PERSPECTIVE ON THE RODNEY KING VERDICT : Dashing the Possibility of Trust : Until there are great changes in the LAPD, people of color can hardly tell their children that police are friends.

Growing up in the 1950s, most elementary school children of all races were taught to respect authority, to salute the flag when it was presented to us, and to always know that if we found ourselves in trouble, if there was an emergency, “the policeman is your friend.”

Policemen, in the ‘50s, at least in my Connecticut hometown, were presented as benign, avuncular figures; they were guys who shepherded lost dogs home, patted little kids on the head and cheerfully told you which way to go to get to the public library.

I don’t know many black people who stop policemen and ask for directions anymore. Mostly they give a wide berth, and, after yesterday’s verdict in the Rodney King trial, that berth will get wider still.

I watched the verdict come in as I bounced my 8-month-old son on my knee. My mouth tightened in grim disbelief as verdict after “not guilty” verdict from a jury with no African-Americans came back. My mind’s eye flashed back to tales of trials in the segregated Deep South, trials where--when they occurred at all--smirking white defendants who had assaulted or killed black people walked away, acquitted by a jury of what was indeed their peers.

Listening to the television’s drone, one part of me grunted in resignation--same ol’ same ol’--and the other part just couldn’t grasp it. The verdicts defied logic. Had not the jury seen the same tape I did, the one that showed the officers in question pounding away at Rodney King? Had they read--and dismissed--the computer transcripts describing we black people as animals (specifically gorillas)? Could they ignore the testimony of emergency room personnel about one officer’s menacing jocularity as King lay bleeding from the injuries administered by the same officer? Obviously, they could and did. So I learned some things from the King trial:

--Southern California needn’t be so smug about how far it’s come in race relations. Simi Valley is thousands of physical miles away from Johannesburg. But some similarities are disturbingly familiar, and the suburban hostility directed toward Los Angeles, with its multiracial population and its urban challenges, would look right at home on “World News Tonight.”

--The policeman, at least for the moment, is not my friend. Many people feel the Simi Valley jury’s verdict has handed the LAPD an open season, a license to hunt its minority citizenry. African-Americans and Latinos felt beleaguered enough by the police before Rodney King. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to envision a worst-case scenario: angry young men of color who will do anything to keep from being stopped because they don’t want to turn into another notch on some cop’s baton.

As I write this, elected officials, civic leaders and, yes, the police department are preparing for what they fear may be massive urban unrest. Isolated incidents of violent anger were already occurring. But I hope that, for the most part, the anger from the King trial can be channeled into specific actions. Instead of trashing our own neighborhoods from a feeling of hopeless impotence, we should take stock of our numbers, coalesce with other minority groups and work for a little home improvement:

--Vote for Charter Amendment F, which provides specific recommendations for police reform, on June 2.

--Lobby to further change the city charter so that residence in the city is mandatory for LAPD officers. It’s easy to wreak havoc in one neighborhood and drive several miles away to live in another. Perhaps if they were truly local residents, LAPD officers who aren’t now living in the city would understand it in a different, better way.

I’m well aware that the job of policing a city as huge and as diverse as Los Angeles is gigantic, that the advent of drug-related violence and crime has increased exponentially and that the police are the first vanguard against it. Often their lives are on the line.

But there’s a considerable distance between collaring criminals and the practice of harassing citizens because they happen to be black and male and thus automatically suspect. I hope, when he’s sworn in, that Willie L. Williams will get the support and cooperation he needs, so that the tension between much of the LAPD and Los Angeles’ minority communities will lessen. I hope he makes enough progress that, by the time my 8-month-old is ready to go to school, I can tell him what my parents told me: If something happens, if there’s an emergency, find a policeman. That policeman (or, today, woman) is your friend. Till that day comes, especially considering Wednesday’s verdict, I can’t say a thing.