Police Urge Residents to Stay Away From Rally : Simi Valley: Officials fear violence between a white supremacist group and counterdemonstrators.

Warning that there could be violence today when white supremacists rally at the East County Courthouse, Simi Valley police have asked residents to stay away from the event.

“This may not be a fun day in the park,” Simi Valley Police Chief Lindsey P. Miller said Friday at a press conference with Mayor Greg Stratton.

The Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement has said it will hold the rally as a show of support for the innocent verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case. Other groups have said they will hold counterdemonstrations, and Miller said that could turn an otherwise peaceful event into a violent confrontation.

Miller said members of Queer Nation, a gay-rights organization with a chapter in Los Angeles, have a history of using violence in demonstrations. Other demonstrators protesting past Nationalist Movement parades have also sparked violence, Miller said.

Besides Queer Nation, at least six organizations representing minorities, women and gays in Los Angeles and Ventura counties have said they will join the counterdemonstration.

City officials said they do not expect any problems with Simi Valley residents. But Stratton said there is a risk that residents strolling near the 1 p.m. demonstration “would get in-between these outside groups that are not indigenous to our community.”

“We’re not trying to curb anyone’s right to make their views known,” Miller said. “Sometimes the best way to deal with these kinds of people is to totally ignore them.”

Cathe Cashman, a spokeswoman in Los Angeles for the coalition of groups that will protest the rally, accused the Simi Valley Police Department of “setting policy for our movement.” She said Queer Nation has joined the coalition before and has not caused problems.

“We believe they should be focusing on the Nazis and not us,” Cashman said.

A Los Angeles Police Department spokesman said his department has arrested Queer Nation members at demonstrations in that city in the past. But he said the arrests generally do not involve violent behavior.

“They have had a number of demonstrations that did not result in anyone from that group being arrested,” Los Angeles Police Lt. John Dunkin said.

Members of Queer Nation’s Los Angeles chapter were among hundreds of gay-rights activists that disrupted a fund-raising dinner attended by Gov. Pete Wilson in Woodland Hills in November to protest his veto of a gay-rights bill. Several arrests were made at the protest, but no injuries were reported.

Outbreaks of violence by protesters enraged by the Nationalist Movement’s philosophy of white supremacy have reportedly occurred at past rallies and parades sponsored by the group. Although the supremacist group typically attracts fewer than a dozen supporters to rallies, hundreds--and sometimes thousands--of inflamed counterdemonstrators often show up, according to news reports.

At a Nationalist Movement march three years ago in Atlanta, Ga., several National Guardsmen and police officers were hit by a hail of bricks and bottles thrown by counterdemonstrators. More than 2,000 troops and police were called to protect five members of the Nationalist Movement after as many as 4,500 people descended on the area to protest the rally.

In 1988, police canceled a planned parade by the white supremacist group at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta when violence from nearby protesters threatened to get out of hand, according to reports. A group of about 1,000 counterdemonstrators protested the parade by 150 members of the Nationalist Movement.

The group’s leader, Mississippi attorney Richard Barrett, is described by a spokeswoman for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith as a publicity seeker who thrives on media coverage.

Besides the Atlanta incidents, Barrett has organized two supremacist rallies in New York after racial incidents, said Janet Himler, associate director of the league’s Los Angeles chapter. She said the group also organized rallies in Arizona, where voters defeated a proposal to establish a holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

Himler said the Simi Valley march is an attempt to “exploit tensions” after the not-guilty verdicts in the trial of four white Los Angeles police officers. The officers had faced charges relating to the March, 1991, beating of Rodney G. King, a black motorist who had attempted to flee from police.

“He seeks a tinderbox in society and attempts to act as a spark to set racism aflame,” Himler said of Barrett.

Barrett has written a book advocating the resettlement of “those who were once citizens” to Puerto Rico, Mexico, Israel, the Orient and Africa, Himler said. Barrett also has created a television program, “Airlink,” to be shown over public-access channels. The show features extremists discussing issues such as neo-Nazism, the Confederate flag and the skinhead movement, Himler said.

Simi Valley officials denied Barrett’s application for a parade permit, but said they could not stop him from marching because of constitutional considerations. City officials have said that the police will provide protection for both the Nationalist Movement marchers and for counterdemonstrators.