Police Officers Find Their Task Increasingly Perilous : Violence: Assaults in recent years are at all-time high. Unprovoked attacks have risen since riots, some say.

Inglewood Police Sgt. Donald Fry was sitting in his squad car, its engine running, making a notation in his log book when a man wearing a parka and blue jeans appeared out of the darkness.

“How you doing?” the man asked. He took another step toward the squad car and then suddenly whirled around, pulled a small semiautomatic pistol from his pocket and fired at Fry.

The sound was deafening, echoing in the squad car like an enormous thunderclap. Fry felt as if he had been slammed in the chest with a baseball bat, and he began to gasp for air. He grabbed the man’s hand for a moment. But the man jerked free and ran as Fry, who tumbled out of the squad car, managed to fire a few errant shots.

When the paramedics arrived, they stripped off the bulletproof vest that saved Fry’s life. His uniform shirt had a gaping bullet hole a few inches from his heart.

Police work now is more dangerous than ever before, with assaults against officers in recent years at an all-time high. More people are ambushing officers, firing at them while they are on patrol, shooting at them while they are pursuing fleeing suspects. Officers often have no way to prepare for the attacks, no time to employ tactics to protect themselves.

The night Fry was attacked, he was wearing a black band on his badge in memory of the two Compton police officers who had been shot to death after a traffic stop six days earlier. Two weeks after that incident, a Garden Grove police officer was killed during another traffic stop. Then two days later, a Pomona police officer was shot and wounded while searching a home for a robbery suspect.

“In a three-week period there were so many brazen, foolhardy shootings. . . . I never saw anything like that when I was first starting out as a young cop,” said Fry, 50, who suffered only minor injuries in the March 1 shooting. “But there’s a completely different attitude today. Cops have become a magnet for all the hostility and violence on the street.”

Law enforcement officials are particularly concerned about a type of assault they rarely saw in the past--unprovoked shootings like the attack on Sgt. Fry. Several times a week now sheriff’s deputies are fired on at random, “which was virtually unheard of a decade ago,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block.

These kinds of attacks, law enforcement experts say, are a reflection of an increasingly violent society in which there are more homicides, more drive-by shootings, more mayhem on the streets. Some officers contend there is another, more ominous reason specific to Los Angeles--increased animosity aimed at police since the spring riots.

As an example, they cite the emergence of anti-police graffiti that began appearing throughout South Los Angeles in the first few days after the Rodney King verdict. Officers saw “Kill Cops” or “Police 187” (California Penal Code for murder) spray-painted on walls and sidewalks.

Many were concerned about how this would play out on the streets. When more people began taking potshots at officers on routine patrol, their worst fears, they felt, were realized.

“The officers on the street have noticed a definite change in atmosphere since the riots,” said Los Angeles Police Department Capt. Jim Tatreau, who heads the Newton Division. “The alarming numbers of officers being fired on at random is something new. And, overall, there’s just more confrontation, more challenging the authority of officers on a nightly basis.”

On a recent day off, Tatreau visited the station with his son, a sheriff’s deputy, and cruised an area near 40th Street in South Los Angeles where there are frequent gang problems. As they drove, someone fired five rounds at them from a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. Two shots penetrated the passenger side door of the police car, just 15 inches from Tatreau’s son’s head.

On a single day in late January, suspects fired guns at Southern California officers in six separate incidents, Block said.

“I was just flabbergasted at all the shootings that day. . . . I’d never seen anything like it in 37 years of law enforcement,” said Block. “And you know what--a few more officers were shot at the next day.”

A few weeks ago, he said, two deputies saw a drive-by shooting in South Los Angeles and pursued a suspect, who turned and shot at them, Block said. The chase continued and a bystander pulled out a pistol and took a shot at the officers. Then someone driving by spotted the action and fired another shot at the deputies.

“During this one brief pursuit these deputies took gunfire from three separate sources,” Block said. “Fortunately they weren’t hit, but this gives you the idea of what law enforcement officers have to deal with these days.”

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LAPD Sgt. Bob Brannon was parked at a fast-food restaurant near Figueroa and 50th streets on a cool weekday evening a few months ago, finishing up some paperwork, when he heard a loud, clanging noise. He thought someone had thrown a brick at his squad car.

He looked up and saw a man peeking over a stone wall, about 20 feet away, shooting at him. The man fired three more shots from a .357-caliber magnum handgun before ducking behind the wall and fleeing. He blew four holes in the side of Brannon’s squad car. A few inches higher and Brannon would have been hit.

The suspect was black, the neighborhood was black, but this shooting was not about race because Brannon too is black.

“This shooting was about color--the color blue,” Brannon says, cruising around the lot on a recent Friday night, reluctant to stop and present a stationary target. “These gangsters just want to shoot a cop and they don’t care what color they are.”

Brannon’s tour of the parking lot is cut short when a dispatcher barks: “Attempted armed robbery. Shots fired.”

He speeds through the side streets of South-Central and pulls up in front of a ranch-style house with a manicured lawn and a well-tended flower garden. The resident, a barber, tells Brannon he had just come home from his shop, parked his car in his garage and was walking to his house when a man approached, pulled a gun and attempted to rob him.

