Inglewood Chief’s Tenacious Style Is Equal to the Task : Police: Oliver Thompson has dealt strictly with department problems and won support from the rank and file. ‘American society still wants to believe in law enforcement,’ he says.

When the city of Inglewood hired him three years ago, Police Chief Oliver M. Thompson set out to find the kinds of face-to-face encounters that would give him a taste of his new home.

So he bought a house in Inglewood and rode his bicycle 1 1/2 miles each day to work. He shopped at the local supermarket, attended a nearby church and sent his son to a public school. At social functions he’d show up sporting a USC hat, a testament to his days there as a graduate student, and poke fun at anyone who dared to support UCLA.

Thompson was still settling into his comfortable middle-class surroundings less than a year later when he caught his first glimpse, at point-blank range, of Inglewood’s underbelly. Pedaling home from a late-night City Council meeting, he was knocked to the ground and attacked by robbers.

Suddenly his welcome was complete.

By now, the 53-year-old Thompson has seen his 200-member force grapple with many of the same nagging problems that plague departments everywhere: contract disputes, grievances, charges of excessive force and concern over community-based policing.

He’s also seeing it from a broader perspective, having been elected earlier this summer as president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, a 3,000-member organization that seeks to expand opportunities for African Americans in the criminal justice system.

Crime, and the damage it can inflict on a city’s image, is a sensitive issue in Inglewood, which relies heavily on the revenue generated from hundreds of thousands of people who visit Hollywood Park racetrack and the Great Western Forum each year.

For years, the city’s largely middle-class African American community has been supportive of the police, but old suspicions persist, fueled in part by high-profile police actions in neighboring Los Angeles: the police beating of Rodney G. King and allegations of improper police conduct in the O.J. Simpson case.

Thompson, a tough taskmaster who credits a stint in the Air Force with giving him the discipline to succeed, says he is committed to closing any gulf.

“Deep down inside, American society still wants to believe in law enforcement,” he said. “They don’t want to think of the police as a bunch of black-booted thugs.” And police officers “are like anyone else. They want to go home to their families without incident.”

Such talk has gained him support among Inglewood’s rank-and-file officers.

“He brought new ideas to the operations and management of the department,” said Detective Larry Marino, president of the Inglewood Police Assn.

Marino says Thompson has an independent style, and his door is open to discuss problems. But at the same time, he adds, officer grievances are up, and tensions with lower level commanders continue to trouble the department.

Last year, some officers accused Thompson of grabbing headlines at their expense when he called a news conference to announce his decision to fire one officer and discipline several others for gambling with a bookmaker.

“It was gambling,” Thompson said. “If you caught someone gambling on the street, would you call him in, sit him down and give him a warning? I gave out the appropriate discipline.”

The chief says his straightforward approach to discipline comes from growing up in a strict, religious home in Tulsa, Okla. He was raised by his great-grandmother and a great-aunt, two women who became his role models and parents after his mother died. He never knew his father.

“It’s not the gender of the model but the strength of the model that counts,” he said.

As a teen-ager, Thompson rejected his great-grandmother’s teachings and started living on the edge of lawlessness--hanging out on the streets, having run-ins with the police. When he was growing up, the Tulsa police who patrolled his neighborhood were all African American and practiced their own, more caring brand of street-corner justice.

“They would grab you by the nape of the neck, sit you down and talk to you,” he remembered. “You didn’t want to get on their bad side.”

Thompson eventually decided his future was in the military. Under the Air Force’s stiff regimen, he began to turn his life around. He wound up in California at March Air Force Base in Riverside County. After four years in the service, he joined the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department in 1965, one of a handful of blacks on the force.

He rose through the ranks in Riverside while completing college and earned a doctorate in public administration at USC. In both arenas he met people with racist sentiments similar to those expressed by former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman.

“I’ve met people who didn’t like me because of my particular paint job, but I never let that bother me,” he said. “We always had a few Fuhrman types out there but never more than a few.”

Thompson counted himself among the kind of officers he prizes today, people who were glad to make it home to their family at the end of the day. It’s something he often thinks about when he remembers that night he was knocked off his bicycle by robbers.

“At first I thought it was a drunk driver,” he said.

As he got up, he saw three men approach. One had a gun. “I said to myself: ‘Oliver, you are a dead man.’ ”

“Give me your backpack!” the gunman barked.

As Thompson took off the backpack and handed it over, he reached for his .45-caliber revolver and came up firing.

“It’s between you and me now,” he recalled thinking.

In the heated exchange, the robber dropped the backpack and escaped with his partners in the car.

Thompson was not injured, but he no longer rides his bicycle to work.

“Just one more thing you have to give up in this dangerous society we live in,” he said.

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Profile: Oliver M. Thompson

* Born: March 20, 1942

* Residence: Inglewood

* Education: Doctorate in public administration, USC; bachelor’s degree in police administration, Cal State Los Angeles.

* Career highlights: Inglewood police chief, 1992 to present; previously chief deputy of Riverside County Sheriff’s Department.

* Interests: Board of directors, Inglewood YMCA and Inglewood Drug/Violence Prevention Coalition; involvement with Boys and Girls Club of Inglewood; member of the Inglewood Ministers Assn.

* Family: Married with four children.

* Quote: “Deep down inside, American society still wants to believe in law enforcement. They don’t want to think of the police as a bunch of black-booted thugs.”