THREE POLICE OFFICERS SIT NEAR the bar of a West Hollywood steak house, drinking wine and glancing from time to time at the wall, where an old painted caricature of O.J. Simpson, yellowed by a decade or two of drifting smoke, serves up a mocking, million-dollar smile. Two days after the verdict, these cops aren't amused. They belong to a disgraced and discredited L.A.P.D., a department maligned around the world, thanks to Johnnie Cochran and Mark Fuhrman, for shoddy police work, perjured testimony and racially motivated assaults on innocent people. No wonder these cops are thinking about getting out. "Nobody wants to stay," says Detective David Lambkin, 42, a tidy man with wire spectacles and a scholarly air. "I've already sent for information on jobs elsewhere." Says Officer Katherine Guel, 34: "People talk about it constantly. They don't have much fight left. Why stay where you're constantly getting beat up?"
Cop as villain, cop as victim: Is it any wonder, in a case that breeds mutually exclusive points of view, that the famously brutal Los Angeles Police Department sees itself as the brutalized one? The bungling, violent department--the L.A.P.D. of Rodney King--was brought to mind even after the verdict last week, when patrolmen spilled from a half-dozen squad cars and pulled guns on a few young men painting pro-O.J. graffiti at the corner of Florence and Normandie, the epicenter of the 1992 riots. Yet cops such as Lambkin and Guel describe a different department: flawed but trying to reform, still catching bad guys and pulling cats out of trees while being eaten alive by the bitter, corrosive effects of public mistrust. This demoralized funk, says community-relations officer Peter Repovich, "causes 400 cops to quit each year"--good detectives such as Lambkin, who says he's tired of being cross-examined by lawyers parroting Johnnie Cochran lines; good patrol officers such as Guel, a Hispanic single mother. She is as far from Fuhrman's swaggering, racist style as Fuhrman is from the old-school L.A.P.D. icon Joe Friday. An eight-year veteran from south Los Angeles, Guel is the kind of cop this department needs: a member of the community she patrols, not a mercenary in an occupying army.
Unfortunately, officers such as Guel aren't common enough. Eighty-three percent of the force lives outside the city limits. And the police culture that produced Mark Fuhrman--promoting him to detective when he should have been stripped of badge and gun--is alive and well.
In September, just days after the Fuhrman tapes were heard around the world, Police Chief Willie Williams disclosed that two 18-year L.A.P.D. veterans had been suspended for falsifying evidence, forcing prosecutors to drop murder charges against two suspects as well as jeopardizing hundreds of other cases. One of those detectives, Andrew Teague, had been named among 44 violence-prone "problem officers" in a 1991 report by the Christopher Commission, a panel that investigated the department in the wake of the Rodney King beating. Also making the list was Officer Michael Falvo, now under investigation for the July 1995 shooting of a 14-year-old Latino boy. As it turns out, 33 of the Christopher Commission's 44 problem officers are still on the force, and as of late last summer, 19 of them were still on the street.