Keeping Lid On in San Diego : Police: Department reforms and a resourceful crisis management plan are credited with maintaining relative calm after verdicts in King case.

When the state’s largest city erupted in violence and destruction, the state’s second most populous city did not.

San Diego not only escaped riots such as those in Los Angeles after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case, it avoided the level of street fighting, confrontations and property damage that the verdicts provoked in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, Omaha, Atlanta, Tampa, Pittsburgh and Toronto.

In the first 48 hours, San Diego did have several frighteningly close calls--three major demonstrations, Interstate 5 closed by protesters, sporadic street fighting, one store burned, a Korean-owned market saved from being torched, numerous bomb threats and rumors ofinsurrection, and two police officers shot at by a sniper.

But by the weekend, the television images of San Diego were a world apart from the images of disarray and lawlessness in many other cities.

Local television aired stories about the nearly all-white San Diego Symphony playing an outdoor concert (“Symphony in the ‘Hood”) for a youthful minority audience, and also of African-American, Latino, and Asian-American low-income students being interviewed by civic leaders for college scholarships under a $1-million fund set up by San Diego’s Joan Kroc, the McDonald’s hamburger chain magnate and former owner of the San Diego Padres.

A year later, with the King federal civil rights trial moving toward a conclusion, no one in San Diego is publicly taking an “it-can’t-happen-here” attitude if civil disturbance erupts again in Los Angeles, just 100 miles up the freeway.

This is still a city with a shortage of affordable housing and high unemployment among minority groups, a city that the Kerner Commission in 1968 listed among those where racial unrest was seething, a city where racial progress is still a sometime thing.

“I think the potential (for violence) is here,” said the Rev. Clyde Gaines of the Greater Trinity Baptist Church, one of those credited with helping San Diego steer away from destruction last year. “I think we need to have a great level of concern.”

To gird against that possibility, San Diego police have been given riot training, the police chief has agreed to delay his retirement, and the strategies that worked so well are ready to be set in motion again.

San Diegans offer two major reasons behind their city’s successes last time: Profound changes in recent years in the San Diego Police Department’s attitudes and tactics, and a quick and resourceful crisis management plan cobbled together after the King verdicts by then-Mayor Maureen O’Connor, black ministers, community leaders and the City Council’s only black member, George Stevens.

The Police Department changes have been accomplished in the wake of what is called “San Diego’s Rodney King case,” in which a black motorist was beaten and cursed by two white police officers wielding nightsticks. The changes have brought a significant decrease in tension between police and minority neighborhoods.

The crisis management effort is credited with avoiding a leadership vacuum at a crucial time. “It was not a time to be invisible,” said O’Connor, who, along with others, fanned out into minority neighborhoods and joined in denouncing the Simi Valley verdicts.

“One of the reasons we survived is that people from the mayor to the City Council to the arts organizations got out into the streets immediately and sided with the people, not against them,” said Sylvia M’Lafi Thompson, an actress and director of 21 Harlem, a group dedicated to promoting artistic endeavors by and for African-Americans in San Diego.

A 24-hour hot line was established for people to vent their anger, report crime tips and talk directly to the mayor, the police chief and others in power. Hundreds of anguished calls poured in. A similar talk-to-your-leaders telethon was put on by a TV station.

“I knew we had to tap into people’s frustrations but without destroying the city,” O’Connor said recently. “We let people demonstrate. We let them vent for 72 hours, but everybody knew what the ground rules were. There were no ground rules in L.A.”

Arthur Ellis, a professor of social welfare at San Diego State University and a member of the city’s civilian review board, said the hot line and call-in TV program were key to San Diego’s success.

“The difference between Los Angeles and San Diego is that in Los Angeles much of the community does not have a sense of connection, certainly with the Police Department but also with other decision-making institutions,” Ellis said. “In San Diego, rightly or wrongly, people still feel that connection, still feel they have a channel to express their anger.”

The road to reforming the San Diego Police Department may have begun in the traumatic and deadly events of March 31, 1985, when police stopped a 23-year-old black man, Sagon Penn, and asked to see his driver’s license.

Penn balked and was thrown to the ground in front of a mostly black crowd and beaten with nightsticks and fists by two white officers. One of the officers called Penn a “nigger,” pinned him to the ground, and said he was going to whip Penn’s “black ass.”

In the struggle, Penn grabbed one officer’s gun, shot one officer to death and critically wounded the other officer and a civilian ride-along. Penn fled in the patrol car, running over the wounded officer’s legs.

After two high-voltage trials, which revealed to some a strain of racism and tolerance of racism among San Diego police, Penn, who claimed self defense, was found not guilty in July, 1987, of murder and manslaughter charges, shocking police and prosecutors and the city’s conservative Establishment.

But the case convinced reformers within the Police Department and the city’s political leadership that changes were needed if the relationship between police and the minority communities were to improve.

“The Sagon Penn case was the low point in the relationship between the police and the community,” said City Manager Jack McGrory. “It was San Diego’s Rodney King case. It was symbolic of the troubles within the Police Department in terms of the attitudes of our officers. We knew we had to change, to break down the walls between government and the community.”

Changes since the Penn trial include a civilian police review board, a more restrained policy on the use of deadly force, greater use of officers walking beats in poor and minority neighborhoods, and community-oriented policing, where officers are ordered to leave their squad cars, mix with residents and respond to their complaints.

Milton Silverman, Penn’s defense attorney, said the outcome of the Penn trial aided San Diego in two ways: First by showing that blacks can get justice in San Diego, and second by the police reforms it wrought. Both, he says, saved San Diego during the Los Angeles riots.

“I think it kept the city from burning down,” Silverman said.

Frank Jordan, president of the San Diego chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, agrees. “We’ve already had our Rodney King,” he said. “Without Sagon Penn, or if he hadn’t been able to get justice, then things could have been very explosive in San Diego (after the King trial verdict).”

Ellis, once a critic of the Police Department, also sees a significant shift. “Some things have been going on for at least the last four years to establish a new dialogue between law enforcement, City Hall and the community,” he said.

After the King verdicts, San Diego police were dispatched to all major shopping areas in a show of force, and fire engines were ordered out of their stations and into neighborhoods. Police officials blasted the verdicts but also announced that the widest possible latitude would be allowed for street demonstrations.

“The impulse of police is to shut down demonstrations, but that’s a recipe for disaster,” said Norman Stamper, San Diego’s executive assistant police chief and author of many of the department’s recent changes.

As the countdown to the next verdicts continues, Police Chief Bob Burgreen is letting it be known that his department is prepared to act swiftly if violence erupts. “We were not going to give up one inch of territory,” he said.

This is worrisome to some officials. “We’re not home free at all,” Ellis said. “This talk stressing the readiness of (San Diego) police is viewed by many as an attempt to intimidate, which will set up a scenario that some people will want to test.”

Still, the hot line telephones are at the ready and the City Hall plan is to emulate last year’s response, including the telethon and the high-profile, into-the-neighborhoods strategy.

“There’s still hope here,” said the Rev. George Walker Smith of Christ United Presbyterian Church, possibly the city’s best-known black minister. “We’re not the powder keg, not yet.”