right now, needless to say,” said David Barrett Cohen, a former Republican congressional candidate who is of Samoan descent. “I don’t know what trial those jurors watched, but it wasn’t the same trial I watched.”

The controversies over the shooting and, now, the mistrial have also highlighted cultural and generational differences among Samoans.

The meeting Tuesday, which was attended by about 150 people, was seen by some as a test of the influence of the chiefs--who are all-powerful on the islands of American Samoa and Western Samoa but have mostly a symbolic role on the mainland.

They have called for calm and were concerned that younger Samoans might resort to violence.

“The matai system back home would control everybody,” said High Chief Papaliitele Alailima. “Whatever the matai says, they follow. Over here, it’s kind of hard.”

Fuiavailili Alailima, a Cal State Dominguez Hills student and president of the school’s Pacific Islander Student Union, said he and others met with Pacific Islander students at several area junior and senior high schools to make their plea in person.

Nevertheless, Alailima said he was unsure whether the younger Samoans would listen.

“On the one hand, there’s respect for authority and even passivity,” Alailima said. “On the other, there’s the values that come over the TV set, the glamorization of violence.”

Just outside the meeting hall, normally used for bingo games, a carload of youths tore through an adjacent street with a hand-painted sign that denounced police.