Verdicts Could Change Police Outlook on Jobs : Law enforcement: Some believe jury ruling will make officers less aggressive. Others see no lasting impact.

The conviction of two officers for violating Rodney G. King’s civil rights has put the nation’s law enforcement community on notice: The federal government is watching.

“We are going to try to pursue any claim of police brutality where local and state officials have not been able to or have not taken appropriate action to make sure that it is carefully investigated,” Atty. Gen. Janet Reno vowed on Sunday.

The Justice Department has reviewed 47,000 cases of alleged police brutality in the last six years and 163 were prosecuted. A department spokesman said Sunday that 1,500 to 2,000 investigations remain open.

But even as the nation’s highest law enforcement officer was pledging to get tough on police who use excessive force, police officials, criminal justice experts and even rank and file officers interpreted the King verdicts Saturday in a variety of ways.

Many law enforcement officers see a threat in the Justice Department’s prosecution of officers in the King case following not guilty verdicts last year in state court. Some fear that the federal verdicts will have a chilling impact on how they do their jobs, reducing their effectiveness in the field and possibly endangering their lives.

Some see no lasting effect on the vast majority of officers, who already exercise restraint in their use of force.

Still others say that the increased oversight will have a positive impact on law enforcement, particularly in minority communities.

And many experts question whether the Justice Department, at a time when the Clinton Administration is trying to scale back government spending, has the resources to police the nation’s police forces.

Perhaps more than any other case of its kind, the King episode prompted police agencies around the nation to re-examine their standards and practices. It also has galvanized communities into demanding greater accountability from their police officers.

Now, as officers throughout the nation do their jobs, the guilty verdicts may influence the way many conduct themselves.

“You’ll find that officers will probably be less aggressive,” said one Los Angeles police sergeant working in South-Central Los Angeles. He said he had no doubt that officers will hesitate to use force, in some cases, “to the point where it could cost their life.”

Another officer challenged that assessment, saying any hesitancy by police to use force will soon fade.

“The first reaction now is, ‘Oh, my God, if we get involved in an altercation, we’re going to go to jail,’ ” said the officer, who asked not to be identified. “But it’s going to blow over and things will get back to normal.”

Former Justice Department official Gerald M. Caplan, now dean of McGeorge Law School in Sacramento, said he believes the behavior of officers will be influenced more by the attitude of their chiefs and their communities than by the Justice Department’s prosecution of the King civil rights case.

“What shapes an officer’s behavior is whether some dereliction of duty will be punished by a day off, a poor assignment or being passed over for a merit increase,” Caplan said. “It is where their police chief stands that counts, not Janet Reno.”

Temple University criminology professor James J. Fyfe, a former New York police lieutenant, said the King beating was “a direct and predictable result of the policies and practices of the (former) police chief, Daryl Gates.

“This happened because the only person police officers in Los Angeles had to answer to was the chief, and he, in turn, answered to nobody,” Fyfe said. “That lesson has been learned in L.A.--the police chief now answers to the mayor.”

Gates was unavailable for comment Sunday, but in an interview Saturday he said officers are going to perform professionally “and not slack off at all.” But he said some officers have already told him that whenever they have to use force, “we’re taking another look at it very, very carefully.

“They’re going to see what happened to these (four) officers and their families, and they’re going to say, ‘Hey, it’s not worth it, don’t put yourself in that position.’ ”

Los Angeles Police Commission President Jesse Brewer, a retired assistant chief, said: “I don’t think this case will have any impact on the way 99.9% of the officers do their job. I think they’re very professional. I don’t think it has any impact on those. For the .1% it may have an impact on, those who feel it’s OK to impose street justice . . .”

Sgt. Dominic Licavoli, watch commander at Rampart Division, said he does not think the verdict will affect use of force by officers on the street. “I don’t think it’s making officers hesitant,” Licavoli said. “Officers are going to do what they have to do to protect themselves.”

At Pacific Division, Sgt. Dennis Barbello said he has not heard anything about officers being more concerned about when to use force. “We do business like we do all the time,” he said. “Our officers are trained on when and when not to use (force).”

