PERSPECTIVE ON LAW ENFORCEMENT : Chokehold Defenders Crying Wolf : It’s a red herring to say that the chokehold ban on forced LAPD to use batons; most cops think the hold is more deadly.

Virtually everybody who saw the beating of Rodney King on the now-famous videotape knew, almost instinctively, that it was an illustration of police brutality. Part of the reason for this knowledge is that most of us--especially males--have, at some point, probably been in physical fights, or have felt the force of another’s blow. But most of us don’t know what it’s like to be out on the street with a mandate to arrest someone who does not wish to be apprehended and who resists, however subtly or vigorously. This is the job of the cop, the person society relies on to exercise force necessary to restrain the nastiest among us.

But how much force does a cop need to use? The police, as the institution we know today, were “invented” by Sir Robert Peel and his associates in London, at a time when the crime rate was soaring and the propertied classes were threatened by street riots and potential revolution. But, instead of arming the cops with powerful weaponry, Peel and his buddies injected a deliberately different and initially surprising set of instructions, which began: “There is no qualification more indispensable to a Police Officer than a perfect command of temper, never suffering himself to be moved in the slightest degree, by any language or threats that may be used.”

Too often, American police have used crushing force indiscriminately. Problems caused by immigration, clashes of cultures and a propensity to resolve problems through violence have long marked cops in the United States.

Along the way, some police chiefs were especially sensitive to the problems of diversity and potential violence. Arthur Woods, who was police chief in New York City from 1914 to 1918, had the police issue city ordinances in five languages--English, Yiddish, Greek, Polish and Italian--so that pushcart peddlers and small merchants could comply with the law.

Yet, corruption and brutality continued to plague America’s cities and their police. When August Vollmer, the leading police reformer of the 1920s, was brought in to straighten out the LAPD, he was appalled by the department’s corruption and brutality. He left within one year, thoroughly disappointed and bitter with a City Council that had refused to fund the reorganization he thought the department needed.

Ever since Vollmer’s day, cops have wrestled with the issue of how much force to use. Most police departments have developed a set of instructions that categorizes force in levels that range up from voice commands, through firm grips; pain compliance holds like wrist and finger locks that cause temporary pain without causing lasting injury; striking with the baton or other instruments, to deadly force. Officers are also taught when each level of force is justifiable and that they should use the lowest level of force necessary. If pain compliance can subdue an individual, for example, batons should not be used. No department, except perhaps Los Angeles’ under Daryl Gates, has recently countenanced the kind of force we saw exhibited on the videotaped beating of Rodney King.

Some people have been asking whether the convictions of Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell have taken an important self-defense tool and crime-control weapon away from the police. The answer is no.

The argument raised by Koon and his defenders is that the force they used against King was reasonable because, when the LAPD forbade use of the former “upper-body control hold”--the chokehold--it left officers no option but to use batons to subdue King. This simply does not hold water. Before the ban, the LAPD defined the chokehold as a form of pain compliance, one step down from batons on the police scale of escalating force. As every other major American police department has always recognized, however, the chokehold is a form of deadly force one step up from batons on the scale of force. By this logic--the right logic, the long-term, prevailing logic among all American big-city police except L.A.’s--choking King would have been even more improper than striking him with batons.

LAPD’s use of the chokehold was, for years, a tragic and wrongheaded aberration. In the five years before the ban, LAPD officers killed twice as many people with chokeholds as did police officers in the 20 other largest U.S. police departments combined. The ban itself came about in the midst of a case brought against LAPD by a young man named Adolph Lyons, who was choked unconscious--not when he fought with or resisted officers, but when he mouthed off in protest of a traffic ticket. Arguing that police had to club King because they could not choke him is a red herring, a suggestion that officers should have been authorized to use an even more extreme level of force than they did.

The convictions of Koon and Powell took nothing legitimate from the arsenal of the police, in Los Angeles or any place else. To the contrary, the videotaped beating, regardless of the verdicts, has made cops in America more aware than ever of their power, and of the need to exercise responsibly their important and exclusive mandate to use force, even deadly force, when absolutely necessary.