LAPD Ends Week With High Marks

This is the Los Angeles Police Department’s strangely contradictory reputation: aggressive and militaristic in charged encounters with individual citizens; reticent, sometimes even timid, when faced with civil unrest.

Over the last week, the LAPD has managed to reinforce half of that image and contradict the other. Faced with large street demonstrations and scattered acts of physical provocation, the LAPD was swift and punishing, a far cry from the department that allowed rambunctious Laker fans to burn cars after the team’s recent championship victory.

Away from the week’s demonstrations, the Police Department strutted with unusual bravado, giving the city a look and feel unlike any since the deployment of the National Guard in May 1992, when a hesitant LAPD was overwhelmed by rioters.

As it often is, the LAPD was faced with striking the delicate balance between civil order and civil liberty. As it usually does, it opted to come down on the side of order, although many people, including some of its most persistent critics, credited it with protecting liberty as well.

By week’s end, the LAPD had managed to keep a lid on potential troubles and avoided the large-scale injuries, arrests and property damage that were suffered in varying degrees in Seattle, Washington and Philadelphia earlier this year.

Many city, county and Democratic Party leaders, including longtime observers of the LAPD such as Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, praised the police for keeping the peace and heading off more serious conflicts. Police called the week’s performance “textbook.” Mayor Richard Riordan labeled it “strategic and effective.”

After months in which heightened activism and newly assertive protest tactics have left some cities with large problems in their wake, Los Angeles has emerged from its brush with the movement relatively unscathed.

Activists who stared down the wrong end of the LAPD’s firepower, on the other hand, came away convinced that the department had overreacted to the relatively small number of provocateurs in their ranks.

Those activists say the LAPD stifled dissent that is entitled to protection. Demonstration organizers worried that some protesters who came to Los Angeles intending only to exercise their constitutional rights may have seen police forcibly disperse a crowd Monday night and then decided to skip the rest of the week’s events.

“They have definitely put a chill on people’s efforts to speak out,” said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. “They have made people afraid and unnecessarily afraid.”

Near the demonstrations and even far away from them, the wail of sirens and the sight of police cars careening at high speeds around the city lent Los Angeles an air of tension. At a cost of more than $1.5 million a day, that struck some as wildly excessive.

In the words of Jim Lafferty, executive director of the Los Angeles branch of the National Lawyers Guild, that overwhelming response on Monday was brought to bear “because the great Los Angeles Police Department didn’t know how to handle a couple of dozen kids throwing rocks and bottles.”

Although shared by many activists and others who were part of that confrontation, that was the view of a distinct minority. As delegates filed out of the convention Thursday night, many stopped and thanked the police. On Friday, some of the LAPD’s most long-standing critics did, too.

“They seem to rely on hardware more than most police departments back here,” said James Fyfe, formerly of the New York Police Department and now a professor at Temple University near Philadelphia. “But it seems to me that it was pretty well done. . . . I’m very happy that it ended on an up note.”

City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter agreed. She credited the LAPD not only with controlling the few flare-ups it encountered but also with protecting the rights of peaceful protesters to get out their message. “It’s a credit to all of us,” she said. “It’s a credit to the city.”

And Joe Hicks, who heads the city’s Human Relations Commission and who in the past has faulted some police officers for their conduct, struck a complimentary tone on Friday.

“What we saw over the last week or so was the epitome of human relations on the streets of L.A.,” he said.

Despite some disagreements over its tactics, what all sides in the never-ending debate over the LAPD and its use of force agree upon is that the Police Department they saw in the streets this week was not the Police Department of 1992 or 1965--when police hesitation allowed rioting in Los Angeles to spread.

What all sides also are left with is a bottom line that the LAPD can, and will, tout with pride--and that protesters can claim credit for as well.

In Los Angeles, there were no reports of serious injuries, either to protesters or police, although many protesters had cuts, bruises and other complaints. There was no significant property destruction. About 200 people were arrested, but few if any were picked up preemptively.

By contrast:

* In Seattle, more than 500 people were arrested and the city suffered $3 million in damage during protests late last year.

* In Philadelphia during the Republican National Convention, 391 people were arrested, 15 police officers and many activists were injured and more than 30 cars were badly damaged.

