Juries Find Police Credibility Still High : Courts: Study shows that jurors continue to favor law officers in excessive-force cases.

Juries still believe police officers two out of three times over citizens who say they have been physically injured by law enforcement officers, according to a study of verdicts by a national legal newspaper.

An analysis of 114 verdicts in Los Angeles and surrounding Southern California counties delivered after the Rodney G. King beating on March 3, 1991, shows that the police version of events still tends to prevail with juries, the National Law Journal said in a study released Monday.

A survey of the same number of verdicts given before the King incident shows about the same ratio in favor of police, the study found.

“The consistency of defense victories confounds expectations that the public--after watching over and over as grainy black-and-white images rained baton blows on a prone Rodney King--would give new credence to self-described police victims,” wrote Gail Diane Cox, who conducted the study for the journal, a leading national legal newspaper.

Cox tracked verdicts in Los Angeles, Kern, San Diego, Riverside, Orange and Ventura counties.

Woodland Hills attorney Lisa Rosenthal said the results should not be surprising, because the makeup of jury pools has not changed. Last year, two juries ruled against Rosenthal’s clients in excessive-force cases--one against the Los Angeles Police Department, the other against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Juries in both cases were all white, and largely retired, Rosenthal said. One panel found for the city in a case involving a man who claimed he was beaten after he failed to stop his car quickly enough for a driving-under-the-influence investigation. The other jury believed the county in a case of a Central Jail inmate who claimed he’d been beaten by deputies.

The findings also do not surprise Richard DeBro, an attorney who represented an African-American probation officer who successfully sued the city and the LAPD for a wrongful arrest and beating. In the first brutality case decided after the first King beating trial and ensuing riots, the jury awarded $170,000.

But Cox found that after the four Los Angeles police officers were found not guilty, 31 of 41 juries “found police defendants not liable.”

“People expected there would be this change reflected in an immediate and permanent change of attitude,” DeBro said. “It’s somewhat naive to think it’s going to change overnight.”

But Beverly Hills attorney Gary Silverman said he has detected a change in jury attitudes that is not consistent with the study findings. “It’s been my experience that after Rodney King, that most jurors would examine a police officer’s testimony more carefully,” he said.

Silverman bases his view on criminal defense work, rather than an excessive-force case he recently lost against the city of Riverside. The jury found against his client, the mother of a 16-year-old male shot to death by a Riverside officer. The officer fired 15 shots after the youth appeared to reach in his waistband for a sawed-off shotgun, which was unloaded.

Thomas Hokinson, senior assistant city attorney in Los Angeles, noted that the city usually wins cases that go to trial. But the awards are higher when the citizen prevails, Hokinson added. Jury awards in 1982 on suits involving police totaled $1,827,954, he said, but climbed to $11,334,009 in 1992.

Some attorneys believe the statistics that bear watching are cases that government agencies settle before trial. In Los Angeles, for example, the city settled 82 cases in 1982 for a total of $824,510, Hokinson said, but in 1992 settled 154 cases, for $8,346,565. The King case, Hokinson said, is “a factor that is considered.”