PERSPECTIVES ON THE LAPD : The Death of Dragnet : The Simpson case underscored the importance not just of gathering evidence, but of preserving its sanctity.

When the legendary Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker was interviewed in 1962, he told a journalist that the program “Dragnet” was “one of the great instruments to give the people of the United States a picture of the policeman as he really is.” The image of the cool, quietly competent cop who sought “just the facts” was severely tarnished by the videotaped beating of Rodney King. It was dulled further by what seemed a Keystone Kops evidence-gathering performance in the O.J. Simpson case. And what little remained of it was shattered entirely when Mark Fuhrman replaced Joe Friday as the poster boy for the LAPD.

Still, it’s worthwhile to distinguish between ordinary police blunders and the transgressions we witnessed in the videotaped beating of King and the audiotaped racist spewings of Fuhrman. We need to appreciate that the double murder of celebrity wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman was an entirely different kind of occurrence than ordinary police work. It was more like what cops call a “critical incident”--an unusual event like a chemical spill, hostage negotiation, major fire or riot.

In their ordinary work, cops are mostly lone rangers. They rarely work together as a large team--and they are even more rarely called on to investigate major murder scenes. On the whole, cops ride around in cars, alone or in pairs, responding to minor disturbances. I recently rode with a patrol officer in Oakland on a summer weekend night. The most serious incident we were called to was a drunk threatening a liquor store owner.

Retired Oakland Police Capt. Peter Sarna, who teaches about critical incidents to police all over California, told me that these are the bane of every police agency, from the FBI to the local constabulary. “The challenge,” he said, “is to take 20 or 30 individual cops and turn them into a highly coordinated team in a relatively fast-breaking, unstable, uncertain and consequently confusing situation.” He added that, “One of the most common breakdowns is that nobody takes charge and buttons down the scene.” The lesson is this: On-the-scene supervision is critically important.

The Brown-Goldman double murder had to be puzzling. What was the motive? Was O.J. Simpson a potential victim of the murderer? Was he the murderer? Or was he entirely irrelevant? On balance and under the circumstances, the cops did a pretty good job of collecting evidence and a sloppier one of preserving it. They behaved like ordinary cops acting under extraordinary pressure. I don’t believe that the Los Angeles police framed Simpson or that they were motivated by racist animus to “rush to judgment.” But given the evidence of the King beating and of the Fuhrman tapes, how many observers among the general public would be willing to give the police the benefit of doubt?

Police can make at least two kinds of error. One might be called “procedural,” the kind of mistakes we all make when we’re in a hurry and under strain. The other, more serious kind of error is a deliberate violation of written or well-understood norms. Police corruption or brutality--or framing a suspect--illustrates such wrongdoing. So does the vicious, racist garbage that spewed from the mouth of Fuhrman.

As a result of the normative transgressions evident in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, the Los Angeles police were no longer seen as Dragnet cops--which was a phony public-relations image anyhow. The Fuhrman tapes will further undermine the LAPD’s reputation for truth and fairness for years to come.

Coming at a time when shocking police scandals are being reported across the nation, the divide between cops and the communities they police can only widen. Unless we root the racist Fuhrmans and the crooked and brutal cops out of American policing, the police of this country can expect that many citizens, especially those of color, will understandably assume that police procedural errors are normative ones.