A Department Deluded by Its Rhetoric : Police: The LAPD suffers from a familiar syndrome: ‘We are better than others and have nothing to learn from them.’

Deep in our usually unarticulated beliefs is the conviction that we Californians somehow are better than other people, that we have built a nobler society here, that we have little to learn from people elsewhere, especially those “unfortunates” back East, whether they are in New York, Chicago or Miami.

In short, we are more than a bit provincial. Carey McWilliams and other writers of our region had several reasons to call Southern California “an island on the land.”

It may have not occurred to our county’s prosecutors or the judge that the move to Simi Valley of the trial of the four police officers who beat Rodney King would affect the verdict. Mayor Tom Bradley now admits he did not anticipate acquittal. That’s not surprising. How could any juror, of whatever color, ignore that videotape? And most whites, especially in California, aren’t racists, are they? After all, this is the state of golden dreams and multicultural harmony.

Even Police Chief Daryl F. Gates may not have anticipated that the jury would acquit. This may be the most charitable explanation of why Gates, despite prior public assurances that the police were prepared for any eventuality, did not implement plans to cope with the anger unleashed by the acquittal.

Despite Gates’ televised statements that he had carefully studied other riots, it was clear that he had not assimilated the lessons of the riots after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, or the continuing, successful anti-riot tactics of the Miami police department, which show that early, large deployment of police does much to prevent riot violence from escalating out of control.

While other large urban police departments, including Philadelphia, Kansas City and San Jose, have made admirable strides in techniques in recent years, Gates’ department remained stuck in the same militarized rut it had dug in the 1950s and 1960s.

Gates’ failure to focus on the problems of brutality and racism directly led to the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD last year.

This failure partly stems from the “we are better than other people and have nothing to learn from them” syndrome. Gates and the LAPD have told themselves so often that they have the best police department in the world that they became deluded by their own rhetoric. Sadly, the politicians, news media and filmmakers of Los Angeles did too little to challenge the LAPD’s self-delusion. Its officers believed that they actually were as heroic as their portrayals in movies and novels.

Gates and his department so prided themselves on the slimmer physiques of LAPD officers and the absence of financial corruption compared with some notorious Eastern police departments that they never focused on the fact that other forms of corruption--those of brutality and racism--can undermine a police department even more than taking bribes or free meals.

The racism of California is not so much the racism of the dominating slaveholder or bigot of the pre-civil rights South. Racism here is an accentuated form of that prevalent in the North--the racism of avoidance, of living so that you have little contact with people of other races.

In the land of the automobile and the freeway, the affluent don’t have the opportunity that people in some other American cities have of mixing with ordinary people on public transportation. Rich and poor, white and black, grow ever more apart.

But great shocks can produce great changes in perception. Whatever their past view of reality, some Californians in the last few days have started to reach out across racial lines.

It’s not enough, but it is a beginning for us to build on.