COLUMN ONE : Brutality: Hard Issue for Police : Has the videotape of the King beating exposed a dirty little secret? Or is the problem of excessive force being blown out of proportion? Experts differ sharply on the matter.

John Davis, a white 46-year-old farmer in rural Mason County, Wash., has little in common with Los Angeles’ Rodney G. King. But, in recent weeks, whenever he has watched the videotape of the beating King received at the hands of Los Angeles police officers, Davis has been carried back to a summer afternoon in 1985.

On that day Davis was beaten by sheriff deputies, in the words of one witness, until he “looked like he had been dipped in a bucket of blood.”

Davis and his 15-year-old nephew were driving a load of hay in a horse-drawn wagon down a public road when a sheriff’s deputy ordered him to move over to let cars pass. The patrol car’s loudspeaker frightened the horses, though, and Davis couldn’t control them.

That was when the deputy drew his gun. When the farmer stepped down, he was beaten, kicked and shocked with an electric stun gun by the deputy and two others who arrived on the scene. They swarmed over him, Davis recalled. “It just escalated into more and greater excitement. Their adrenaline just kept building until the climax,” he said.

The videotape of the King beating began airing several days before a federal appellate court awarded Davis a $375,000 settlement stemming from his beating. When he saw the tape, “boy howdy, I had the feelings come right back to me,” Davis said. “There was the same energy in the air, I could see it. I’d just cringe to watch it.”

But how emblematic was that disturbing videotaped scene? Did it truly, as the Davis and other cases suggest, pull back the covers from America’s dirty little secret, a secret some suggest had never really been kept under wraps in certain neighborhoods?

While some activists and lawyers describe police brutality as “endemic,” particularly in minority communities, most law enforcement officials and some legal authorities say it would be a mistake to conclude that the problem is getting worse nationwide. On the contrary, most see it as less severe today than 20 years ago.

No one can quantify the police brutality problem because no agency keeps national records, and comparing statistics from city to city is rendered meaningless by inconsistent record-keeping methods.

“It’s almost impossible to speak about the problem except in an anecdotal, impressionistic manner,” said Gerald M. Caplan, a George Washington University law school professor, who formerly headed the National Institute of Justice and served as general counsel of the District of Columbia police.

“The number of people killed by police has gone down from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s in major cities,” said Patrick V. Murphy, who rose from a beat patrolman in New York City to head police commissions in Detroit and New York and a similar post in Washington, D.C. He now directs the police policy board of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and will serve as a senior adviser to Mayor Tom Bradley’s panel investigating the King incident.

“I’m satisfied departments are much stricter about it (police brutality),” he said. “The FBI investigates these things, and it didn’t 20 years ago. Lawsuits have increased dramatically, and liability forces mayors and city councils to get into it.”

Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska, agrees that there has been improved management, higher personnel standards and better training since the 1960s. Furthermore, he said, about 30 of the nation’s 50 largest cities have adopted some form of citizen review board to handle complaints against police officers, many in the last five years.

“So L.A.,” he said, “is out of step at this point.”

But, acknowledging the lack of statistical evidence, he argues that police departments “lost momentum” in the late 1980s on curbing the use of excessive force. “Something happened out there,” he said. “I can’t prove that, but I believe it.”

Federico Pereira was killed Feb. 5. A grand jury indicted five New York City police officers March 20 on charges of murder, manslaughter and assault in the choking and beating death of the 21-year-old car theft suspect.

One of the five officers indicted allegedly climbed onto the back of the prone and handcuffed Pereira and placed two hands around his neck, pulling his head back until his spine was bowed. Pereira died at a hospital soon after.

The officers, all of whom have pleaded not guilty, maintain that Pereira became violent when the officers tried to arrest him and that he repeatedly banged his head on the pavement while they attempted to restrain him.

But to Latino activists in New York, the Pereira case was another demonstration of rising police violence in their community. From 1986 to 1989, an average of seven Latinos a year were killed by police gunfire in the city, but in 1990, 23 were killed.

In all, 41 people died in New York in 1990 in police gunfire, the highest number since 1975 and an increase of 37% over the 30 fatal shootings of civilians by police in 1989.

Police officials contend that the rise in the number of fatal shootings reflects a harsh reality--the streets are getting meaner as the drug trade grows more violent and guns become increasingly prevalent. Thirty-three of the 41 civilians killed in New York, for example, were armed, according to official statistics.

But critics of the department note that almost 75% of New York’s police force is white--in a city where whites make up less than 50% of the population--and more than 40% of the officers live outside the city. Many of those who live in the suburbs, Latino activists contend, bring with them prejudices and phobias.

Part of the problem nationwide, said Walker, the University of Nebraska professor, may be racism. But he and others also think the war on drugs is to blame. “It sent a message to police officers that you can go out there and kick some butt, do whatever you need to do.”

