Why Are We All So Shocked?

On the day last week that America heard retired Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman expound on the subject of race and law enforcement, the reaction was swift. “What I have heard has made me sick,” Mayor Richard Riordan declared in prepared statement. “I am saddened and outraged . . .”

Sickened, saddened, outraged. And, presumably, shocked. To be sure, one week later many people still seem plainly stunned by Fuhrman’s virulence.

But why? Long before Johnnie L. Cochran accused Fuhrman publicly of racism, the same charge was leveled by . . . Mark Fuhrman.

Strange how forgetful we are. Fourteen months have passed since we first learned that Mark Fuhrman was not merely a racist, but a self-avowed racist. In July, 1994, we learned that when Fuhrman applied for a stress-related early retirement in the early 1980s, he told psychiatrists of his violent impulses and his hatred for blacks and Latinos.

But the pension review board rejected his claim, apparently thinking Fuhrman was just trying to con the system into a lucrative departure.

And now we hear that Fuhrman apparently told witness Natalie Singer in 1987 that he liked to beat and kick black suspects--that he found it a good way to relieve tension.

It’s a scandal that Fuhrman wasn’t forced to turn in his badge. It’s a scandal that then-Chief Daryl F. Gates and the LAPD brass looked the other way.

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The essential facts of Fuhrman’s views were first reported last summer by legal affairs writer Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker. Plenty of media, including this newspaper, followed up with their own reports on Fuhrman’s extraordinary stress claim.

Yet, more than a year later the audiotapes left TV news anchors breathless: Mark Fuhrman said the N-word! Again and again and again!

Fuhrman’s racist views seemed to come as a surprise to everyone except the African American community. Much of the public apparently was unaware of the disability case, and among those who remembered it, the attitude appeared to be one of forgive and forget.

It started with reaction to the New Yorker story. Titled “An Incendiary Defense,” Toobin’s piece previewed the Simpson defense strategy and included extensive quotes from documents that became public after Fuhrman sued, unsuccessfully, over his rejected disability claim.

It’s strong stuff. Psychiatrists describe Fuhrman espousing views he would later express to an aspiring screenwriter with a tape recorder.

Quite a scoop, but Toobin heard far more criticism than praise. When journalists get beat on a story, they love to point out its flaws. On “Nightline” and elsewhere, big-shot journalists likened Toobin’s piece to irresponsible, National Enquirer-style journalism. Why didn’t he get the D.A.’s response? Why didn’t he report that several officers had responded to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman before Fuhrman arrived on the scene? How could the New Yorker let the Simpson team use them like that?

Yes, the defense team had found a skeleton in Fuhrman’s closet. But the logical leap from Fuhrman-is-a-racist to Fuhrman-planted-the-glove is a big one.

These new judgments help explain why the mainstream media was more cautious than the New Yorker in its pursuit and presentation of the Fuhrman story.

Later came Judge Ito’s ruling that Fuhrman’s stress claim was inadmissible in court, reinforcing the notion that his racist attitudes were ancient history.

And then came Fuhrman’s own cool, steadfast testimony--under oath, of course--that he had not uttered you-know-what for a decade.

And because the public wants to trust the police, because we need to trust the police, we wanted to believe Fuhrman. That business about his stress claim? Well, gosh, that was a long time ago.

Besides, his claim was denied, right? So he must have been, uh, exaggerating a little.

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At a USC symposium last year concerning media hype and the Simpson case, former San Jose Police Chief Joseph D. McNamara, a well-known reformer, expressed his astonishment at hearing so many journalists criticize Toobin’s scoop. To him, the real story was obvious: How could the LAPD tolerate and, yes, even promote a man who acknowledged his own bigotry?

It was, and is, mind boggling. In a commentary published in The Times last September, former LAPD assistant Chief David D. Dotson suggested this “disturbing” reason an officer “can be racially prejudicial and still promotable. LAPD management is aware of attitudes like Fuhrman expressed but looks the other way. It is just locker-room talk.”

It all happened on Daryl Gates’ watch, that era of denial. Aren’t you glad he’s a former chief now?