Williams Promises a ‘Biopsy’ of Fuhrman : LAPD: In response to concerns over inaction, chief tells council that department is keeping tabs on 100 additional officers.

Police Chief Willie L. Williams on Tuesday promised the Los Angeles City Council a full “biopsy” of former Detective Mark Fuhrman’s LAPD career and also revealed that the department has added about 100 officers to a watch list of 44 previously identified rogue officers.

Williams said the 100 officers are ones with several complaints lodged against them for being discourteous or for using excessive force. The 1992 Christopher Commission report on the Rodney G. King beating identified 44 problem officers in the department.

Meanwhile, Williams told council members Tuesday that his Administration has as a top priority ending a “code of silence” in the LAPD’s ranks that protects rogue officers from being exposed to their superiors or internal investigators.

Williams met with lawmakers as they tried to grapple with the crisis of confidence facing the LAPD after disclosures in the O.J. Simpson trial of Fuhrman’s audiotaped racist remarks and tales of police beatings and evidence planting.

“It’s pretty obvious the LAPD is again on trial,” Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas told his colleagues during the two-hour meeting.

Councilwoman Laura Chick, chairwoman of the council’s Police Review Committee, also chided the council. The council, she said, has let itself be distracted from the job of eliminating LAPD racism, identified by the Christopher Commission report, in its rush to implement Mayor Richard Riordan’s plan for adding thousands of officers to the force.

“Yes, we know we need more officers on the street,” Chick told her colleagues. “But somehow in the energy and push to do that, we turned away from the focus and priority . . . of the Christopher Commission.”

In Tuesday’s wide-ranging dialogue, other council members, while sharply decrying racism in the LAPD, said that officers like Fuhrman are a small minority and warned that the continuing emphasis on Fuhrman is destroying the morale of good officers.

Relating a recent scene where an officer held the hand of a 15-year-old, dying of gunshot wounds, so “he would not die alone,” Councilman Michael Feuer emotionally asserted: “That’s the Los Angeles Police Department, not Mark Fuhrman.”

Tuesday’s session ended with no action by the council and a rising level of frustration with the magnitude and seeming intractability of the problem.

Councilman Joel Wachs asked why officers with Fuhrman’s background cannot simply be fired. “You can’t do it that easy,” Williams told Wachs, noting that officers are protected by state law from perfunctory dismissal.

After relating some of the hallmarks of the department’s history of excessive force cases involving African American victims, Councilwoman Rita Walters demanded to know when the department’s efforts to clean up its act, mapped out in broad strokes by Williams, would be completed.

“I don’t think I can guess as to the time,” the chief said. “I’d hope it’d be a very short time.”

Later, Williams told reporters, who were pressing him for details of what is being done to screen out problem officers, that the department is closely monitoring the 44 officers identified by the Christopher Commission as well as “about 100 other officers.”

A system of monitoring the performance of these officers by their superiors and Internal Affairs has been in place for a year, Williams said. They are monitoring officers who have had two or more complaints lodged against them in one year, one complaint of misuse of force that was sustained after a hearing and any complaints of racism or sexism, the chief said.

Tuesday’s session was sparked by a motion by Chick aimed at providing the council with an update on what LAPD management is doing to investigate the Fuhrman tapes and to root out such attitudes and behavior from the department.

Chick said the department must develop better ways to screen recruits with behavior problems, provide officers with in-service cultural sensitivity training and fire rogue officers.

A more detailed review of the department’s plans is expected next week when the council’s Public Safety and Personnel committees hold joint hearings.

In his opening remarks Tuesday, a solemn Williams assured the council that an LAPD task force is doing a “biopsy of Mark Fuhrman’s career” that will seek to sort out “the fact from the fiction” in taped interviews the officer, now retired, gave to aspiring screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny.

In those tapes, Fuhrman repeatedly refers to blacks as “niggers” and brags about incidents in which he and other officers roughed up suspects and planted evidence against them.

Williams assured the council that his task force would also seek to determine if other officers were implicated in the incidents Fuhrman related to McKinny. In the tapes, a voluble, boastful Fuhrman identified other officers by their nicknames as participants in abusive behavior.

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Sensing council frustration with the Fuhrman tapes debacle, Williams assured the lawmakers that “the department has not been sitting still for the last three or four years.”

“I have emphasized that I, as the chief, will not accept or tolerate bias of any type--bias based on gender, bias based on ethnicity, bias based on whether one is a gay or lesbian or bias based on some individual who steps out from the crowd and breaks the code of silence,” Williams said.

“One of the real challenges we have today,” Williams said, is to make sure the message gets out that if “you sit by and watch others who are biased, this is just as egregious an action as if you went out and stuck up a 7-Eleven or used drugs. When that type of understanding is ingrained . . . we’ll be a long way toward eradicating some of the problems we have today.”

Police Commission President Deirdre Hill also damned the department’s unwritten code of silence and urged the council to fund a special unit in the LAPD to investigate complaints of internal racism and sexism against minority and female officers. Such a unit would help the department identify attitudes that breed officers like Fuhrman, she said.

An LAPD request for funding the unit was made last year, Hill later told reporters.

Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg urged that half of the department’s Internal Affairs division--which investigates problem officers--be staffed with civilians. With that kind of makeup, it would “be less likely that the code of silence would continue,” she said.

Pressed by anxious council members to explain what steps were being taken to root out officers like Fuhrman, Williams said the department is poised to begin an 18-month program of training for its officers that will include inculcating an appreciation of cultural and ethnic diversity.

Williams and Hill, who continued to decry the media’s focus on the LAPD’s rogue officers, also had one bright spot to report. Internal LAPD computer terminal communications have been cleared of the kind of racial slurs that stunned the public in the wake of the King beating thanks to periodic, spot checks of e-mail exchanges between patrolling officers, Williams said. “As a result, there’s little abuse of the system,” he said.