Murphy agreed. “There is no doubt that this war-on-drugs rhetoric is part of the problem--raiding all these crack houses, more guns on the street, cops getting automatics,” he said. “It has cops so psyched up they think they are in combat.”

Said Seattle attorney Timothy K. Ford: “What is the war on drugs? It’s a war on people, and with a war, there’s going to be collateral damage.”

Last week, two West Palm Beach police officers were indicted on charges of second-degree murder and aggravated battery in the death of a man who was savagely beaten to death last November as he was walking home from a McDonald’s restaurant.

Undercover officers Stephen Rollins and Glen Thurlow were driving down the street in a gold Cadillac, police say, when they stopped Robert R. Jewett, a 34-year-old plasterer. There are no witnesses to exactly what happened next. But within minutes, Jewett was dead from a beating in which his Adam’s apple was crushed, nine ribs were broken and he was hit between the legs with nightsticks with such fury as to cause what one veteran medical examiner called “the most severe testicular damage I’d ever seen.”

Both officers, who were suspended without pay on Friday, have been named in previous brutality complaints.

In South Florida, and particularly in Miami, the issue of police brutality has long haunted relations between police and the black community.

In what became a landmark event in Miami history, black insurance man Arthur McDuffie was riding a friend’s motorcycle on the morning of Dec. 17, 1979, when, according to police, he flashed them an obscene gesture and sped away. After a short chase, McDuffie pulled over and up to 12 officers wielding heavy flashlights began to pummel him. He died four days later of a fractured skull.

Almost five months later, when four of the officers on trial for taking part in the beating, and then covering it up, were acquitted by an all-white jury, Miami erupted. In three days of vicious rioting, 18 persons were killed, hundreds were injured and blocks of Liberty City were sacked and torched.

During the 1980s, two other riots convulsed Miami, both touched off by shootings of black men by Latino police officers.

Law enforcement officials acknowledge that many officers are edgy and that tempers get short. But they argue that cops have a right to be that way.

Col. W. D. Teem, commander of the North Carolina Highway Patrol, said, “police officers are running scared” because “more and more people resist arrest. These men and women have to be careful. It’s a sign of the times.”

“What gets lost is we have to deal with a lot of society’s rejects and misfits,” said Ronnie Clackum, chief of the Clayton County Police Department in Georgia. “People call the police when there’s no one else to call.”

Clackum, who said he doesn’t tolerate excessive force in his department, added that high-speed chases put officers on edge. “The adrenalin gets to flowing, and by the time someone sideswipes your car, officers get so caught up in the events and emotion that they overreact,” he said.

But Brian Spears, an Atlanta lawyer, speaks of the “spiraling effect” of police brutality, arguing that, in communities where the police have a reputation for using excessive force, suspects may flee or resist arrest precisely because they fear what will happen to them in police custody. “It (police brutality) breeds disrespect and mistrust and makes it likely that people who are taken into custody will act out of fear and run. Or fight.”

A New York state investigative panel recently called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the fatal police shooting of a black man on Long Island in 1984.

The state Commission of Investigation charged that local prosecutors had skewed evidence to favor the police account of the death of Ricky McCargo, 27, who was shot in a parking lot by a Nassau County detective. A Nassau County grand jury heard evidence in the case in 1984 and refused to hand up an indictment against the detective.

Several witnesses said McCargo was on his knees, begging for his life, when he was shot.

In a large number of excessive force cases, there are no outside witnesses. Determining the facts--both for the public and for juries--often is difficult, according to lawyers and civil rights organizations that deal with brutality issues.

Even when other officers are present, corroboration often is difficult to get, say lawyers, because officers stick to the “code of silence” that bonds them. As Ralph Goldberg, an Atlanta lawyer, explained: “You don’t rat on your partner.”

In most cities allegations of police misconduct are investigated by other police officers, so there is widespread public suspicion that brutality or other misdeeds are covered up.

“In approximately 8,000 complaints investigated (in New York City) in 1987 and 1988, there was not a single instance of an officer coming forward with incriminating information about another officer,” said Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

John R. Dunne, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, said criminal civil rights prosecutions for police misconduct are “among the most difficult under federal law. Almost always, the victims of police abuse have themselves committed some kind of law violation which has brought them to the attention of the police in the first place. Thus, their credibility is not always easy to establish.”

But some lawyers contend that frequently the only charges filed against brutality victims is resisting arrest. “I get a lot of guys coming in here with black eyes and bruises,” said Lori Lefferts, assistant district attorney for Pima County (Tucson), Ariz. “They’re being charged with resisting arrest to cover the officers’ rear ends, but I’ve never seen any of these charges prosecuted.”

Some lawyers think the nationwide publicity surrounding the Rodney King tape will make it easier to successfully prosecute police brutality cases.

