AFTER THE VERDICTS : Valley’s Deputy Chief Takes a Goodwill Drive

Stacked neatly in the back seat of Deputy Chief Mark A. Kroeker’s cruiser Saturday were four blue notebooks: the Los Angeles Police Department’s comprehensive plan to keep peace after the verdicts.

But in the hours after the jury convicted two officers and acquitted two others, the notebooks remained in the back seat unused and unneeded as Kroeker tooled around a peaceful San Fernando Valley to visit police officers and community members exhausted by the divisive trial.

Rather than acting as a field marshal, Kroeker spent much of Saturday morning as goodwill ambassador--needling tired cops, passing his badge around to a group of curious children and politely refusing doughnuts at every turn.

It suited Kroeker just fine.

“If I sit here all day like the Maytag repairman, I’ll be a happy guy,” Kroeker said after the verdicts were announced. Minutes later, however, he was pulling his car out of the Van Nuys Station garage, tired of listening to a silent police radio in his third-floor office.

A few miles away in Panorama City, where a few businesses were burned and looted during last year’s riots, Kroeker pulled alongside a patrol car carrying four officers snacking on breakfast sandwiches from a nearby fast-food restaurant. All was quiet.

“Things are getting pretty rough when you have time for a Big Mac,” Kroeker said. They all laughed. Then one turned his attention to his fellow officers.

“This department is going to have to do some serious damage control,” the officer said. “Officers are feeling pretty let down right now.”

Kroeker nodded his head and drove off.

Indeed, many officers felt betrayed by the verdicts. For Kroeker’s part, he watched the verdicts with no visible emotion. “My reaction is very matter-of-fact and accepting,” he said. “I feel the same way I felt after the first trial--the system has rendered its product.”

By 9 a.m. he was heading toward the embattled Foothill Division where the four officers were stationed at the time of the 1991 beating. Instantly, an officer munching a doughnut offered him one.

“Doughnuts everywhere,” he said in feigned exasperation. “A good cop doesn’t eat doughnuts.”

In a cramped hallway outside the station’s jail, Capt. Gabe Ornelas briefed Kroeker, telling him several people had gathered at the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street, the site where King was beaten.

“It was all the press,” someone sneered.

Kroeker went anyway.

Most of the press had already gone away, but Kroeker came upon a bunch of kids and community leaders campaigning for City Council candidate Leroy Chase Jr. Intending to linger at the edge of the lot and watch the crowd, Kroeker was nonetheless spotted.

“Hey, chief,” someone shouted, and the crowd converged on his car. “You’ve been doing such a fantastic job with the Valley,” Lake View Terrace resident Robert Winn said.

A crowd of children from the Boys & Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley in Pacoima gathered around Kroeker as he took off his badge and passed it from kid to kid. “Whatever you do, don’t drop that badge,” Kroeker admonished the children. “It’s like dragging the American flag through the dirt.”

And as the badge passed from one grubby hand to another, Kroeker held an impromptu swearing-in ceremony, asking the children to pledge to stay in school, out of trouble and away from drugs.

“And keep smiling, huh?” he asked a small girl, whose mouth bent into a shy smile. “There you go.”

Pulling out of the lot, a hand-painted sign reading “Honk If You’re Happy” caught Kroeker’s eye. “Well I’m happy--happy regardless,” he said, tapping his horn. “I’m happy to have a job and I’m happy to be doing good things with my life.”

And the blue notebooks were still stacked neatly in the back seat.