* In Washington, D.C., where demonstrators objected to an April meeting of the International Monetary Fund, police practiced the controversial tactic known as “preemptive arrest” to take more than 1,300 people to jail rather than risk letting them speak out.

Protesters, Judge Get Share of Credit

The relative lack of damage over the past week was not entirely attributable to the Police Department, however. Much of the credit goes to the protesters. They had promised to march and demonstrate peacefully, and, with very few exceptions, they delivered.

Their Convergence Center near MacArthur Park was a festive, busy place. Some people built and painted puppets. Others joined in raves at the park, consulted over march plans and napped in the shade during the afternoon heat. Police eyed the area throughout the week, but held their distance, and protesters did nothing to provoke them. And a federal judge had forbidden the LAPD to make preemptive arrests.

A breathtaking array of causes were touted and denounced over the past week. Demonstrators criticized the death penalty and police brutality, including what many see as the improper conviction and incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal, jailed for killing a Philadelphia police officer.

Environmental and economic causes abounded: One group criticized Occidental Petroleum for its drilling plans in Colombia. Many found Al Gore’s environmental record inadequate. Some protested income and wealth disparity. There were protesters who complained of mistreatment of garment workers alongside others who called for an end to American use of a bombing range in Puerto Rico. Some advocated on behalf of organized labor, a few protested abortion rights.

With few exceptions, those protesters championed their causes colorfully and peacefully.

In fact, the smaller group of demonstrators who courted trouble--those who heaved rocks, concrete chunks and street signs at police Monday--found themselves at odds not only with police but also with fellow protesters.

The confrontation Monday was by far the most memorable test of police and protesters. It occurred along a chain-link fence line at the end of a long day of marching and music.

The trouble that evening began with protesters throwing bottles and rocks at police over the top of the fence. It escalated as police and other demonstrators tried in vain to bring a stop to the pelting. It ended in a forced march out of the protest area, with police firing “stinger rounds” as protesters--some with their hands raised, many with their backs turned--were pushed from the area.

The police handling of that had at least two effects.

It embittered activists, who said police had overreacted, missed opportunities to defuse the situation without force and needlessly sprayed protesters with painful, though nonlethal bullets.

It also set a tone for the rest of the week’s demonstrations, serving as a stern warning to anyone who was tempted to break the law--but also, according to critics, potentially frightening off peaceful demonstrators who may have worried about how their actions would be greeted by police.

In the melee Monday night, police charged protesters with horses, fired “stinger rounds” at them and pushed them far away from Staples before allowing them to scatter. The opening moments of that push were rough, and amplified by the fact that the LAPD had cut off some natural routes of departure. That, according to many observers, made it hard for protesters who wanted to leave peacefully to do so without confronting the police. Instead, many were struck with batons or shot with stinger rounds.

On Friday, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks apologized to anyone who was struck or shot while trying to leave the area peacefully.

“We’re sorry if anyone was injured unnecessarily,” Parks said.

He vigorously defended the department’s overall performance, however, and disputed the contention that some people may have been so intimidated by the LAPD’s actions that they declined to exercise their constitutional rights.

“We had people who lawfully protested all week,” he said. “We gave them escort, and they gave their message. . . . We embraced the lawful protests.”

Beleaguered by Reputation

That’s not always the way it appeared, with police and protesters skirmishing throughout the week and barely escaping a second major confrontation Wednesday. That time, hasty negotiations involving police, protesters and members of the U.S. Justice Department’s Community Relations Service cooled off a tense moment just outside the officially designated protest area near Staples Center. In that instance, the tension was eased not by the LAPD pushing into the crowd, but rather by officers backing up.

Yaroslavsky, who has spoken out repeatedly regarding the LAPD and the Rampart corruption scandal, argued that the Police Department’s challenge this week was made much harder by its reputation for laxity in the face of unrest. That reputation, he said, was most recently and vividly reinforced by the department’s failure to intervene after the Laker victory, even when innocent people were swept up in that melee.

Those images, Yaroslavsky said, might well have emboldened violence-prone protesters in Los Angeles, and encouraged them to think they could get away with trouble. After Monday night, that image was unquestionably erased, he said.

“It wasn’t pretty on Monday, but for whatever reason, Monday was the peak, and we didn’t see a repeat,” Yaroslavsky said. “On the whole, the Police Department did the job that the public expects it to do, which is to keep the peace.”