PERSPECTIVE ON THE D.A. : Wake Up, Prosecutors, and Smell the Smoke : The people’s lawyers can’t always win police brutality cases, but to keep the public trust they should at least try.

Maybe we have been naive. Maybe the loudest and wildest critics of criminal justice in Los Angeles have been right--or at least more right than we ever imagined. The report by Special Counsel James G. Kolts on brutality in the Sheriff’s Department throws a harsh new light on all involved in local law enforcement.

Now we can’t blame it all on Daryl Gates; we can’t even blame it all on the Sheriff’s Department, because Kolts and his staff saved some of their harshest words for the district attorney’s office. It’s not just a police problem any more.

The report by Kolts, a Republican, a former prosecutor and a retired Superior Court judge (appointed by Ronald Reagan) noted that in the past 6 1/2 years, the Sheriff’s Department’s Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau looked into 57 cases of possible criminal misconduct by deputies (these were cases referred for special investigation by the captains of the officers involved); the D.A.’s office prosecuted seven. The department referred 382 questionable shootings by deputies to prosecutors; the D.A.’s office prosecuted one case.

The report cited particulars: “We found incomprehensible a recent D.A. reject of a fatal shooting where there was ample documented evidence that the deputy was combing the streets outside his patrol area, against direct orders not to interfere, looking for a fight one New Year’s Eve. The D.A.’s reject letter explained in soothing tones to the LASD that the case was not prosecutable because of inconsistencies (which we found to be immaterial) in the statements of two eyewitnesses. Contrary to the deputy’s version of the facts, the eyewitnesses and the coroner’s report indicated that the victim was shot in the back and side. There was slim, if any, evidence that the deputy was in danger or could have believed himself to be. The D.A. should have filed a case.”

At a news conference Monday, Merrick J. Bobb, general counsel to the Kolts commission, called the D.A.’s record worse than that of the Sheriff’s Department.

There are many reasons for the failure of the district attorney’s office to pursue vigorously cases against police officers. The most obvious is their difficulty: The verdict in the Rodney King beating trial is just the most dramatic example of how hard it is to win a brutality case against law-enforcement officers.

The psychological obstacles are equally significant. Prosecutors need the full and enthusiastic cooperation of the police to be successful in court. Prosecutions of police officers severely jeopardize that relationship. Moreover, prosecutors consider themselves to be on the same side as the police; prosecuting an officer is like going after a friend or relative. Finally, the police who investigate brutality cases have many ways of discouraging prosecution. Just because police formally present a case to a prosecutor does not mean police hope that charges are filed.

None of these explanations, however, is sufficient. What we have here is basic denial. The police deny the problem, prosecutors deny the problem, judges deny the problem and the public denies the problem. But the problem remains.

Why should it be so hard to believe that some people, given guns and other weapons and the authority to use them, will enjoy brutalizing others? Why not, it’s a power trip of the highest order. Why should it be so hard to believe that some officers, exposed to the worst in others, will succumb to the worst in themselves? Why should it surprise that white officers who must deal with often hostile minority citizens sometimes become deeply bigoted?

It’s time for the prosecutorial community to wake up and smell the smoke. Police brutality is part of the crime problem, not its solution.

Our criminal justice system depends on public support. We use police, prosecutors, courts and prisons only as a last-resort measure against a proportionally small number of law-breakers. We rely on most people to obey the law out of their own sense of justice. That disappears when the public, or any significant portion of it, sees that the police operate beyond the law and with impunity.

All that we can expect of prosecutors is that they try. We can expect that they use their professional understanding of the dark side of humanity to evaluate police cases. We cannot expect that the D.A’s office will win many of these cases.

The public has an even worse case of denial than prosecutors. We cannot expect that a few prosecutors will make a big difference in police conduct. The most important checks on police misconduct are internal to the police department. But if the D.A. does not try, then the state loses its moral claim to serve justice.

We need systemic changes as well. Certainly the district attorney’s office would do well to consider changes in its hiring policies. Instead of concentrating on hiring newly admitted lawyers and developing them into career prosecutors, the office might hire lawyers who have defended criminal cases, maybe even from the ranks of the public defender’s office. Such lawyers would bring a perspective not often found in those who have worked only as prosecutors.

The federal government, from the FBI to the Justice Department to the local U.S. attorney’s office, must take a more sustained and aggressive look at police brutality. Instead of playing a largely reactive role, the federal government should see this as much a part of its law-enforcement mission as the investigation and prosecution of international narcotics traffickers.

When a Los Angeles deputy district attorney appears in court, she appears not on behalf of law enforcement, or the status quo, but on behalf of all “the people of California.” At least that’s the ideal. The Kolts report indicates a different reality.