COLUMN ONE : Tapes Mean More Hard Questions for LAPD : Critics say not much has changed since the King beating. Others cite progress in quelling racism, brutality.

This time it’s not about videotape and Rodney King; it’s about audiotapes and Mark Fuhrman.

But once again, in the glare of the world spotlight, the Los Angeles Police Department faces troubling questions about the conduct and attitude of its officers as they strive for order in a racially divided city.

Has anything changed in the four years since the King beating?

Thomas Stiles finds himself wondering. He is an African American police officer who joined the LAPD 13 years ago. Like others in an agency that has struggled mightily to rid itself of racism and sexism, he found himself hearing about Fuhrman’s alleged racial slurs and acts of misconduct and feeling confused about how far the department has come--and how much further it still must go.

“It’s frustrating,” Stiles said. “Here we are approaching the year 2000 and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any better.”

The Fuhrman tapes--now a focal point of the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial--have caused considerable soul-searching throughout the ranks of the LAPD. Some officers insist that the department has made enormous strides since the 1991 King beating and a scathing review by the Christopher Commission.

Women and minorities now make up a greater share of the department’s sworn personnel than ever before, LAPD administrators say. Training programs emphasize tolerance of all races and groups, including gays. Not only are the lessons reinforced during daily roll-call meetings, but peer pressures within an increasingly diverse organization have helped cut down on overt acts of bigotry and sexual harassment.

Officers found guilty of racism, sexism or excessive force are disciplined with fines and suspensions--77 days without pay, in one recent harassment case, said Capt. Jim Tatreau of the LAPD’s Newton Division.

Still, the picture is muddled by many shades of gray. Even as an entrenched “old boy” network is giving way--eroded by retirements, departures and the upwelling of new blood--some officers cling to old biases. Their attitudes are not as openly expressed--at least at the station house--but many are still out on the streets, reacting to situations that sometimes require more restraint or sensitivity than they are willing to offer, according to critics.

Despite well-publicized reforms, the LAPD still employs 33 of the 44 officers cited by the Christopher Commission for repeated excessive-force complaints between 1986 and 1990. Nineteen of those officers are still assigned to patrol divisions, said Cmdr. Tim McBride, an LAPD spokesman.

The Fuhrman tapes have added to the criticism leveled at the department on a number of fronts. During his tape-recorded but not yet public talks with a screenwriter, Fuhrman used racial slurs, disparaged female officers and boasted of lying, roughing up criminal suspects and tampering with evidence, according to attorneys involved in the Simpson case.

While his own spokesman insisted that Fuhrman was merely inventing stories to punch up a screenplay, the detective described one incident that appeared to be corroborated, at least in part, by records of a 1978 disturbance in Boyle Heights. In his purported disclosures about what happened after two LAPD officers were shot, Fuhrman talked about how he and three other officers “basically tortured” the suspects, beating them until “their faces were just mush.”

*

Although Fuhrman was the primary suspect in a subsequent 18-month Internal Affairs investigation, he was not punished, he told his interviewer, adding: “They knew damn well I did it.”

Stung by past criticisms of LAPD misconduct, many officers said they were disturbed by the leaked contents of the tapes. Some characterized the attitudes attributed to Fuhrman as aberrations--the type of arrogant bluster that began to die out years ago.

There was a case in Van Nuys several years ago, said Chuck Leber, a 46-year-old patrol officer, in which a policeman had a vendetta against a drug dealer and planted a plastic bag of evidence. But a sting operation led to the officer’s arrest, Leber said.

Such abuses now are probably rare, he added.

Police Chief Willie L. Williams, who was hired three years ago to implement Christopher Commission reforms, defended the department’s progress and decried the Fuhrman allegations as creating a false impression that the LAPD is filled with racist, sexist rogue cops.

“Every hour . . . on the national and international news, the Los Angeles Police Department is being painted with a broad brush as racist, as being anti-Semitic and as being brutal,” Williams said this week during the latest of monthly media briefing sessions.

Televised trial coverage during the debate over Fuhrman fueled intense discussions at a carwash at Crenshaw Boulevard and 48th Street. Some customers shared their own bitter experiences with the police. Owner Jerry Brown, 60, said the disclosures about Fuhrman only reinforced his own early suspicions of law enforcement in Los Angeles, formed when he was a teen-ager and was stopped and hassled for merely driving through his own neighborhood.

“A leopard doesn’t change his spots,” Brown said. “The old LAPD is alive and well. Nothing has changed.”

Rosie Vasquez, a community activist in Boyle Heights, had much the same reaction. The news about Fuhrman caused her to think back on the police beating of Rodney King and other, even earlier abuses of police power. She keeps newspaper clippings mounted on her wall: stories of officers roughing up minority groups as far back as 1951.

“It’s the same old story,” she said. “It [seems] like from the very beginning we were dealing with police brutality. They have this attitude, ‘You have to do something, or react to me somehow, because I’m wearing a badge.’ ”

Even so, the Los Angeles Times Poll has shown a significant overall rise in public approval of the LAPD since 1992, when the initial acquittal of officers charged with beating King led to the worst rioting in American history.