“With the L.A. tapes, people are shocked, people who wouldn’t have believed police brutality really existed,” said Patty Bates, who works with brutality victims on behalf of Dallas’ privately funded Community Relations Commission. “There’s no way you can deny anymore that it’s happening.”

“It’s one of those epiphanies,” said Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. “It’s one of those transforming events which will never allow the situation to be viewed the same.”

Such visual evidence is producing quick action elsewhere. Last week Charleston, S. C., policeman Julius Jeng was photographed kneeing a suspect who was being held by another officer. Police later released the suspect, Howard Sims, saying he had been mistaken for another man. Although no complaint was filed against the department, Jeng was temporarily suspended.

Charles Friel, dean of the college of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, questions whether the highly publicized police brutality cases are a good sample of reality.

“Hundreds, thousands of arrests are done competently,” he said. “When you have an incident like L.A., and it gets in the media, it’s like a magnet sucking up little filings. The incident becomes a lightning rod for other issues (such as racism). You have to be careful to separate the facts from what’s sensational.”

Beatings such as that dealt to Rodney King are “not tolerated in the vast majority of police departments,” said James J. Fyfe, a former New York City police lieutenant who has appeared as an expert witness in damage claims against the LAPD. Fyfe contends that Los Angeles stands apart from other departments in excessive use of force. “The reason,” he said, “is accountability. The police answer to the chief, and he answers to no one.

“In New York, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and every other big city, except for Los Angeles, elected mayors appoint police chief executives,” Fyfe said. “Regardless of their expertise in police administration, the chiefs of these big cities all serve at the pleasure of their mayors.”

In Los Angeles, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates’ job is protected by civil service procedures. He can only be dismissed for cause by the city’s Police Commission, with the concurrence of the Civil Service Commission.

Many cities also rely on civilian review boards. They have varying degrees of independence, said the University of Nebraska’s Walker, and most cities adopt them only after controversial incidents, such as shootings and beatings, spark public protests.

But in Chicago, New York and in some other cities that have review boards not wholly independent of the police department or city administration, critics contend that they are set up in such a way that they become little more than arms of the police department.

“Every single (review board) that exists still only has power to make recommendations to the police chief, so the single critical factor is the attitude of the police chief,” Walker said. Also, in slightly more than half of the big cities that have them, the initial investigations are performed by police officers, not independent investigators.

Jay Miller, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said his office does not refer brutality victims to Chicago’s Office of Professional Standards, which sustained only 190 of the 2,410 excessive force complaints filed with it last year. “We don’t trust them,” he said.

In addition, police critics complain that the agencies charged with investigating police misconduct frequently are not interested in determining whether a systematic problem exists. In many cities records of complaints filed against police officers are purged after a few years.

For Denver City Councilman Hiawatha Davis, an advocate for changes in the internal investigations system in his city, the failure of police departments to keep records is evidence that the system is “severely flawed and totally compromised. They obviously don’t have any information to evaluate trends. Without records, you can’t do any analysis of the characteristics of complainants or the officers who have been complained about.”

He added: “Ironically, the investigative nature of the police institution suggests that one of their primary activities would be record keeping. Police work thrives on bits and pieces of information gathered over a long period of time.”

But Chuck Lepley, assistant district attorney in Denver who investigates police brutality complaints in his county, contends that independent civilian review might hamper the police. “If police officers feel they cannot trust the review process, they may just decide to let the guy go,” he said.

“I think there’s quite a few false reports of excessive force. The people who stand between violence and the public are the police. Sometimes in the process people don’t want to cooperate, but the police are still expected to arrest them,” he said.

In some places across the country, lawyers and civil rights organizations say the number of police brutality complaints have gone up since the Rodney King case first was publicized.

“People are coming out of the woodwork,” said Joe Cook, executive director of the Dallas ACLU, whose office receives some 200 citizen complaints a year against the police. “Before, they thought it wouldn’t do any good. Now they have hope someone will listen to them.”

“Our calls have increased since the L.A. videotape,” said Ellen Spears, interim director of the ACLU of Georgia. “People feel that maybe something can be done.”

“You’re going to see a lot of groups and individuals running around with camcorders,” said Clackum, the Clayton County police chief in Georgia.

He may be right. In May, well-known Miami attorney Ellis Rubin settled for $15,000 a police brutality case for a client whose mistreatment had been videotaped. Then he issued a call for blacks and other minorities to band together as “video vigilantes.”

“I think people in neighborhoods where this brutality goes on should get together, buy a camera and then be there with it when police do a round-up or raid a crack house,” he said. “I think that could put an end to this.”

Contributing to this report were Anna Virtue and Mike Clary in Miami, Doug Conner in Seattle, Lianne Hart and J. Michael Kennedy in Houston, Laura Laughlin in Phoenix, Lee May and Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington, Ann Rovin in Denver, Tracy Shryer in Chicago and David Treadwell in New York.