Police Brutality

A coalition of 30 civic, religious and political groups this week sounded a public alarm about police brutality, an issue that has not been in the forefront of public debate since department reforms six years ago. The coalition charged there is a "widespread perception in many of our communities . . . that routine abuse and harassment of citizens by the police has been increasing and becoming more violent in recent years. " The standard measure of police abuse - the number of complaints filed by citizens with the department - would appear to contradict the coalition's contention.

Considering the size of the crowd that filled South Street Saturday night, police say that things didn't turn out all that bad. But four teenagers charged with assaulting police officers are alleging that they were victims of excessive force. Police said that five officers were injured and 19 revelers were arrested Saturday after thousands of young people swarmed South Street. Cops had bulked up patrols on the street after "flash mobs" appeared on at least two weekends earlier this year.

Police Commissioner Kevin M. Tucker yesterday rejected a call for an independent investigatory panel with Hispanic community membership to look into allegations that police officers used unnecessary force while arresting three North Philadelphia residents - two of them pregnant women - on Feb. 12. Tucker said that he hoped the normal 45-day Internal Affairs Division investigation could be accelerated and end in 30 days. "I left the meeting with mixed feelings," said David Sambolin, an attorney and spokesman for the local chapter of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights.

The videotaped beating of Thomas Jones by Philadelphia police officers is yet another incident that calls attention to the nationwide, systematic problems of police brutality and racially discriminatory policing. I am a former U.S. Marine and police officer who has come under gunfire and confronted many fleeing suspects both armed and unarmed. Regardless of the severity of Jones' alleged actions, his having been set upon by a mob composed of law-enforcement agents indicates cowardice and a lack of professionalism by the officers involved.

AIDS activists lambasted the police commissioner yesterday for appointing a panel to review a department probe of allegations that police brutalized protesters in Center City last week, claiming that its job is merely to cover up the truth. But a member of the panel said that based on TV news footage he's seen, it appears that police used excessive force in quelling a protest by ACT UP, a militant AIDS group. "It looked like a police riot," said Larry Gross, one of the panelists.

LOS ANGELES - His beating stunned the nation, left Los Angeles smoldering and helped reshape race relations and police tactics. And in a quavering voice on national television, Rodney King pleaded for peace while the city burned. But peace never quite came for King - not after the fires died down, after two of the officers who broke his skull multiple times were punished, after Los Angeles and its flawed police department moved forward. His life, which ended Sunday at age 47 after he was pulled from the bottom of his swimming pool, was a continual struggle even as the city he helped change moved on. The images - preserved on an infamous grainy video - of the black driver curled up on the ground while four white officers clubbed him - became a national symbol of police brutality in 1991.

The city yesterday agreed to pay $325,000 to a brain-damaged North Philadelphia youth to settle a hotly-contested case alleging police brutality. "It certainly doesn't admit any wrongdoing. Frankly, we don't believe there was any," said City Solicitor Stephanie Franklin-Suber. The settlement between the city and Kareem Glass, 18, ended a jury trial that had been in progress before U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno. The city's top lawyer said she agreed to settle the case to avoid a risk of the jury awarding much more to Glass, who had been seeking several million dollars in damages, according to court records.

The outrage was immediate and the response of government was swift to the widely viewed videotape of the police mini-riot by white Los Angeles Police Department officers against a black suspect they had stopped after a high- speed chase. The amateur photographer's pictures of Rodney King writhing on the ground while being clubbed with police batons and shocked with a stun gun were powerful symbols that the LA district attorney, federal officials and opinion writers, liberal and conservative, could not ignore.

The Rev. Al Sharpton and 15 others were arrested yesterday when they attempted to cross the East River Drive during a march protesting local injustices to blacks. The arrests came about 5:20 p.m. as Sharpton, along with lawyers Alton Maddox Jr. and C. Vernon Mason, led about 500 people on a march from Harlem to a rally outside Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence. After his arrest, Sharpton vowed to "agitate every week until we get (Mayor Edward) Koch out. " Sharpton announced he would take Tawana Brawley to Washington today to meet with Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.

Nearly three weeks ago in New York City, 30-year-old Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was ensnared in a confrontation with police that even Los Angeles' Rodney King could never have imagined. Two officers at Brooklyn's 70th Police Precinct were accused of the physical and sexual abuse of Louima, a married security guard with no prior arrests, after a skirmish outside a nightclub. He was allegedly beaten by police on the way to the precinct. He was taken to the men's room, he said, where 25-year-old officer Justin Volpe allegedly used the handle of a toilet plunger to sodomize him, then jammed the stick into his mouth, breaking a few of Louima's teeth.

