How the Dirty Work Got Done : It’s no good complaining about brutality, this history of the LAPD suggests--we get the police force we ask for : TO PROTECT AND TO SERVE: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams, <i> By Joe Domanick (Pocket Books: $23; 497 pp.)</i>

“We’re on the Freeway, upon the Highway, that’s the place to be.

We’re on the Right Way, there is no Left Way

Let’s go, the road is straight and clear.

There are no bars ahead, there are no signs of red

All the land is for you and me.”

Lumbering though it may be, this little ditty from one of the lavish stage shows the Los Angeles Police Department held to raise money in the 1950s perfectly captures the competing desires that have pulled at the heart of Los Angeles.

On the one hand, it glamorizes the free city (“there are no signs of red”), harking back to our origin as the kind of Old Western town made legendary by such films as “High Noon” and “Unforgiven”--a place where everyone, from merchants to cowboys, gunmen to gamblers, could stake their own claim to the Great Frontier. On the other hand, the song also reflects the extraordinary social conformity that L.A. was striving to attain in the ‘50s (“there are,” it also implied, “no signs of Reds “).

Liberty and conformity, the Free Way and the Right Way: With ideals as conflicting as these, is it any wonder that this city exploded in 1992?

“To Protect and to Serve,” Joe Domanick’s vividly reported history of the LAPD since its formal inception in 1877, shows how the department has often exacerbated these conflicts. But Domanick, a journalist whose 1990 L.A. Weekly piece on the LAPD won an L.A. Press Club award, refuses to scapegoat the police for their failure to resolve in the streets conflicts that really lie at the heart of our civic culture.

Many of us, for instance, have hungered for the kind of intimate social community where people know their neighbors and dare to converse with strangers. But such a community necessarily requires a measure of conformity. Conservative ideologue Charles Murray, for instance, has recently touted his vision of Utopian American living--a town where Americans care about, but also to some extent control, each other. For better or for worse, such a closely knit community is the kind that the first modern police force, London’s “bobbies,” was designed to serve.

As attorney Andrew Peyton Thomas shows in his new book “Crime and the Sacking of America” (Brassey’s: $25; 351 pp.), the bobbies practiced in the late 19th Century something traditionally regarded as an innovation of the late 20th Century: community policing. Wearing blue to distinguish their mission from the offensive one of Britain’s red-coated regular army, the bobbies, Thomas writes, aimed to “ferret out crime before it actually occurred, mainly through getting to know members of the community and encouraging their cooperation.” The bobbies successfully kept crime under control, but at the price of imposing sometimes rigid social mores on the people they served.

Most Angelenos, in contrast, historically have clung tenaciously to their Old Western roots, preferring another, more libertarian vision of community: one in which we remain virtually free from the influence of others. This vision--which leads the police to function more as soldiers than social workers--was championed most prominently by former LAPD chief Daryl Gates.

Gates showcased his paramilitary strategies in a host of media events: Riding shotgun on an armored tank, for instance, he helped raze the walls of a suspected crack house with a 14-foot-long battering ram; appearing on CBS News, he effusively praised Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode’s “inspired and heroic” decision to bomb the headquarters of a black radical organization called MOVE (the first aerial bombing in the history of mainland America, the assault killed 11 people and set several blocks of housing ablaze).

The harsher Gates’ rhetoric became, it seemed, the higher his public approval ratings soared: after a decade of touting programs with names like SWAT, CRASH and Operation Hammer and recommending to the U.S. Senate that “casual drug users ought to be taken out and shot,” for example, Gates received a 74% approval rating in a 1988 Los Angeles Times Poll.

As novelist and former LAPD sergeant Joseph Wambaugh told Times media critic David Shaw shortly before the riots of 1992, Angelenos, who in 1981 and 1985 had voted down ballot initiatives to improve the department’s extremely low officer-resident ratios, had implicitly condoned Gates’ “lean and mean” approach to policing. In exchange for the “unbelievable bargain” of policing the city effectively with so few men, Wambaugh said, leaders and voters in Los Angeles have “sort of given these people . . . a certain amount of latitude . . . (to be) very aggressive, paramilitary . . . stopping crime before it happens.” People want that job done, “and they don’t want to hear about the dirty side of it. This is the deal the city made and now the city’s crying about it.”

