GOOD COP, BAD COP

By Richard Lacayo

Police brutality works only in the dark. The sadistic assault on Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who was allegedly sodomized with a toilet-plunger handle by New York City police, was supposed to be confined to a station-house bathroom. But now that the attack is a public outrage--his injuries took him to the hospital, and from there to newspaper front pages--much more is at stake than just the reputation of Brooklyn's 70th Precinct, where four officers face charges. All around the country, the aggressive, "zero tolerance" policing strategy--which has contributed to New York's plummeting crime rate and is being imitated in other cities--is now getting a second look.

All but career criminals are happy with the nationwide drop in such crimes as murder, rape and assault. But the Louima attack, which is also an assault, has citizens wondering whether one kind of public order has been achieved at the cost of another. In short, is America's crackdown on crime bringing with it an increase in police brutality? The best answer, in most cities, is probably not--though harassment and violence against minorities remains endemic in some quarters. "This is a major problem in this country, particularly in urban areas," says Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. In truth, no one keeps reliable national statistics. And local claims are suspect. A decline in complaints to local police review boards doesn't necessarily prove that there are fewer occurrences; critics say that such complaints in New York are down because abused citizens have given up. Despite more than 16,000 complaints against New York cops since 1993, only 180 officers have been disciplined, most of them with just a lecture or the loss of a vacation day.

But New York is not America. In fact, several police departments that entered the 1990s with a reputation as out-of-control head bangers, including Los Angeles and New Orleans, have turned a corner. That's because cities have learned to simultaneously provide effective police training, install a credible oversight authority, develop better relations with the people they serve and send a clear message to cops that abuses won't be tolerated.

It's a lesson learned the hard way. Six years after the Rodney King beating, Los Angeles is policed very differently. The L.A.P.D. has shown impressive progress. Its percentage of white officers has decreased from 61.3% in March '91 to 50% in July '97, producing a rank and file less likely to see a minority community as a hostile planet. The proportion of female officers, whom studies show are less prone to abusive behavior, has increased from 13.3% to 17.4% in the same time period. Citizen complaints are monitored by a new office of inspector general. "It's quite a different face on the Los Angeles police department," says Edith Perez, president of the city's new police commission, a civilian body that oversees the 9,400-member department. Last Friday the city swore in a new police chief, Bernard Parks, an African-American veteran of the force who promised to "provide a better service to the citizens."

What constitutes effective oversight of that service remains a big question. As a means for exposing and punishing police misconduct, civilian review boards have a mixed reputation. Many have no subpoena power and meager investigative staff, which leaves them powerless to get to the bottom of cases. While the New York board is supposed to be made up entirely of civilians, a majority of its members are former law-enforcement officials, prosecutors and lawyers. "What is needed is an independent board of civilians who are trained in investigating complaints," says N.Y.C.L.U. head Siegel.

In May, a voter referendum approved just that kind of arrangement for Pittsburgh, Pa., but not before a prolonged local struggle, federal intervention and one highly publicized death nearby. Critics of the department say that by the late 1980s, police were out of control. "They were taking people off the street with absolutely no due process and throwing them in jail," says A.C.L.U. attorney Timothy O'Brien. At the same time, virtually every complaint that came before the department's internal-affairs division was dismissed.

Matters came to a head two years ago with the killing of Jonny Gammage, a cousin of Ray Seals, then star defensive end of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Gammage, 31, was driving Seals' Jaguar through a mostly white suburban neighborhood when he was stopped by police, ostensibly for driving erratically. After an officer knocked a cellular phone from Gammage's hand--he later claimed he thought it was a gun--officers pinned Gammage face down on the pavement. He later died of suffocation. Only three of the five suburban officers present went to trial. One was acquitted of involuntary homicide by an all-white jury. The case against the other two resulted in a mistrial.

Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Justice entered into a consent decree with the city of Pittsburgh in which the police department agreed to a litany of new procedures, including strict documentation of the use of force, extensive new training and the appointment of an outside auditor with access to police disciplinary records. The new Citizen Police Review Board will have the power to conduct its own investigations and subpoena witnesses.

