NEWS ANALYSIS : Can LAPD Root Out Every Racist in Its Ranks? : Police: Williams vows nothing less, and the agency has new training programs. But mayor’s pledge to add officers may hamper officer screening, observers say.

Thrust into the latest in its four-year run of unsettling controversies, this time because of taped interviews with former Detective Mark Fuhrman, the Los Angeles Police Department has committed itself to a mandate no less ambitious than rooting out every last racist from its ranks.

“We are going to address the core issues that if there’s one person in our organization--sworn or not sworn--that thinks like that or acts like that, or thinks they can get away with it, it’s one too many,” Police Chief Willie L. Williams said last week in one of his many recent public statements on the Fuhrman interviews. “Things are going to be different in the department.”

But sources say that even after years of dwelling on the issue and repeated recent promises that new efforts are under way, the department’s determination to confront racism has been hampered by conflicting priorities. In addition, department insiders worry that the LAPD’s credibility, already a scarce commodity, may be further damaged by misleading statements about what has been accomplished so far.

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Williams was confronted with one such embarrassing snafu last week, when he announced Tuesday that the department’s Internal Affairs Division was monitoring about 100 officers with multiple or sustained citizen complaints involving excessive force, racism or sexism. After the chief said that, however, department officials said no such comprehensive scrutiny was under way and Williams was forced to admit that there was no list such as the one he had described--although he emphasized that other means are being used to keep track of potential problem officers.

Those admissions disappointed some LAPD backers, but department officials note that new programs have been launched. In recent months, new training officers have been put in place at each of the department’s 18 police stations, for instance, and Internal Affairs has opened an inquiry into the specific allegations that Fuhrman made in the interviews.

Sources familiar with that probe said the department has determined that Fuhrman received his first complaint in 1977, and that he faced five misconduct allegations growing out of a 1978 police shooting--an incident that sparked numerous arrests and allegations of police abuse. Internal Affairs cleared Fuhrman of wrongdoing at the time.

Nevertheless, despite a month of growing controversy regarding the Fuhrman interviews, no broad study of LAPD racism has been initiated, according to sources inside the department.

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More troubling to some of those who are eager to see the department tackle racism squarely are the divisions among city leaders about how to best address the problem.

Williams has generally seen the solution as primarily a matter of improved training, while Mayor Richard Riordan, who balks at most suggestions that threaten to take officers off the streets, instead emphasizes the need to improve management so supervisors are held accountable for the actions of their subordinates. Police Commission President Deirdre Hill echoes Riordan’s view but also wants City Council funding for a commission-backed anti-discrimination unit.

Meanwhile, many longtime LAPD officers, schooled in the art of investigation, see the answer as beefing up Internal Affairs in order to catch and punish officers who behave in the ways that Fuhrman described during 10 years of interviews with an aspiring screenwriter. And then there are those, many of them, who are resigned to the fear that no effort, no matter how concentrated, can ever wipe out racism at the LAPD as long as it exists in society at large.

“You can only train so much; you can only monitor so much,” said one LAPD veteran. “And then you can only hope that your people perform.”

When the City Council’s Public Safety Committee meets this week in a special session, LAPD officials are expected to present an array of training and screening programs that represent the heart of Williams’ contention that the department is moving to address racist attitudes on the force.

Essentially, they are divided into four areas: pre-employment screening, training of recruit officers, in-service training given to officers once they work for the department, and discipline and counseling for officers who fail to put their training to work as they are told. At each level, officials hope to stress the department’s stern rejection of racism by any of its officers.

“We’ll be on hand to explain what we’re doing on training,” said Assistant Chief Frank Piersol, who heads the department’s Office of Administrative Services. “We think it’s an impressive program.”

Others are not yet convinced. The LAPD has long been screening applicants, but some department insiders believe that a burst of hiring in the 1980s undermined the effectiveness of that screening.

Now, a similar campaign is under way again as Riordan and Williams seek to enlarge the notoriously understaffed department. Class sizes at the Police Academy have increased markedly, and although officials applaud the LAPD’s determination to expand, some quietly worry that it may move so quickly that it chips away at its pledge to screen and train carefully--effectively choosing a bigger department over a better one.

Among those who question the ultimate value of training is Riordan, who is far more interested in demanding accountability as the principal tool for combatting racism and sexism.

“The ultimate way to get rid of racism, sexual harassment or any other kind of abnormal behavior is to hold leaders accountable, right from the bottom up,” Riordan said. “You want to get rid of sexual harassment? Punish the people they report to. If you did that once, you’d get rid of sexual harassment overnight.”