Rather than inhibit most officers, the verdict will have a “very salutary” effect, said John R. Dunne, who headed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division when the Los Angeles officers were indicted last August.

The acquittals of former Officer Timothy Wind and Officer Theodore Briseno “tells the rank and file policeman that the public recognizes he has a very difficult job in terms of identifying the line between legal and illegal force,” said Dunne, who is now a partner in a Washington law firm.

On the other hand, Dunne said, the convictions of Officer Laurence M. Powell and Sgt. Stacey C. Koon tell officers that the public “will not condone clear excesses or some authorization by a higher official for that type of action.”

Chief Willie L. Williams said Sunday that the convictions were not a reflection on the Los Angeles Police Department as a whole.

“Unfortunately, in the minds of many, the entire Police Department was on trial,” he said on ABC’s “This Week With David Brinkley.” “And that’s what we’re trying to separate. There were four individual members of the Los Angeles Police Department. . . .Four people were on trial. Four people out of millions of police officers in the United States.”

The mere prospect of a federal investigation sends a chilling message to officers, a Los Angeles Police Protective League official wrote in the union’s publication earlier this month.

Hank Hernandez, the league’s general counsel, warned officers in an open letter that they too could easily become targets of future criminal reviews.

“Instead of conducting a fair and objective federal probe of the King arrest, these federal agents were using biased and intimidating tactics which were simply designed to obtain adverse evidence against the defendant officers,” Hernandez wrote.

“Many of our officers did not feel free to leave interviews which turned abusive or adversarial out of fear that their conduct would be misrepresented to the department,” he said.

Reno said Sunday that any future investigations--like the King case--would be “fair, thorough and as objective as possible. And we’re going to take appropriate action, based on the evidence and the law.”

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Reno offered an olive branch, saying she wanted to “form a partnership” with the “many dedicated police officers around this country.”

Asked whether the convictions would have a chilling effect on law enforcement officers, she said, “No. I think this vindicates what so many officers do day in and day out around the nation. They do their job in a fair, appropriate manner.”

However, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said the King incident represents only the “tip of the iceberg” of police brutality in the United States.

He said the Justice Department needs to take a vastly enhanced role in investigating police abuses.

Paul L. Hoffman, legal director of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said Sunday that the Justice Department has devoted inadequate resources to the problem of excessive force. He said testimony presented at congressional hearings in 1991 revealed that while law enforcement budgets increased dramatically in the past decade, resources for civil rights enforcement stayed the same.

Hoffman has urged a significant increase of Justice Department resources and a change in laws to eliminate impediments to successful federal prosecutions in excessive-force cases.

“The federal government needs a broader range of tools to respond to police abuse by local law enforcement agencies,” Hoffman wrote in a study to be published in the next issue of the USC Law Review.

Fyfe, in his book called, “Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force,” reported the Justice Department employs 80,747 people and “only 44 . . . are civil rights prosecutors.”

From 1981 to 1990, the department presented an average of 56 police abuse cases a year to federal grand juries and obtained on average 36 indictments a year. The conviction rates in these cases is 89%, according to congressional testimony.

While the impact of the verdict may be debated, one Los Angeles police commissioner, who asked not to be identified, said he is convinced that the jury’s decision will further erode police morale that has plummeted since the King beating and the criticism of the department’s slow response during last year’s riots.

“There’s a lot of anger in those people, a hell of a lot of anger,” he said. “Anger and spite.”

Los Angeles attorney Johnnie Cochran, who has represented numerous citizens in police brutality cases and worked as a deputy district attorney, said he expects Saturday’s verdicts to have a significant impact in curbing police misconduct but will not reduce the effectiveness of officers. “This isn’t like they’ve been told they can’t respond to a darkened figure in an alley,” he said.

During the King trials, the four defendants contended they had no choice but to use their batons because the LAPD earlier had banned the chokehold--a controversial technique that quickly renders a suspect unconscious.

Many officers in the field also supported using the chokehold, which city officials banned after a number of suspects were killed.

LAPD supervisors, after the King beating, turned to the Los Angeles Police Commission for new tools. They include a new gas spray that burns the face and eyes, and rubber bullets that police say are effective in dispersing large, unruly crowds.