Cutting-Edge SWAT Force Adapts to Changing LAPD : Police: Negotiations replace deadly force when possible, as team handles record number of standoffs.

The 67 men of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Weapons and Tactics unit are members of the department’s most exclusive club. Handpicked for the duty after passing rigorous entrance requirements, they train using live ammunition and confront armed and barricaded suspects at the rate of more than one a week.

For a quarter-century, SWAT has occupied a unique place in the Police Department and the public imagination--a group of virtual soldiers embedded in a police agency, their missions among the most demanding in law enforcement.

The original SWAT team was pioneered by the LAPD, and it has grown up there, evolving from a ragtag group of eager volunteers into a tightly disciplined cadre of professionals whose officers train side by side with Navy SEALS and Green Berets.

Insular and intensely proud, SWAT was battered and shaped by early criticism and a pair of nationally renowned shootouts, one of which occurred 20 years ago this month. It battled a reputation for militarism, redoubled its emphasis on negotiation and emerged as one of the nation’s most widely emulated hostage rescue organizations. Most recently, when a highly regarded female officer was denied entry into the unit, it raised the question of when, if ever, SWAT will open its doors to women; her case is in court and its outcome could again reshape SWAT as it continues to define its place within the LAPD.

As SWAT has changed, so has the Police Department, which is trying to adopt a more community-oriented style that bears little resemblance to the work SWAT officers perform. That leaves SWAT at a telling juncture in its history, caught between the LAPD that gave birth to it and the one that houses it today.

But the paramilitary arm of the Police Department remains fully staffed and in robust health--despite the vogue for a kinder, gentler force, despite money problems in municipal government, despite the departure of its godfather and founder, former Chief Daryl F. Gates.

His successor, Willie L. Williams--a police chief better known for his devotion to community policing than his belief in special weapons and tactics--has expressed his confidence in the unit. More important, he has kept it at full strength despite cutbacks in other areas of the Police Department and pressure to put more officers on patrol.

This summer, SWAT will stand guard against terrorism during the World Cup games, the same function it performed a decade ago during the Summer Olympics. Less trumpeted are the missions its officers perform every day. For no matter how thoroughly the LAPD transforms itself, there are times when only SWAT will do.

*

On patrol in a tough stretch of Newton Division on a recent Saturday, a couple of police officers run across a glassy-eyed young man toting a 9-millimeter pistol and ranting incoherently. When he refuses to drop the gun and instead holes up in his house, the patrol officers surround the place and call for SWAT.

“We’re going to scout it, contain it, try to bullhorn it and see if we get a response,” says Sgt. Charles J. Duke, a burly SWAT supervisor who has broken off dinner with his wife to take charge of this situation. “If we don’t, we’ll tear-gas it. And if that doesn’t get him out, we’ll go in after him.”

Moving with the precision of a military drill team, most of the SWAT officers check their weapons while a small group peels off to scout out the location. The scouting team returns with good news: There are no hostages visible in the house, and no toys, bicycles or anything to suggest that there may be children in danger.

Repeated attempts to bullhorn the man to the door fail. At 9:46 p.m., the officers fire off the tear gas. One whiff of it is enough to knock most people to their knees, but this suspect stays in the chair, oblivious to the acrid smoke billowing around him. After several more rounds are fired, he begins to pace and yell--what sounds like gibberish in a Jamaican accent--but he still will not come out.

Finally, however, the gas seems to get the upper hand. At 10:21 p.m., four hours and a dozen tear-gas canisters later, the man appears on his front porch. He’s unarmed and does not resist. The officers put him in plastic handcuffs and load him into a police car.

Neighbors, some of whom have been behind the police tape for hours, straggle home. A few residents jeer at the LAPD, a familiar foe. Others applaud as the officers pack up.

“It’s kind of scary,” says Vena Simpson, as she loads her sleeping baby out of the car and prepares to put her to bed. “These guys are like the Army or something. But I thank the Lord that we have them. That man could have hurt my children.”

*

The 1965 Watts riots made a deep impression on the city and its police--and no one reacted more strongly than a young commander named Daryl Gates. Convinced that the riots proved the need for the LAPD to better counteract sniper fire, Gates pioneered SWAT, making the LAPD the nation’s first police department to develop such an organization.

In the early years, SWAT was informal. Officers continued to work their regular jobs, they got no bonus pay, and they kept a decidedly low profile.

“We would send out these Teletypes to tell guys we had a training day coming up, and it used to end with, ‘Bring your lunch,’ ” said Pat McKinley, now the chief of police in Fullerton. “That meant bring your rifle.”

The Marine Corps provided some training, and McKinley recalls spending hour after hour marching through the storm drains of Los Angeles, practicing ways to move through the city undetected. “The idea was that if we lost a part of the city, we could come at it through the storm drains.”