Several police departments, including New York's, have also begun trying to identify problem officers early. That has been an important reform in New Orleans, where the police department has come a long way from October 1994, when Officer Len Davis ordered a lethal hit on citizen Kim Groves for filing a brutality complaint against him. On the same day Groves was killed, Richard Pennington was sworn in across town as the new superintendent of police. With the city's reputation in free fall, Pennington moved quickly to replace the department's discredited internal-affairs division with a more independent public-integrity division and to ban controversial restraining tactics such as choke holds and hog-tying.

Pennington also established an early-warning system that flags the records of cops who have drawn more than one complaint. Those officers get 40 hours of training in everything from their choice of words when making an arrest to the correct way to secure handcuffs. Says Pennington: "We jump on the problem and address it immediately."

"Less than 5% of all cops constitute the 'bad' element," says Ron Hampton, a retired Washington police officer who now heads the National Black Police Association. "But if the other 95% stand around and do and say nothing, that is where the real problem lies." The code of silence is formidable. For two days after Louima was assaulted in New York, no one in the 70th Precinct said anything about the incident. And even a department willing to act against bad cops is thwarted by police unions and civil service rules that allow officers to go over the heads of supervisors trying to discipline them. Boston police commissioner Paul Evans has complained that many of the officers he attempts to penalize for misconduct successfully appeal their punishments before the state's civil service commission.

Two weeks ago, however, a judge in Massachusetts' highest court provided police throughout the state with a compelling incentive to behave. He ruled that municipalities don't have to indemnify officers who break the law in pursuit of their duties. Says Boston police department spokeswoman Margot Hill: "[The city] can step back and say, 'You're on your own, kid.'"

The Louima case comes at the very moment when police departments around the country are fascinated by a crime-fighting strategy that New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani credits for much of his city's remarkable drop in crime. The zero-tolerance policy encourages police to focus on quality-of-life violations--public drinking, lewd behavior, loud music--as a means to discourage more serious crimes. The idea is that when left untreated, small disorders breed larger ones. The policy also goes by the name "broken windows," after the idea that one broken window on a street will encourage people to break more of them. Along with New York, such cities as Cleveland, Ohio, Milwaukee, Wis., and St. Louis, Mo., have adopted the approach.

Critics of the strategy say it encourages cops to sweep neighborhoods and harass ordinary citizens for minor offenses and opens the way to an us-vs.-them mentality. George Kelling, a Rutgers University professor who helped develop the idea, says it has gone awry in some places; it was intended to be carried out in the context of a larger strategy of community policing, the widely popular approach in which cops get out of squad cars to involve themselves in community problems. "Zero tolerance and 'sweeps' are not part of my vocabulary," says Kelling. There's plainly some tension between the confrontations required by quality-of-life enforcement and the kind of cooperation between cops and locals that community policing is intended to promote. How to resolve that is still a work in progress. "There is clearly a right and a wrong way to do broken windows," says Indianapolis, Ind., Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, whose city started adopting the strategy five years ago.

In the end, none of the institutional machinery to discourage brutality works without a clear message from the top that bad cops are bad news. New York's Giuliani may have sent out the wrong signal even before he was elected. While still a candidate, he addressed a wild demonstration of 10,000 out-of-uniform officers who assembled outside city hall to protest the decision by then Mayor David Dinkins to establish the city's civilian review board. After taking office, Giuliani was repeatedly accused of dragging his feet on hiring investigators for the board. Last year, when he tried to cut a fourth of the investigative staff, the city council said no.

An effective board is still a lot cheaper than an out-of-control police force. Louima, the victim in the latest assault, announced plans last week to file a $55 million lawsuit against the city. Though in the past Giuliani has defended officers accused of egregious violence, in this episode he opted swiftly for the victim. He also announced plans for six months of town meetings between New Yorkers and every one of the city's 38,000 officers. Maybe all that talk could have been avoided if the cops had earlier heard a clearer statement about brutality from the mayor's office.

--Reported by Jyl Benson/New Orleans, James L. Graff/Chicago, Margot Hornblower/Los Angeles, Elaine Rivera/ New York and Tom Witkowski/Boston

With reporting by JYL BENSON/NEW ORLEANS, JAMES L. GRAFF/CHICAGO, MARGOT HORNBLOWER/LOS ANGELES, ELAINE RIVERA/NEW YORK AND TOM WITKOWSKI/BOSTON