Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 18, 1991 TAG: 9103180232
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEORGE F. WILL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Three Los Angeles officers shared the labor of administering to their victim at least 56 blows with clubs, hard enough to cause fillings to fly from his teeth, fracturing his eye socket, smashing his cheek bone, causing a skull concussion and facial nerve damage and breaking a leg. He also suffered burns from an electric stun gun and damage to internal organs. He will never fully recover and may have brain damage.
Daryl Gates, Los Angeles police chief, says he is distressed. What distresses others is the fact that he is still chief. Apparently the principle of accountability, never strong in American government, has become attenuated to the point of disappearance.
Gates can be called The $8 Million Dollar Man. Just in the past year, that sum has been awarded to victims of Los Angeles police misconduct. There will be two commas in the sum awarded to the man whose savage beating by some of Gates' men was recorded by a citizen with a video camera.
After almost committing homicide, but before they knew they had been filmed, Gates' officers compounded their criminality by filing a report filled with lies. They said the victim had been driving 115 mph in his Hyundai. The manufacturer says that car can't go that fast. The officers wrote that they used force to stop the victim from fighting. Witnesses and the camera say that the victim was passive while being clubbed and stomped for two minutes by the three officers, as l2 other officers watched.
So Gates "apologized." Sort of. "In spite of the fact that [the victim] is on parole and a convicted robber, I'd be glad to apologize."
"In spite of"? Gates' ugly intimation is that a police miniriot is at least a little bit justified if the victim has a bad-enough past.
Gates once said that perhaps the reason several blacks have died after being subdued by police choke-holds is that blacks are more vulnerable than "normal" people to such holds. (Twenty-seven people have died after such holds during Gates' 13-year tenure.) Gates may not be at his best when thinking and talking, but the problem is not that he is no Pericles. It is that his department is demonstrably guilty of an intolerable level of abuse, much of it resulting from racism.
Gates sees no racial aspect to the videotaped beating. But when three white men club and stomp a black man while a dozen other white men watch, well, people will talk.
They did when Jamaal Wilkes, who is black and a former star with the Lakers, was handcuffed because his auto registration was about to - yes, about to - expire. Joe Morgan, who is black and a Hall of Fame second baseman, was thrown to the ground and handcuffed when cops decided he looked like a drug dealer. (Later the cops said "oops!" and a court said: Pay Mr. Morgan $540,000.)
The latest episode was recorded in the most appalling video of a racial incident since the Alabama police riot at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. How many beatings and other indignities are being suffered by Los Angeles citizens who are not famous or fortunate enough to have their experience of police misconduct videotaped? The burden now rests on the Police Department to disprove the assumption, shared by 54 percent of all Los Angeles residents, that blacks are particularly subjected to brutality.
Gates has long been a special pinup of the kind of conservatives who cotton to primitivism, as in his thought that casual drug-users should be shot. But he is a special problem for thoughtful conservatives who are having a hard enough time convincing Congress to expand some police powers.
Every policeman present at the scene of that police crime should, at a minimum, be fired. Some, probably most, perhaps all, should go to jail. And what of Gates, who is paid ($l68,793, by the way) to produce a police force better than his is?
Police work is frequently dangerous and even more often unpleasant. It can be desensitizing and demoralizing - literally de-moralizing. It requires special strength of character to do this indispensable work right, day by day and night after night, without succumbing to callousness, disgust and rage.
Most police officers lead lives of heroic resistance to these weaknesses. Minimizing those weaknesses is a test of police leadership. Gates has failed that test too often.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB