Don’t Condemn, Gates Tells Rally for Deputies

Hundreds of people gathered downtown Monday to hear former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates warn against a “rush to judgment” in the videotaped beating of two unarmed illegal immigrants by two Riverside County deputies.

“I did not come here to defend [the deputies], because I don’t know if they need my defense,” Gates told the noontime crowd.

And despite a parade of speakers who condemned illegal immigration to the crowd’s applause, Gates said the rally “has nothing to do with the immigration problem--and it is a problem. It has to do with a chase down the freeway at breakneck speeds, where felonies are being committed, taking people into custody and the use of force.”

Law enforcement, Gates told the crowd, “needs to know that you want them to be aggressive, that you want them there, that you want them to protect you.”

Staged against a backdrop of American flags and patriotic music, the rally also featured speakers who bashed illegal immigrants and the media.

The Riverside Sheriff’s Assn. sponsored the rally after Deputies Tracy Watson and Kurt Franklin were videotaped by television news crews striking two occupants of a pickup loaded with illegal immigrants. The April 1 incident followed a harrowing 80-mile chase from Temecula to South El Monte.

Among the rally speakers were representatives of several state legislators and the president of a statewide law enforcement employees organization, the Police Officers Research Assn. of California. Riverside County Sheriff Larry Smith did not attend, and the county Board of Supervisors was unrepresented at the podium.

Watson and Franklin, who did not attend the rally, were suspended with pay. They have been roundly criticized by Smith and numerous civil rights organizations for using batons to force the two immigrants onto the ground.

Their actions are under investigation by the FBI, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the internal affairs unit of their own department. Enrique Funes Flors, one of the two immigrants struck with batons, and an occupant of the truck who said he was kicked have filed claims against Riverside County.

The rally was the first of two in Riverside on Monday. A counterdemonstration was staged four hours later in a nearby city park by the Mexican Political Assn. to push for investigations into the deputies’ actions. About 50 to 75 demonstrators participated.

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At the first meeting, the crowds held up signs reading: “Our Deputies Don’t Deserve Media Castration,” “Put the Illegals Away, Not Our Deputies,” “Police Get Punished, Criminals Get $$” and “Where Is the Outrage When a Cop Is Beaten or Killed?”

Buttons, ribbons and T-shirts reading “11-99--Officer Needs Help” were sold by the deputies’ association to raise money for Watson’s and Franklin’s legal defense.

Many in the crowd waved American flags--including several hundred handed out by Ron Prince, a chief sponsor of Proposition 187, the 1994 state measure that sought to restrict education, health and social services for illegal immigrants.

Two men were issued misdemeanor battery citations after scuffling with a group of people carrying the Mexican national flag through the periphery of the crowd, said Riverside Police Department spokesman Steve Johnson.

The first incident occurred while the song “America” blared on the public address system, the other during the rally’s opening prayer.

Neither man was affiliated with law enforcement, Johnson said.

Gates, the keynote speaker, said he was still angry that, after a Superior Court jury acquitted three officers involved in the 1991 beating of motorist Rodney G. King, federal authorities successfully prosecuted Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and Officer Laurence M. Powell on civil rights violations.

“In this [Riverside] case, the United States government--stay out of it. We do not need the FBI, the civil rights section of the Justice Department, any of that,” he told the applauding and cheering crowd.

Then he asked where civil libertarians were “in protecting the civil rights of these deputies?”

Gates said investigators should not too quickly or too harshly judge the emotion-steeped actions of Watson and Franklin. The former LAPD chief has assailed Smith for his statement against the deputies, but Gates was fiercely critical of his officers after the King beating.

Gates noted that on Sunday, Lakers superstar Magic Johnson--the “epitome of a professional”--was ejected from a game after charging and bumping a referee to contest a call. “And that’s only a game,” Gates said.

“Emotion enters into it,” Gates said of high-speed police chases. He said the public has seen only the concluding baton-wielding moments of the chase--not the chase itself, in which occupants of the truck allegedly threw debris at the pursuing officers and tried to run into other vehicles to divert the deputies’ attention.

He called batons “a prehistoric weapon.”

“That’s all they give us,” he said, “and they teach us to use it just that way, because they don’t let us use chokeholds.”

Had the suspects been armed, Gates said, the deputies still probably would have been criticized for using batons.

“No matter how you use that club,” he said, “people are going to criticize.”

Dan Swift, president of the 1,300-member Riverside Sheriff’s Assn., called the rally a success. He estimated the crowd at 1,000--and said most appeared to be “law enforcement or affiliated” with it.

The Riverside Police Department estimated the crowd at 500.

Among those who attended the rally was 88-year-old Audrey Lea, who came from Pacific Palisades and perched atop a short stepladder to show her support for law enforcement.

“The press is very biased against police officers. It’s un-American. It’s un-American!” she shouted.

Nineteen-year-old Joseph Turner--wearing a T-shirt emblazed with the letters USA-- skipped his economics class at nearby Riverside Community College to attend the rally. “I’m getting a better education here,” he said. “We’re sick and tired of all these people going against police, saying that everything American is bad or evil. Today, we are the vocal majority.”

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Standing far in the background, Riverside County jail Deputy Mike Petras viewed the rally with a smile. “It [public sentiment] is getting a lot better than it was,” he said. “Anytime you get a pat on the back, that’s great.”

Monday’s second rally was held “to keep on the pressure until those deputies are held accountable for what they did,” said Martha Hernandez, a chapter president of the Mexican Political Assn. “We don’t want them to go through a process that falls through the system’s cracks and nothing happens to them.”

Latino activists called for a boycott of this weekend’s Sunkist Orange Blossom Festival in Riverside. They criticized city leaders for their silence in the case, saying that silence “is interpreted by law enforcement as an endorsement of their brutal behavior and encouragement to continue in those atrocities against anyone appearing to be an immigrant.”

The festival, the Latino activists said, honors “an industry that would not have succeeded absent the blood, sweat, pain and humiliation of immigrants, whose descendants are now being hunted down, chased, beaten, killed, bashed and blamed for everything from unemployment in our country to a threat against national security.”