RE: "BLAME the cops again?" (letter, Feb. 15) Patricia Doughterty was correct in her letter. I am going to condemn the Los Angeles police regarding Christopher Dorner, because this was the third time in 47 years that the brutality from that department sparked a major outburst of violence and death, and this time from within its ranks. They didn't help themselves, either, when while searching for Dorner they nearly killed two Hispanic women who happened to be driving a car that looked like his, basically making his point.

CAIRO - Egypt's Interior Ministry offered a rare expression of regret Saturday after riot police were caught on camera a day earlier beating a protester who had been stripped of his clothes, then dragging the naked man along the muddy pavement before bundling him into a police van. The video of the beating, which took place late Friday only blocks from the presidential palace, where protests were raging in the streets, further inflamed popular anger...

Oscar Rosario is not against police, he said. He's just against police brutality. "The police motto is honor, integrity, service," said Rosario, who stood in the middle of Spring Garden Street on Sunday afternoon waving a Puerto Rican flag. "We want them to show that. All we want is justice. " Rosario was one of about 100 people who gathered in a brisk, pre-Hurricane Sandy wind to protest outside a fund-raiser for Philadelphia Police Lt. Jonathan D. Josey II, the officer fired after punching a woman following the Puerto Rican Day parade last month.

Oscar Rosario is not anti-police, he said. He's just anti-police brutality. "The police motto is honor, integrity, service," said Rosario, who stood in the middle of Spring Garden Street Sunday afternoon, waving a Puerto Rican flag. "We want them to show that. All we want is justice. " Rosario was one of dozens who gathered in a brisk, pre-Hurricane Sandy wind to protest outside a fund-raiser held for Philadelphia Police Lt. Jonathan D. Josey II, the officer fired for punching a woman after the Puerto Rican Day parade last month.

Mayor Nutter apologized in person Friday to the Chester woman who took a sucker punch in the face from a Philadelphia police officer at festivities after last weekend's Puerto Rican Day Parade. Nutter met with Aida Guzman in his office and told her he had been "horrified" by the incident, which was captured on video and posted on YouTube, and which prompted viral views and widespread outrage over the last week. The video, taken Sunday at Fifth Street and Lehigh Avenue, shows Lt. Jonathan Josey punching Guzman so forcefully that she falls to the ground.

PARIS - The younger daughter of a British-Iraqi couple slain while vacationing in the French Alps has returned to Britain, while her badly wounded older sister has come out of an artificial coma, authorities said Sunday. Four-year-old Zeena and 7-year-old Zaina survived a vicious shooting that killed their parents, Saad and Iqbal al-Hilli, as well as a still-unidentified older woman and a French man who apparently happened to be passing by on his bicycle. French police have been scrambling to hunt down leads since Wednesday's rampage, while relatives of the couple arrived in France to take care of the girls.

IT WASN'T that long ago that federal ATF agents spent most of their time tramping through places like Appalachia smelling out illegal stills. They were the "revenuers" of story and song, chasing rumrunners down Thunder Road. But in recent years, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives got heavily into arson investigation, and it was due largely to the activities of agents in Philadelphia. Like Walt Wasyluk. Walt always considered the Santiago firebombing case of Oct. 5, 1975, to be one of the highlights of his career as an ATF special agent.

True Believers A Novel By Kurt Andersen Random House. 438 pp. $27   The aphorism by Karl Marx that most appeals to Karen Hollander, the protagonist of True Believers , asserts that epochal events happen twice, first as tragedy and the second time as farce. It occurs to her, however, that in the 1960s, when she and her comrades were young, "playing secret agents with licenses to kill and then playing antiwar radicals, exactly the reverse happened. " A divorcée and a diabetic, with a granddaughter on whom she dotes, a brilliant attorney and dean of a prestigious law school, Hollander has recently refused to be considered for an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Chuck D, front man of the seminal hip-hop group Public Enemy, proclaimed that rap music "is CNN for black people," he spoke a truism of the time. By the late '80's, the Reagan years had stripped poor communities bare, crack cocaine had seeped in, police brutality ran rampant, and socially conscious groups like PE spit out the 'hood's hard-core truths with all of the delicacy of a sledgehammer. But try to find a CNN MC today. For every Mos Def or Talib Kweli, there's a surplus of Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj wannabes - all puffed-up and profane style rather than socially charged substance.

How will history remember Rodney King? Unwilling symbol of police brutality? Unlikely advocate for us getting along? Unrepentant drunk? That's the question I've pondered since I heard the news Sunday that King was dead at 47, found lifeless by his fiancee at the bottom of the pool at his home in Rialto, Calif. I mean, we had just talked a month ago, when King came through town to promote his long-planned memoir, The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption.