Understanding the Riots--Six Months Later : A New Blue Line / REMAKING THE LAPD : CHERYL FRANCIS HARRINGTON

As a child growing up in New York, Cheryl Francis Harrington assumed that the police were there to protect her.

That assumption lasted until one evening a decade ago. While she was waiting in her car outside an upscale Los Angeles shopping mall, an officer pulled over and asked to see identification. She explained that she was going shopping, so the officer let her go.

But Harrington has never forgotten.

“Los Angeles is like a police state,” she said, citing a laundry list of slights, hassles and harassments that she said she and her African-American friends have been subjected to at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department. “These things never happened in New York. New York cops are like real people. They don’t come up to you posturing, threatening.”

And although she said that she does not dislike the LAPD and that she supported the failed ballot measure to increase the number of officers, she said she has become deeply cynical about the department and no longer believes it is there to protect her.

“I am leery of them,” she said. “I don’t feel like I can call on them if I was in some kind of trouble.”

Her feelings about the LAPD extend to an uncertainty about the community-based policing concept.

“As an African-American person, I have a certain fear of the police,” said Harrington, an actress in her 20s. “I am fearful of more police on the streets because I’m not sure what they would do.”

She is optimistic about new Chief Willie L. Williams--who she said seems “levelheaded”--but thinks it will take time for the department to change.

Harrington said she thinks that the department has too few minority officers. A more diverse department would make a difference in her West Adams neighborhood.

West Adams--a community near USC of stately turn-of-the-century Victorian homes, wide avenues and large front lawns--was home to many of Hollywood’s best-known African-American stars in the 1930s.

Although Harrington characterizes her neighborhood as “not out of control” when it comes to crime, the area suffers from problems shared by many central-city neighborhoods--traffic, gangs and urban blight.

“Even though I live near (the Rampart) police station, I almost never see any officers,” Harrington said. “But it would be nice to see more Hispanic, black and Korean officers walking the beat, because those are the kind of people that live here.

“Community policing can help,” she added. “But it depends on whether the mentality (of the police) changes.”