Some attribute Riordan’s emphasis on accountability to his management style and credit him for taking an aggressive position in that regard. But others see a political motive in his position as well: Riordan campaigned for mayor on a pledge to increase the LAPD’s size and visibility, and training programs by definition borrow from the field in two ways: first, by requiring a certain number of officers to work as trainers; and second, by forcing officers to take days off in order to undergo their training.

“Anything that touches the number of officers on the street, that’s treading on sacred ground,” said one person familiar with the mayor’s position. “It’s almost as though he doesn’t want to hear about it.”

Councilwoman Laura Chick, who heads the Public Safety Committee and who scheduled this week’s hearing, said she hopes the session begins the process of identifying a “full-picture continuum” that incorporates training, screening and management into a package.

“I think it’s simplistic to think that it’s this or that,” she said. “We can’t do these things piecemeal.”

While Riordan, Chick, Williams and others debate management principles and the limits of training, one branch of the LAPD is pursuing specific allegations against specific officers. Since last month, the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division has been reviewing the comments that Fuhrman made to aspiring screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny, especially his boasts about beating suspects, manufacturing evidence and lying to department investigators.

That investigation has expanded beyond Fuhrman, in part because he has retired from the LAPD and thus is no longer subject to departmental discipline. But in the interviews, Fuhrman referred to a number of other officers, some by their actual names, others by nicknames.

Sources say Internal Affairs has begun addressing each of those allegations, a quest that has taken investigators back almost 20 years and cast a shadow across a number of previous investigations. Typical is the potential effect on the LAPD’s long-concluded investigation into an informal and infamous group of West Los Angeles police officers who called themselves “Men Against Women.”

Fuhrman was interviewed by Internal Affairs as part of that probe, and he denied any wrongdoing by himself or other officers.

In the interviews with McKinny, however, he boasted of his own misconduct and that of colleagues. Because the issue is so old, there may be little point in the department opening a full-scale re-investigation, sources said, but Fuhrman’s statements now have raised questions not only about his own truthfulness in the initial interviews but that of other officers as well.

Other areas where the detective’s comments may prompt further internal investigation involve his discussion of police rupturing a suspect’s spleen during a beating, his contention that supervisors sometimes sanctioned the abuse of suspects and his description of racist, sexist actions by himself and numerous other officers.

No incident has raised greater alarm inside the department than the former detective’s description of an incident in which he told McKinny that he and three colleagues “basically tortured” suspects after a shooting that left two police officers wounded. Authorities believe Fuhrman was referring, either truthfully or with great embellishment, to a Nov. 18, 1978, brawl in Boyle Heights.

According to police sources, Fuhrman faced five misconduct allegations after that incident. One was dismissed when it was determined that Fuhrman was not at the location named by the complaining person. He also was accused of beating suspects at a police station and in a police car, as well as treating suspects with discourtesy.

Although officials believe that Fuhrman was embellishing during the interviews with McKinny, they continue to try to determine precisely when he was telling the truth--and when he was not.

No matter where it leads, the Internal Affairs inquiry will be limited to trying to determine whether officers are guilty of misconduct and whether charges should be brought against them.

The Internal Affairs Division has not traditionally inspired great confidence in LAPD critics, however.

In 1991, the Christopher Commission opened its chapter on LAPD complaints and discipline by observing: “No area of police operations received more adverse comment during the commission’s public hearings than the department’s handling of citizen complaints against LAPD officers.”

After reviewing the department’s records, the commission called the public frustration “understandable.”

Partly as a result, the Police Commission recently voted to establish a special unit to investigate complaints of discrimination and harassment within the ranks of the LAPD. That unit could be called upon to assist in the department’s current efforts, were it not for one thing: The City Council has not agreed to fund it.

“In this situation, it would be apart from Internal Affairs,” Police Commission President Hill said of the unit. “The unit would look at environmental issues, management issues, other concerns that are beyond what Internal Affairs does.”

Because of that, Hill said she hopes the council comes out of its upcoming hearings with a commitment to fund the anti-discrimination unit.

With so many ideas in play, LAPD supporters hope that progress can come out of the current focus on racism within the department.

But others worry that conflicting agendas and ideas will scuttle the effort.

Moreover, critics say they have watched the LAPD try to tackle this issue before, and they are skeptical that the results this time will be much different.

“You can’t root out racism at the LAPD unless you root it out of society,” said Michael Zinzun, who heads the Coalition Against Police Abuse. He and some other department critics have long advocated creation of a civilian review board to look into allegations of police misconduct--a step the LAPD has staunchly resisted.

“We can’t end racism, so we need to try to control it, and the only way to do that is to give the community control of the police,” Zinzun said. “Maybe we can’t control racism everywhere, but we can try to do it in the Police Department if we have real community control.”