COLUMN LEFT : Leadership Demeaned by Moral Silence : Elected Latinos have unexcusably shied away from condemning the King beating.

Elected Latino officials have created a moral crisis in the Latino community by remaining largely silent about the police beating of Rodney King. Their moral timidity may have emboldened some Latino leaders to support a police chief whose department has historically mistreated and abused Chicanos. A prominent Latino organization has even joined the chorus for recall of Mayor Tom Bradley.

By refusing to judge when judgment is clearly required, these Latino politicians have undercut their own civil-rights tradition. Calling the LAPD’s brutality problem “systemic” is no excuse for withholding moral censure of Daryl M. Gates’ record as police chief.

The situation is all the more tragic because the Latino officials and Gates’ Latino supporters know better. They know, for example, that the LAPD and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department have a history of using nightsticks on Chicanos. From the 1880s through the end of the Depression, LAPD officers often doubled as union busters. As recently as last year, Latino janitors experienced this tradition, when LAPD officers broke up their march for higher wages and better working conditions in Century City. Many of the marchers were mercilessly clubbed.

How, then, to explain the code of moral silence among Latino officials? Has the LAPD changed since 1968, when East Los Angeles students were beaten by officers after walking out of their classrooms? Has the department reformed since July, 1970, when its officers, accompanied by San Leandro police, gunned down Beltran and Guillermo Sanchez in a case of mistaken identity? Is law enforcement less brutal than when newsman Ruben Salazar was killed by a sheriff’s deputy during the Chicano moratorium? Today’s silent Latinos should remember that the black community supported Latino calls for indicting the responsible sheriff deputies.

Racism is woven into the fabric of the LAPD; its police chiefs cannot be separated from the “them and us” mind-set that characterizes the department. Today’s LAPD is not all that different from the politicized institution that, in 1949, broke into the home of City Council candidate Edward R. Roybal to look for evidence linking him to the Communist Party or organized crime. That criminal act reflected the values of then-Chief William Parker.

On Jan. 27, 1960, testifying before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Parker said: “Some of these people (Mexicans) were here before we were, but some are not far removed from the wild tribes of the district of the inner mountains of Mexico.”

Eleven years later, Chief Edward M. Davis bragged that his department had run the Brown Berets out of the city. “We knocked them off right and left, and they never did figure . . . how it was happening.”

LAPD surveillance and disruption of the Chicano Movement is a matter of record. So is the attitude of the police. Addressing a Chamber of Commerce group in 1970, Gates, then assistant chief, characterized radical movements as nothing less than “a revolution against the free-enterprise system.” He urged the businessmen to support law-enforcement’s efforts to suppress radicalism.

Gates’ weakness for inflammatory remarks hasn’t really changed since then. He would shoot casual drug users; Salvadorans are “drunks,” and gang members the new barbarians. His style of leadership clearly sets the tone for his department and encourages his officers to imagine themselves as the defenders of “American” society.

In light of this history, how could certain Chicano leaders attach themselves to a movement to recall the man who has urged Gates to step down? Why would they risk transforming the beating of King into a black-brown issue and help Gates evade the public’s moral scrutiny?

True, Bradley has been soft on Latino issues. True, black leaders have not been especially helpful on immigration problems. But that record should not deter Latinos from condemning the King mauling as unjustifiable and from denouncing it, considering their own experience, as anything but an aberration.

The Latino politicians have paid a price for their moral silence. Many in the community wonder if their conduct is the result of LAPD intimidation. Others worry that any Latino support for Gates will further heighten tensions between Latinos and blacks. What is certain is that these officials, by ignoring the lessons of their own history of being victims of police brutality, have diminished their moral authority in the eyes of their constituents.