The officers who staffed SWAT in the early years--veterans now refer to the team during that period as “Old SWAT”--were dedicated to the mission but sometimes ill-equipped to carry it out. And on Dec. 8, 1969, Old SWAT came face to face with the Black Panthers. When the officers arrived at a Central Avenue stronghold to serve arrest and search warrants, they were greeted with shotgun blasts and submachine-gun fire.

Over the next five hours, more than 200 Los Angeles police officers and a handful of Black Panthers exchanged thousands of rounds of gunfire. When it was over, three officers and six Black Panthers were hurt.

Although no one died, the Black Panther shootout raised deep concerns. To do its job correctly, LAPD leaders decided, SWAT needed to be a formal unit whose officers trained and worked together full time. In 1971, Old SWAT became New SWAT, a full-fledged unit under the wing of the department’s Metropolitan Division.

Then, on May 17, 1974, the LAPD engaged in the most notorious gunfight in the history of the organization. That afternoon, police officers and FBI agents descended on a 54th Street home where they expected to find members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the group that had kidnaped heiress Patricia Hearst a few months before.

Three SWAT squads and hundreds of other officers closed in on the residence, surrounding it. The SLA members did not respond to the bullhorn, but when SWAT fired a single tear-gas canister inside, the residents opened fire with machine guns. For about two hours, police and suspects traded shots while news crews broadcast the shootout nationwide. Eventually, the house burned to the ground. Six SLA members died, three from gunshots, three from the fire.

As the Panther battle had in 1969, this major shootout forced the LAPD once again to review the way its SWAT officers went about their work.

“When I took over Metro (a few months after the SLA incident), there was a lot of sensitivity about SWAT,” said Jesse A. Brewer, who went on to become an assistant chief and then president of the Police Commission. “There was a feeling that we were using military tactics against citizens.”

Brewer tightened SWAT’s admission standards, clamped down on discipline and insisted that SWAT officers treat members of the community with respect. Under him, the unit replaced its old tear-gas canisters, which were implicated in starting the fire that destroyed the SLA headquarters.

All of that helped calm the waters, but the evolution of SWAT reflects a constant balancing between the unit’s use of military tactics and the department’s desire to project a friendly public image.

In the mid-1980s, that tension flared up again when SWAT began using a pair of battering ram-equipped small tanks, known as V-100s, in some confrontations.

“That sent a terrible signal,” said Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., a prominent Los Angeles attorney and frequent police critic. “It reinforced that whole argument about the LAPD as an occupying army.”

Without ever admitting a mistake, the LAPD scaled back the use of the tanks. Today, they sit mostly idle, and criticism of the unit is mostly muted. Cochran and Stephen Yagman, two of the city’s most prominent civil rights lawyers, say they have not handled any SWAT cases in years. Cochran says his impression is that the unit has improved from its rougher origins.

In large measure that is because negotiations or other, less subtle, forms of persuasion resolve almost all SWAT situations without gunshots. Still, there are times when SWAT officers make the hardest of all decisions in police work: When its officers believe they have exhausted all other remedies and feel lives are in danger, SWAT will shoot to kill.

*

Everything seems to go wrong at once for Tan Khuat. He and his wife are fighting, he has troubles at work , and neither the cocaine he has spent all night smoking nor the beers he’s downing are making things any better.

On the morning of Oct. 20, 1992, Khuat sets out to end it all. He storms into his wife’s apartment, fires several shots and grabs his 3-year-old daughter. Over the next several hours, Khuat shoots at police officers and reporters and dares police to take action as he threatens again and again to murder “the baby.” He never mentions her name.

“I want to get this thing over quick, give you something exciting,” Khuat tells the SWAT team negotiator. “I want her and me together, her heart against my heart. That’s what it is right now, my baby, my blood. . . . Our hearts beat together right now.”

About 1 p.m., SWAT officers conclude that Khuat is going to kill his daughter if someone doesn’t kill him first. They recommend shooting him at the first opportunity. Cmdr. David J. Gascon, head of the LAPD’s Metropolitan Division, gives his go-ahead. The area captain approves it.

Police officers deliver some food that Khuat has requested while a sniper posted on the roof of an adjacent building takes aim.

At first, everything goes according to plan. Khuat opens the door and steps over the threshold. But just as Officer Charles Buttitta squeezes the trigger, Khuat looks down and to the right, at the food. The bullet misses the center of his head and pierces his left ear. Khuat shrieks that he’s been hit and dives back into the apartment. He has the little girl.

Khuat runs to the back of the apartment, but SWAT officers storm in behind him. They find him in a bathtub, where he’s holding the girl in front of his face and screaming: “I kill baby! I kill baby!”

They beg him to pause for a moment, pleading with him to put the girl down. Khuat hesitates and peers around his daughter, exposing his right eye as he shifts the little girl’s body.

From seven feet away, SWAT Officer Joe Cordova fires one shot. His bullet is on target, striking Khuat just beneath the eye, killing him instantly. As the bullet strikes, Khuat loses his grip on the baby. An officer reaches out and grabs her before she hits the floor.

*

If SWAT was born in the aftermath of the Watts riots, it came of age in the buildup for the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Confident as ever, Gates announced that SWAT would handle any outbreak of terrorism inside the city limits. Lt. Jeff Rogers, who headed the unit at the time, remembers being pleased at his chief’s confidence, but a little surprised as well.

“I said, ‘Gee, that’s flattering,’ ” recalled Rogers, who retired in 1991. “ ‘But guess what, chief? We’re a SWAT team, not a counterterrorism team.’ ”

So Gates authorized SWAT to become the organization he had advertised it to be. He sent three of his most trusted officers--Rogers, Sgt. Al Preciado and Capt. John Higgins--to Europe, where they studied counterterrorism units in Israel, Italy, France, West Germany, West Berlin and England. “We came back with a whole head full of ideas and a shopping list of what we needed,” Rogers said.

They got it. Some new equipment was purchased by the Olympic Organizing Committee. Other pieces--special poles with mirrors that allow officers to look around corners without being seen, flashlights that attach to the barrels of rifles--were invented by officers in the Metro armory.

SWAT also revolutionized its training.

Before the 1984 Olympics, SWAT trained with blanks. Today, SWAT, unlike any other unit in the LAPD, trains using live ammunition.

They use abandoned buildings to simulate hostage rescue missions, shooting dummies while trying to avoid the cross-fire of their colleagues. Just to make it more realistic, those drills sometimes include smoke-filled rooms, tear gas, dim lighting and concussion grenades--extremely loud devices used to disorient suspects when officers break into a room.

When they are out to impress a guest, SWAT will sit the visitor in a chair with dummies of hostage-takers on either side. The cops will storm the building, throw the grenades and shoot the dummies while the guest sits frozen to the chair a few feet from the flying bullets.

SWAT officers spend 240 hours a year shooting, climbing, rappelling and practicing other tactics. They fire out of helicopters, rappel off the sides of some buildings and scale the walls of others. They drop from helicopters onto rooftops. It is grueling, dangerous work, but it underscores a message: Things sometimes go wrong; SWAT needs to be ready when they do.

“You perform like you practice,” one SWAT cop said. “For real.”

*

Judith Hering, a young medical assistant, is early for work one summer day in 1983. She opens the doors to an exam room and finds James Hugh Bomar inside .

Bomar is carrying a gun, and he wants money and drugs. Hering is convinced he will kill her and a second hostage if he doesn’t get his way. As other employees show up for work, they realize something is wrong inside. They call the police. SWAT responds, and a negotiator strikes up a conversation with Bomar over the phone.

SWAT holds its ground all day, the officers nervously counting on Bomar to keep talking and not start killing. Meanwhile, they craft a plan to resolve the situation if Bomar refuses to surrender. When he comes out to get the car he has demanded, a sniper across the parking lot will shoot him.

What they do not know is that Bomar has a plan of his own. He has dressed himself and his hostages in hospital gowns and surgical masks. And just before they bolt from the building to the waiting car, he fires off two fire extinguishers, producing a thick cloud that makes it impossible for the sniper to get a clear view of who’s who. SWAT’s carefully laid plan is useless. So the officers shift gears.

Bomar and his hostages pile into the vehicle, with Hering behind the wheel. As she attempts to pull away, a SWAT cop hits a remote switch, killing the engine. The car stops, and Bomar, who’s been hiding his head below the seat, pops up to try to restart the engine. He is holding a gun.

Without hesitation, a SWAT officer kneeling beside the car fires into the back of Bomar’s head. As Bomar dies, he slumps onto Hering’s shoulder.

Sometimes hostages feel affinity for their captors--not this time.

“I was relieved and happy that they had shot and killed him,” Hering said. “I thought: ‘Oh, thank goodness. It’s over.’ ”

*

Today’s SWAT is a far different unit than the one that ran into the Black Panthers in 1969 or the SLA in 1974. It is busier, better trained and better equipped. As a result, according to its officers, it is better able to resolve the growing number of standoffs that it is called to handle without resorting to deadly force.

In 1993, SWAT confronted a record 67 barricaded suspects, almost all armed, some holding hostages. SWAT also served 60 high-risk warrants, those in which officers had strong indications that violence might greet them at the door.

And yet, SWAT officers did not fire a shot last year. They have had two shootings in 1994, ending an 18-month stretch in which they did not resort to deadly force.

Hollywood, of course, has tended to portray SWAT as a killing machine, an image that officers dispute even as they sometimes cultivate it. Their calling cards picture three heavily armed cops in full paramilitary regalia, but one veteran SWAT officer says he is sick of seeing himself portrayed by Hollywood as a “paramilitary, beady-eyed killer.”

Over the years, SWAT has toned down some of its military rhetoric: It still defines its operations as “missions,” but no longer describes breaking into a house to save a hostage as an “assault.” In today’s image-conscious LAPD, the preferred term is “rescue.”

“We are a lifesaving organization,” said Sgt. Mike Albanese, a veteran SWAT supervisor and experienced negotiator. “Our mission is the absolute preservation of human life.”

Others echo that sentiment and emphasize that SWAT talks more than it shoots; negotiations or less-than-lethal force solve nearly every SWAT scenario.

The team makes a dramatic entrance. They arrive at a standoff dressed in bulletproof vests and helmets, radios and guns slung across their backs, their faces sometimes obscured by gas masks. As they huddle around their forbidding, jet-black equipment truck, just about everybody smokes or chews tobacco. A crowd invariably gathers.

At one recent incident, the residents pulled up beach chairs and binoculars to watch the SWAT crews in action. Others opened their doors to the SWAT officers, inviting them to take up position on their rooftops and in their carports. “It made us feel better to have them here,” said Adela Saldana, an elderly woman in a wheelchair whose home is a few doors from the scene of a recent SWAT call-out. “I was afraid. I cannot walk, and this man was out there.”

The officers trade off-color jokes and bash liberals while they wait for their full contingent to arrive. But once everyone’s in place, the banter quickly stops. They may have nicknames like “Freaker,” but they are chillingly serious about their work.

It is, after all, serious business. SWAT sometimes kills people. And though it has generally avoided the excessive-force complaints that have devastated other parts of the LAPD, there have been some.

In 1988, SWAT officers shot and killed Ruben Medrano, a 38-year-old Vietnam veteran who had taken an overdose of heroin and was threatening to shoot himself. In an effort to end the standoff, SWAT officers burst into Medrano’s apartment. What happened next remains a hotly contested legal issue, but Medrano ended up being shot twice in the chest and once between the eyes.

Medrano’s family charged that SWAT had been too quick to pressure him and had effectively murdered a disturbed man in need of counseling, not confrontation.

Although not commenting on that case in particular, SWAT officers insist that they do not rush standoffs. The average incident takes around four hours to resolve, and some last 10 or 12 hours, even longer. In general, negotiators try to keep a suspect talking as long as there seems to be some hope of progress and as long as the hostages do not appear to be in imminent danger.

Ask any SWAT cop today about the unit’s record, and he will cite the group’s proudest statistic: In 23 years of service, SWAT has never lost a hostage as a result of its actions. Experts say that is the result of SWAT’s practice of combining negotiation and weaponry under one command--an approach that is intended to diminish any sense of competition between shooters and negotiators.

At the end of a good SWAT day, the hostages go free, the officers go home and the suspect goes to jail.

*

“The (high-rise) caper, now that was a slick deal,” recalls retired Lt. Rogers, who served a record 13 years as head of the unit.

It’s about 10:30 a.m. on May 4, 1988. Reynard Jones of Compton strides into a Westside high-rise. Jones grabs a temp filling in for the day and forces her into a conference room. He claims to have a bomb . He threatens to detonate it if his demands are not met.

Jones wants a car, and he wants $5,000 cash. That poses both tactical and practical problems for the SWAT officers: They do not generally let suspects leave a scene because it threatens to strip them of control over the situation. Plus, none of them have any money.

One SWAT officer goes into a bank and asks whether the folks there would lend the LAPD $5,000 so that it could pass it on to a hostage-taker who has already threatened to blow himself--and, presumably, any cash that’s given to him--to kingdom come. The bank declines, so the officer pulls out his credit card and gets a cash advance for $5,000. He then retires to a corner to chain-smoke and hope that his colleagues can resolve the situation without bankrupting him.

Sgt. Albanese spends the better part of the day on the phone with Jones, talking through one issue at a time. Once he gets his money, Jones focuses on food and a car. He is desperately afraid of getting shot--at one point, he offers $100 to every police officer at the scene if they will promise not to shoot him on the way to the car.

As it begins to get dark outside, police deliver the car. Jones wants to see that it’s put in place correctly, so Albanese suggests that the hostage walk over to the window of the high-rise and direct it to just the right place while Jones relays instructions over the phone.

While they’re in mid-sentence, SWAT officers detonate an explosive device on the door to the conference room. It blasts the door from its hinges and SWAT cops pour in through the opening. They grab Jones. He has arrested unhurt , and later goes to prison. The hostage goes free.

“They were very good,” said one person who was in the office that day and saw SWAT at work. “They canvassed the suite, they had a medical backup, they communicated with this guy. They resolved that situation when it looked very, very bad.”