Eastsiders Give Police Low Grade for Performance : Webster panel: At the last of seven meetings on LAPD response to the riots, they complain of brutality and callousness by officers.

Angry Eastside residents Tuesday night complained to a special panel studying the police response to the Los Angeles riots that they have been systematically shortchanged by law enforcement.

Decrying Police Department inaction during the riots, several dozen residents told the Webster commission at Hollenbeck Junior High School that Los Angeles police had earned especially low marks in the Latino community.

“You ask what didn’t work? The Police Department. It’s as simple as that,” said social worker Hector Brolo, at the last of the commission’s seven public meetings.

Brolo said that “for starters, the police have got to immediately desist from working for the (U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service). That is absolutely undermining the foundation of law enforcement in our community.”

He and others among the mostly Latino crowd of about 80 residents said police brutality and callousness had become an all-too-frequent part of life for Latinos and other minorities.

Attorney Edward J. Flynn described how a 16-year-old Latino boy he represents was falsely arrested for looting after the riots and turned over to immigration officials “with no questions asked. He was merely on his way home late at night, and the (cab) driver asked if he would mind sharing the ride with two other men.

“When he got out, the police arrested him with the others--no questions asked. And when the cab driver tried to explain that my client didn’t even know the men, they arrested the driver, too.”

Other residents demanded that unruly police officers be rooted out of the department.

“It’s tragic that the police call themselves ‘L. A.’s finest,’ ” Ricardo Lopez said. “Every day I read in the paper about how we the taxpayers are paying for their brutality lawsuits. It’s a disgrace.”

“We’ve got to weed out the wackos,” said Abel Pena. “Everyone knows there are some cops on the force who get pleasure out of beating up on people.”

Many of the several dozen residents who testified said underlying social conditions were more to blame for the riots than the police beating of motorist Rodney G. King.

Lawrence Teeter said that an unresponsive Police Department hierarchy was responsible for permitting the kind of attitudes that enabled renegade police officers to “feel safe” in brutalizing people.

“Every (police officer) who makes a racial or sexist remark to a member of the public on the job should be subject to mandatory disciplinary action,” he said. “If all we do is sit around planning for the next disturbance--and do not do the necessary things to prevent it--then another disturbance is what we will get.”

The commission meetings were aimed at giving residents in areas most affected by the violence the chance to offer their views on how the Police Department handled the riots.

The panel had tentatively planned to follow the seven community sessions with two public hearings, but officials said Tuesday that the hearings might not be necessary. The panel is expected to issue its final report next month.

The commission is named for its chairman, William H. Webster, former director of the CIA and FBI. In the aftermath of the riots, the city’s Police Commission appointed him as its special adviser to examine the performance of the Police Department.

Webster did not attend Tuesday’s meeting because of what commission staff described as a prior commitment in Washington. He was also absent from two earlier sessions.

Deputy special adviser Hubert Williams chaired the meeting in Webster’s absence. Williams is the former chief of the Newark, N. J., Police Department and now head of the Police Foundation, a Washington-based think tank on law enforcement issues.

The panel is focusing on the Police Department’s preparedness before the riots and its response once the violence erupted on April 29.

Webster and Williams have assembled a staff of 22 volunteer lawyers, including six former federal prosecutors and several business litigators from the city’s largest law firms.