RIOT AFTERMATH : Students in UC Berkeley Protest Call for College of Ethnic Studies : Reactions: They demand new guidelines to boost minority admissions. Tempers also flare in San Francisco and Las Vegas.

Several hundred University of California students, still seething over the Rodney G. King verdicts, rallied outside the campus administration building here Tuesday. They presented demands ranging from the creation of a college of ethnic studies to an easing of admissions standards to boost minority enrollment.

Anticipating the protest, university police had sealed off the building’s entrances, but some angry students beat on the doors and scuffled with security guards. There were no injuries or arrests.

The episode followed a noon rally on Sproul Plaza, where about 400 students, professors and a few Bay Area political candidates called for racial equality and denounced the Simi Valley jury’s acquittal of the four Los Angeles police officers last week.

Student Body President Margaret Fortune, who led the demonstration, said the aim was to “make a link between the Rodney King incident and the larger injustices that it reflects in our society.”

One protester from Los Angeles, freshman Monica Rodriguez, held a 3-foot-tall, papier-mache effigy of a policeman shaped as a pig. Rodriguez said she was demonstrating “not only for the students, but for my family back home.”

At dusk, university Chancellor Chang-lin Tien said in a statement that he sympathized with the students’ concerns and would meet with representatives of the group next week.

The six protesters on hand to receive his statement decried Tien’s response as useless: “This isn’t negotiating, this isn’t anything,” junior Eraka Bath said.

The city of Berkeley is facing more than $1 million in riot-related costs, including police overtime pay and damages to 56 vandalized businesses.

Across the bay, San Francisco was abuzz with controversy over unusually aggressive police tactics used to abort a King verdict-related protest Friday night. Using emergency powers, the police had arrested several hundred people as they gathered for the demonstration.

“People were arrested who had nothing to do with any planned demonstration,” said John Crew, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Some were merely going out to mail a letter. . . . This was an absolutely extraordinary abuse of power.”

Newly appointed Police Chief Richard Hongisto--who donned a uniform and took part in the arrests--defended the show of force that came one day after marauding youths vandalized more than 100 businesses in a looting binge that cost San Francisco well over $1 million and led to 1,300 arrests.

“We’re the only city in the United States who had this problem and brought it to a screeching halt in just one day,” Hongisto said.

A similar debate over the law enforcement response raged in Las Vegas, where minority leaders complained that police acted precipitously in sealing off the mostly black west side of town after rioting began Thursday evening.

“We’re getting very tired of . . . being the scapegoat,” said Eric Cooper, undersheriff of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. “Everyone is trying to say (we) caused the riot. . . . We just reacted to it.”

The trouble in Las Vegas included looting, shootings, sniper attacks on police cars and fire-bombings. Property damage was estimated at more than $6 million. Initially, police attributed three deaths to the rioting, but that number was scaled back to one Tuesday.

Elsewhere, Fresno police arrested one of 20 youths accused of looting a K mart store and roughing up customers Friday, in what appeared to be that city’s only King verdict-inspired violence.

Packer reported from Berkeley; Warren from Los Angeles.