Board Urged to Limit Police Use of Ram

Carrying placards and singing “We Shall Overcome,” nearly 100 representatives of Pacoima religious, civil rights and community groups attended the Los Angeles Police Commission meeting Monday to ask the panel to limit police use of a motorized battering ram that was employed against a suspected drug “rock house.”

Jose De Sosa, president of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the NAACP, also asked the commission to publicly reprimand Police Chief Daryl F. Gates for “his reckless and unreasonable decision” to use the device in the Wednesday night raid.

Police Commission President Stephen D. Yslas said the commission will begin an immediate evaluation of the “criteria that went into the department’s use of this battering ram” and will “undertake to develop an appropriate set of criteria for this tank.”

The vehicle was used for the first time during the Pacoima raid, which resulted in two arrests but reportedly netted only a small amount of drugs. The only occupants of the home were two women and three children. None of them was hurt.

Police officials later said they had been unaware that there were any children present when they drove the armored vehicle with a 14-foot battering ram attached to it into a front room of the house, which police suspected was a rock house, a fortified dwelling where drugs are sold.

Gates, who was present at the hearing, was defensive about the raid, in which he participated.

“All this stuff just gives support to those people who are in those rock houses,” Gates said. “They are going to say, ‘Ho, ho, ho. All those people have come down, and they’ve really told the chief, haven’t they? He’s not going to use the battering ram . . . because the community is against those things.’

“And quite frankly, community, if you don’t want us to use it, we won’t use it. But that means you’re going to have a proliferation of narcotics, and you’re going to have a proliferation of rock houses all over this city and all over this community. You make the choices.”

“The entire community is much disturbed,” said the Rev. T. G. Pledger, vice president of the Pacoima Ministers Assn. “This is a total disgrace to the human race.

“We’re not here to indulge anybody in narcotics,” he said. “We want to wipe it out too. But we do not want this deadly weapon . . . in Pacoima” or anywhere else.