Of course, once George Holliday’s videotape of the King beating showed us just how lean and mean the department’s policing could be, our disregard was replaced by genuine concern. Shaw’s articles on the department offered one explanation for why we didn’t realize the problem sooner: Not until after the riots did journalists give prominent play to the fact that L.A.’s violent crime rate had become the nation’s highest in the mid-1980s and that city payouts for lawsuits against the LAPD increased from $891,000 in 1980 to $14.7 million in 1991.

Domanick’s comprehensive review of L.A. history also underscores how difficult it was for ordinary Angelenos to develop much of a lively and caring communal spirit. The biggest blow came in the 1890s, when L.A.’s “boosters,” in an effort to lure business from union-dominated San Francisco, attempted to stymie L.A.’s labor movement by refusing to give in to workers’ strikes against wage reductions. By 1910, striking printers at the L.A. Times, along with their allies in the labor movement, grew so frustrated that they bombed the Times’ main printing plant, killing 21 employees.

“It’s impossible to exaggerate just how stunning and unmitigated a disaster the dynamiting of the Times was for L.A.’s labor movement,” Domanick writes. “For decades afterward, visitors from London, New York, Chicago or San Francisco would be struck by the lack of a working class style, of a certain pride, a joie de vivre , a feeling that the city belonged to the people whose sweat made it go, as well as to those who owned it.”

Angelenos’ alienation from their city grew in 1920s Prohibition, Domanick shows, when cops coddled Mafia kingpins while at the same time arresting and jailing people in Little Italy who went so far as to have wine with their dinner. By the 1930s, as Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe Phillip Marlowe put it, L.A. had become a “paradise of fakers . . . a city rich and vigorous and full of crime, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.”

While LAPD chief William Parker ferreted out most corruption when he took over the department in 1950, his conviction that “society was running amok” led him to draw a thick blue line between his “superior” officers and the “venal” communities they patrolled. As Domanick writes, Parker’s philosophy of “The Grip” discarded such “archaic” notions of policing as walking a beat, knowing the neighborhood and serving as a social mediator in favor of “patrol cars with faceless occupants detached from the community; enforcing all laws and keeping an intense 24-hour surveillance over an equally faceless population.”

Parker’s cops policed with such zeal, Domanick writes, that “in 1956 alone, when crime was low and had yet to become the issue it is now in America, the LAPD would arrest 220,000 people, about 10% of the population of L.A.”

Parker adopted a “kill-the-messenger” policy toward those who tried to warn him that his aggressive policing may end up fomenting more unrest than it stopped. (One such messenger, a young sergeant and mayor-to-be by the name of Tom Bradley, was summarily dismissed from his liaison work with the black community after sending the chief a memo about growing rage in that community.)

While Domanick unearths much dirt about the LAPD leaders, his book excels at drawing fair, empathetic, multidimensional portraits of their lives.

Writers such as 1930s Times reporter Harold Story, for instance, have vilified James Edgar Davis, LAPD chief in the late ‘20s and again through most of the ‘30s, as “a burly, dictatorial, somewhat sadistic, bitterly antilabor man who saw Communist influence behind every telephone pole.” Domanick, however, ventures beyond that caricature to show how Davis won his post only after years of picking cotton, mucking out stables and walking a police beat in which he had, by his own estimate, to knock down “1,000 doors.”

At the same time, Domanick shows how Davis fell prey to the same hypocrisy as some of those who recently supported Proposition 187. The very man who came to California dirt poor and uneducated later ordered borders erected along the major points of entry to the state. At one border, a billboard showed a blue-uniformed cop with his palm thrust out near an imposing red “STOP!” sign.

“To Protect and to Serve” ultimately fails to analyze the city council’s often heated debates over which direction the LAPD should head now: toward paramilitary or community policing? Chief Willie Williams, while a proponent of the latter strategy, realizes that it in a city spanning nearly 465 square miles, it’s no mean feat to institute bike patrols and other intimate community policing techniques.

Nevertheless, community policing may be our only viable course, for history suggests that the only other direction may lead back to 1992.