The Washington Post

In the most poignant moment of his recent address to Congress on the war in the Gulf, President Bush described the scene we had seen on television: four Iraqi soldiers emerging from their bunker, “broken, tears streaming from their eyes, fearing the worst.”

And “then there was this American soldier. Remember what he said? He said: ‘It’s OK. You’re all right now. You’re all right now.'”

That scene, said the triumphant president, says a lot about America.

It does indeed. But so does another tableau we saw on our TV screens last week: a handcuffed black man being beaten senseless by a gang of white police officers.

The contrast between those two scenes—one on a battlefield, the other in Los Angeles—is a useful description of the gap between the American ideal and the American reality.

I had hoped Daryl F. Gates, Los Angeles’ chief of police, might have been moved by the president’s remarks to try to rid his city of the police brutality that is its continuing disgrace. Instead, he resorted to PR games.

Listen to him. The assault (fortuitously videotaped by an alert citizen) was an aberration, he says.

Race wasn’t a factor; it just happened that Rodney King was black and that the 15 cops involved were white.

The three officers photographed clubbing and kicking their victim (while a dozen more, including a supervising sergeant, stood watching) may have been guilty of “excessive force,” but the 25-year-old King “created” the incident.

Of course, he did. By doing 115 mph in a Hyundai its manufacturer says never reached 100 in company tests, by resisting arrest while face down on the pavement with his hands cuffed behind him and—who knows?—perhaps by being provocatively black.

The chief finds the whole affair unfortunate, of course, but principally, it seems, because his entire 8,300-member force might be “tarred” by the brutality of a few club-happy cops.

Neither his words nor his actions suggest outrage that the things black people have been saying about L.A. cops have turned out to be graphically, documentably true.

That’s the thing that provokes anger not just in Los Angeles but across the land.

The savagery recorded by George Holliday’s new video camera would have been awful enough to cause heads to roll even if the L.A. police department had, to that point, been a model of decorum.

Given the long history of racial allegations against members of the department and the chief’s apparent inability to curb his men, the head that should roll now sits squarely on the stiff neck of Chief Gates.

That’s not to say that all the brutality is the responsibility of the chief. The 41-year veteran was around but not chief of police, when police brutishness triggered the 1965 riot that made Watts a household word.

But he was chief when he authorized the use of the chokehold that led to the deaths of 15 detainees, a dozen of them black.

It was during his watch that complaints of police overreaction (ranging from beating to racial slurs to baseless arrests) reached the staggering total of some 350 a week.

The city is paying out some $3.5 million to $5 million a year in police-abuse settlements, according to a spokesman for the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union.

Indeed, it is likely that official toleration of these outrages—both by Gates and Mayor Tom Bradley, himself an ex-policeman—is the main reason it continues.

Any number of bad police departments (including Maryland’s Prince George’s County force in suburban Washington, D.C.) have cleaned up their acts after the appointment of chiefs who made clear they would not tolerate police brutality.

To listen to some Los Angeles residents, the major difference between the recent beating and scores, perhaps hundreds, of others is that this one was videotaped and, therefore, undeniable.

Even so, it took from Sunday to Thursday for the chief to announce that all 15 of the officers would be investigated by the department and to ask that criminal charges be filed against the three who took turns clubbing and kicking the handcuffed man.

All these things ought to be done, of course. But doing them grudgingly, under duress, as Gates is doing, serves only to minimize their effect.

The impression is that Gates cares less about the brutality that persists in his department than about the damage to his public relations.

But what happened in Los Angeles goes beyond PR, goes even beyond the criminal conduct of a handful of police officers sworn to uphold the law.

It goes to the fundamental question of what America is and aspires to be.

Neither the poignancy of the Gulf scene described by the president nor the shame of the scene recorded by George Holliday’s camera had anything to do with the qualities of the two terrified men at the center of the TV screen: one an enemy soldier, the other a suspected speeder and convicted robber.

What moves us was the behavior of those who acted on our behalf.

In one case, they made us proud to be Americans; in the other, they called into question the country’s fundamental humanity.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our elation over what happened in the Gulf could be matched by our outrage over what continues to happen here at home?