The barber says he whipped out a .32-caliber handgun and shot the robber, who fired a few shots back and ran into a neighbor’s back yard. Brannon studies the shell casings from the robber’s gun and then follows the bloodstains--a neat trail of red drops--into the back yard. He draws his gun, pulls out his flashlight and slowly searches every corner of the pitch-black yard but cannot find the suspect.

This kind of police work--chasing an armed, wounded man into the darkness--is terrifying enough. But officers know it is part of the job, Brannon says, and they know what kind of tactics to employ. It is the random shootings, he says, that have rattled officers on the street.

Later that evening, Brannon, whose dinner at a fast-food restaurant was interrupted by yet another armed robbery call, pulls into a fenced lot behind the 77th Street Division police station. Here he can finish his cold teriyaki chicken dinner in peace.

Brannon is not easily intimidated. He is a patrol sergeant in one of the nation’s most violent neighborhoods. Before that he spent 13 years as a SWAT team member, crashing through doors of barricaded suspects and serving high-risk narcotics warrants. But after 23 years as an officer, he feels vulnerable on the streets for the first time.

“I used to just park out on the street and eat. . . . I never thought twice about it,” says Brannon, after finishing his dinner. “But now I feel like a real target--a dead bull’s-eye. I never felt like that before.”

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The number of violent assaults against police officers has risen steadily in the last 15 years. In 1977--the first year the FBI began compiling such statistics--about 49,000 officers nationwide were assaulted, primarily with guns or knives. Five years later, the number of assaults jumped to about 56,000, and in 1991 the toll was up to about 63,000.

“In the past, a cop killer was a rare and special breed; today a cop killer could be anyone,” said Joseph McNamara, former police chief of San Jose and Kansas City who is now a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. “In the past, a cop only got shot if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time . . . like if a holdup man was coming out, saw a blue uniform and opened up. Now it’s much more frightening because a shooting can happen at any time, for any reason, from anyone.”

Adding to the danger, experts say, is the proliferation of sophisticated, high-powered weapons. Officers began seeing many more military-type assault rifles on the street during the 1980s as the drug culture became increasingly violent, said Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, a Washington research organization. Until the public becomes willing to initiate “a full court press” to ban assault weapons, Williams said, they have to accept the consequences of sending police out on the streets “outmanned and outgunned.”

“There’s no reason police officers with handguns should have to risk their lives against criminals armed with vastly superior weapons of war,” Williams said, “weapons designed for the battlefield.”

After a lengthy car chase through the streets of Hollywood, LAPD patrolman Bruce Cardenas and a few other officers cornered a suspect who was wanted for the attempted murder of a California Highway Patrol officer. As the officers pulled out their handguns, the suspect, who was crouching behind his car, began blasting off rounds with an M-1 military assault rifle.

“Something like that would just tear through your body armor,” said Cardenas, who along with the other officers eventually killed the suspect. “That’s what we were afraid of.”

Fortunately, the majority of guns on the streets still cannot penetrate bulletproof vests. So despite the rise in assaults, the number of police fatalities has declined during the past two decades, primarily because more officers are wearing bulletproof vests, said Gerald Arenberg, executive director of the National Assn. of Police Chiefs.

Since the mid-1980s, about 400 officers have survived shootings because they were wearing protective armor, according to law enforcement figures.

“If it wasn’t for these vests, it would be a slaughter out there,” Arenberg said. “You’d see officers getting wiped out all the time. The fatality stats would be going through the roof.”

But vests cannot save every officer, and last year 55 were killed in the line of duty as a result of assaults. Both Compton officers were wearing bulletproof vests, but they were shot in the head, execution-style. The Garden Grove officer died after a bullet entered below his vest and tore through his abdomen.

Much attention is paid to police brutality, but little attention is paid to the brutality against police, said Marianne Wrede, president of the California chapter of Concerns of Police Survivors (COPS). Wrede’s 26-year-old son, a West Covina policeman, was shot to death trying to subdue a man on PCP.

“These officers killed become a statistic, but people don’t realize what the family members go through,” Wrede said. “We can never get over the loss of our Kenny. Our pain is always there. It’s something we live with every single day.

“All the time we see young mothers trying to raise their children alone, trying to put their lives back together. Last year we saw a father who lost a son to a police shooting commit suicide because the grief was too great. People don’t hear about how this tears up a family.”

The rising level of violence means more stress for the officers on the street, said Kris Mohandie, an LAPD psychologist. During the past two years the number of officers seeking psychological services has doubled.

“The level of fear among officers today is very high,” he said. “They walk up to cars now, hands on their guns, because they never know now what they’ll encounter. There’s a heightened fear about being ambushed. All that leads to a real feeling of powerlessness and vulnerability--and that’s the core of stress.

“This is a very tough time to be a police officer.”

Assaults on Police

The number of non-fatal assaults on police officers nation-wide has increased during the past 15 years, according to FBI statistics. 1977: 49,156 1978: 56,253 1979: 59,031 1980: 57,847 1981: 57,174 1982: 55,775 1983: 62,324 1984: 60,153 1985: 61,724 1986: 64,259 1987: 63,842 1988: 58,752 1989: 62,172 1990: 71,794 1991: 62,852