In TV Age, Openness Best Tactic for Embattled Agency

Five years after the Rodney King beating, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department takes its place under the unforgiving media spotlight, where cops’ images are made or tarnished forever by a few seconds of videotape.

Riverside’s time came at 7 p.m. Monday when spokesman Mark Lohman, newly promoted from deputy to sergeant, stepped in front of broadcast and print reporters demanding information about the videotaped beating of a man and a woman. The pair were in a pickup truck packed with at least 19 people suspected of sneaking across the border from Mexico and leading officers on an 80-mile freeway chase.

Lohman, trim and wearing a policeman’s carefully trimmed brush mustache, was friendly to the reporters. He greeted Channel 5’s Stan Chambers by name. He spoke into the mikes for a broadcast sound check and held up a white piece of paper for the TV crews to adjust their lighting with. Then, without hesitation, he said his department was embarrassed.

The next morning, many miles to the west in Los Angeles, a veteran Los Angeles police commander pondered the situation, and remembered the days when he took charge of police in the San Fernando Valley just five days after King was beaten there.

Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker, who now commands the police in south Los Angeles, said the lesson for law enforcement, in this modern age in which public policy is shaped by powerful but short messages on TV, is that police departments have to be open about their investigations of possible misconduct.

“The lesson to me is there is a great need for us in law enforcement to communicate,” he said. “The lesson is we have to communicate what an internal investigation does.”

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A colleague who covered Sgt. Lohman’s press conference at the Riverside sheriff’s office was impressed with the way he seemed to answer questions without evasion. That impression was no accident.

Senior Riverside County Deputy Sheriff Lori Marquette said Sheriff Larry Smith and other top officers met immediately after the beating and agreed to follow a policy of open disclosure.

“We saw the same videotape as everyone else,” Marquette said. “We’ve always been upfront about releasing what information we can. The public has a right to know what’s going on. We wanted to let you know as soon as possible we’re on top of this.”

Just after the King beating, there was a different atmosphere around Los Angeles police headquarters, where top officers combined outrage at the event with resentment at the press for giving it so much coverage.

African American community leaders demanded an independent investigation, not believing the department’s secretive Internal Affairs Division would thoroughly investigate the beating. Mayor Tom Bradley, who is African American, wanted an independent investigation too and appointed a commission headed by distinguished attorney Warren Christopher, now secretary of state.

The Christopher Commission, and its open hearing policy, was bitterly resented by Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and other top brass. The debate over the commission, its recommendations and the King beating itself has never ended, remaining a festering wound in L.A.’s civic life.

Clearly, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department wants to avoid this.

But it won’t be easy.

Despite the agency’s apparent openness, some are skeptical about its record. “We have had the same complaints about them that we heard about Daryl Gates, the insensitivity toward the Latino community, especially the undocumented,” said Antonia Hernandez, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “No human being deserves to be treated this way.”

Moreover, the Riverside department will be exposed to a barrage of second-guessing and punditry, most of it based on viewing the 15 seconds of videotape of the beating.

Deputy Chief Kroeker recalled the heat the LAPD took after the King beating, even from other police executives. That’s another lesson, he said: “Let’s not condemn other organizations based on something you see on television or something you see by a very short observation.”

That comment touched on one of the most important points about the latest beating and the King assault--the impact of television on public consciousness and on public policy.

It’s a fact of modern life that unless it’s shown on television, it hasn’t happened.

Cops have been engaged in misconduct for years, but it didn’t dominate the public consciousness until King and, now, the Riverside beating. Impoverished Mexicans have been sneaking across the border through most of this century, usually welcomed by employers who want low-cost labor. It’s such a common story we never think of it, unless roused to attention by the sight of the other truck passengers running away while the man and woman were beaten by deputies.

“I wonder if atrocities in Rwanda, if they had been videotaped, where babies were macheted in a hospital, what the world would have thought,” said Kroeker. “It was genocide in our time but because it didn’t appear on network TV in a way that was live, everyone was blase about it.”

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Nobody is blase about this one. Always hungry for a good chase story, a TV crew stumbled on a big one. Now the nation is outraged. Our unofficial governor, President Clinton, all over California affairs this election year, expressed immediate concern. Groups across the political spectrum voiced their predictable views.

This is going to damage the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department and police departments elsewhere. By seeming to level with the media, Riverside County has begun effective damage control. The real test, however, will be whether the authorities there permit a complete and open investigation.

As many a corporation and politician has learned, a cover-up only makes things worse; the best damage control is to let all the facts hang out.