A Times staff writer who spent several recent months at the Van Nuys Division observed that attitudes such as Fuhrman’s were not widespread, but occasionally evident--mostly among older white officers still patrolling the streets. Many seemed to feel their careers were stalled. Some expressed anger at minorities, women on the force and even the LAPD brass--to their minds, a bunch of pencil-pushers and bean-counters who have little understanding of real police work. Detective Ben Lovato, a 26-year veteran stationed at the Hollenbeck Division, has seen street officers face greater and greater threats in recent years from heavily armed gangs and street warfare.

“People talk about what’s happening in Beirut, in Bosnia,” Lovato said. “You have it right here in the streets. . . . I hate to say it, but it seems like no one cares.”

To some longtime officers, the heavy emphasis on sensitivity and political correctness has gotten in the way of getting the job done.

“Everybody’s walking on eggshells right now, and that’s not a way to run an agency,” said Officer Joe Onorato, a 24-year veteran who still works the streets of the 77th Division, a high-crime area in South Los Angeles. Too many officers now fear taking charge in a disturbance because they do not want to face reprimands, he said.

Unhappy in such an environment, many longtime cops are getting out, leaving the LAPD to be run by younger officers who are far too passive to control crime, Onorato said.

Onorato said he was weaned on “good, aggressive police work” and lamented all the attention that is paid to whether an officer uses the “N word” in dealing with drug dealers or other criminals.

“Blacks call blacks the same name . . . they call each other the ‘N word’ and it’s OK,” he said. “If you stop and think about it, what is considered racist? Calling a white a honky--is that racist? I don’t think so in a lot of cases.”

Doing away with racist attitudes is often difficult, despite intensive training efforts, said Dr. Kris Mohandie, coordinator of the LAPD’s behavioral sciences department. Many officers who are assigned to heavily minority communities that have been plagued in recent years by high crime rates begin to associate race or ethnicity with crime, even if they know they should not, Mohandie said.

“We’ve talked to a lot of [officers] who know this change [in their own attitudes] is taking place, and they’re distressed by it,” Mohandie said. “[But] from a psychological point of view, it’s a natural thing to form stereotypes. It’s kind of a mental shortcut in order to deal with the world. . . . It’s all about wanting to know what to expect in advance. It’s all about self-protection.”

Mohandie said he advises officers to counter those impulses by going into the community and having positive experiences with members of minority groups.

Racist attitudes in the department have been tempered to a large degree by the integration of the LAPD, he added. Working alongside African Americans, Latinos, women and gays has enabled more and more veteran white officers to see those groups in a non-adversarial way.

Any racism that still exists has moved underground, for the most part, becoming far less visible in recent years. Some black officers say they know it is there, but they rarely encounter it during day-to-day duties.

“When I walk up, it’s squashed,” said Officer Ron Smith, a veteran at the Wilshire Division, which employs a relatively high percentage of black officers.

Stiles, the 13-year veteran who works the same division, remembered being shocked by hearing racial slurs when he joined the department as a 21-year-old recruit. Stiles said he eventually took an activist stance, stepping in on behalf of minority criminal suspects if they appeared to be receiving unfair treatment.

“When I saw a suspect was handcuffed too long, I would do something,” Stiles said. “If after a struggle I saw he was down and had given up, I would say, ‘Enough is enough, the game is over.’ I’ve made a point of making sure that that doesn’t happen when I’m around.”

More than a decade later, Stiles can say he seldom hears racist sentiments. On the other hand: “I’ve never been promoted.”

While racism has become less apparent, negative attitudes toward women have shown greater staying power, some officers said. Male officers tend to feel angry that recruiting standards are lower for women, who are not required to possess the same strength and physical skills that men are, said Van Nuys patrolman Leber.

“We still have officers who don’t feel females belong in patrol functions where there is a likelihood of physical confrontation,” Leber said.

The department doesn’t publicize it, officers said, but it’s a poorly guarded secret that white males must score 100 on the oral exam to clear the first hiring hurdle, while women can get in with a score in the 70s.

*

“That’s been a sore spot with a lot of officers,” Leber said. “Hiring people by quota as opposed to hiring the best qualified person.”

Carol Sobel, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said female LAPD officers tell her they are still the targets of sexist behavior and comments. The offenders, she said, are not just old-timers. Even new male officers sometimes refuse to work with women, she said.

Despite all that, a vast number of citizens still express support for the difficult job that LAPD officers do in an extraordinarily complex, ever-changing metropolis.

Frank Villalobos, a Boyle Heights activist who serves as president of Barrio Planners, said the Hollenbeck Division recently opened a substation near a troubled public housing project.

He is glad, and grateful.

“It makes a hell of a difference when you know they’re here with us,” Villalobos said. “It really has been a significant change.”

Times staff writers John Johnson, Stephanie Simon, Nora Zamichow, Bettina Boxall and Jean Merl contributed to this story.