Essay: Trust Also a Casualty of Carnage

The murder of rookie Los Angeles Police Officer Christy Lynne Hamilton was another jagged tear in the fragile social contract between the police and the populace they are sworn to protect and to serve.

The terms of the contract are simple: We are supposed to obey the law and respect the police. Cops are expected to treat us fairly, not brutally.

Christopher Golly, 17, described by his friends as a speed addict, didn’t give a damn for the contract. He killed Hamilton early Tuesday in a San Fernando Valley neighborhood unaccustomed to violence. Nor has the contract been observed by other cop killers who have murdered nine Southern California police officers in the last year.

Fortunately, most people do care. Respect for the police drew an estimated 4,000 people to services Monday for two slain officers from another department--Palos Verdes Estates Capt. Michael Wayne Tracy and Sgt. Thomas Vanderpool, who were killed during a seminar in a Torrance Holiday Inn.

One day after those services, Officer Hamilton was killed. The fact that she was a mother made her killing especially sad. But no matter what the gender or the age, a cop’s murder always carries with it powerful symbolism, posing such questions as these:

What chance do civilians have now that police officers are becoming just another target? Is society collapsing, with lawlessness becoming a way of life? Are our lives going to be forever dominated by fear? Will we withdraw into ourselves, cowering in our homes and cars with newly purchased handguns while the cops nervously eye each passerby as a prospective assassin?

*

All of this fear, all this killing, comes at a time when we are asking our police to trust us even more. Trust is the heart and soul of a new LAPD strategy, born of the controversy surrounding the beating of Rodney G. King. Called community-based policing, it depends on cooperation between police and civilians.

The police are supposed to treat us as friends, and we are supposed to respond in kind in a joint endeavor to prevent crime, not just deal with its consequences. For their part, cops are being trained to listen rather than confront. But these days, that is asking an awful lot. Because to hold up their end of the new contract, they have to gamble that they won’t be gunned down by someone waiting for them behind a door.

I thought about what we want from our police after hearing of Officer Hamilton’s death. Two years ago, I had written about how the strategy was working in the San Fernando Valley’s Devonshire station where, coincidentally, Hamilton was working.

One of my guides was Officer Stephanie Tisdale. In the course of her rounds, we visited an apartment house where the manager had told Tisdale that two of the tenants were selling drugs. Tisdale and I walked over to the suspected apartment. She knocked on the door. A thin, tired-looking woman admitted us. She denied selling drugs, even though small pieces of tinfoil, used to wrap heroin, were scattered on a coffee table.

Tisdale looked around the apartment, poked her head into the filthy kitchen and messy bedroom. Then we left. The visit had been intended as a warning that if the woman was selling drugs, she’d better stop. It made more sense than a huge police raid, with the cops randomly arresting the innocent.

Tuesday morning, as I recalled the experience, I wondered what would have happened if an armed drug dealer had been waiting in the bedroom when Tisdale looked in. She might have been killed. Are good officers such as Tisdale now wondering the same thing each and every time they knock on a door?

*

I called one of the architects of community-based policing, Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker, and asked him whether the cop killings will create even more fear among police officers and the public.

“It’s unsettling to people when an officer dies because they feel they have lost their shield,” said Kroeker, who now is responsible for bringing community policing to a wide area of South L.A., where crime is high and conflict between cops and residents has been most intense.

Do you believe people have lost their protection? I asked. “No,” said Kroeker. “I put us all in the same area of violence. It is a violent world to be a cop and it is a violent world not to be a cop.”

This last weekend, Kroeker said, seven people were killed by gunfire in a wide area of South L.A. The point is, you can get shot whether you’re a civilian or a cop. “There are many things,” he said, “that make us similar, rather than dissimilar.”

In other words, we’re stuck in this bloody world together, civilians and cops, sharing risks--and sharing the responsibility of stopping the violence that makes our lives dangerous. “We’re all vulnerable,” Kroeker said, “whether we are in a black-and-white or a little green Toyota.”

Violence Against Police In California

The number of police officers killed and assaulted in the line of duty in California has fluctuated over the last several years. An assault is defined as serious injury to an officer, or the use of a dangerous weapon or substantial resistance.

In The U.S.

The number of officers killed in the line of duty has decreased since a peak of 134 in 1973. The rates for all assaults-ranging from mere threats to the actual battering of officers-has fluctuated.

Number of Number of assaults officers killed per 100 officers 1986 66 16.90 1987 74 16.8 1988 78 15.9 1989 66 16.4 1990 66 17.4 1991 71 15.5 1992 62 17.6

Note: Accidental deaths are not included.

Sources: California Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training, state Department of Justice’s Law Enforcement Information Center, FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program.