Commentary : A Postscript, (No) Thanks to Fuhrman : Police: The infamous tapes confirm what minorities always knew--but Latinos also know enough good cops to have hope in community-based policing.

I should probably thank Mark Fuhrman for helping me prove a point about the Los Angeles Police Department that I tried to make a few weeks back. But I am too sick at heart, both for this city and for the many good Los Angeles cops that Fuhrman maligned in the hateful audio tapes that have become the latest sensational twist in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

You read that right: many good Los Angeles cops.

For in writing recently about the negative image the police still have in minority communities, and the reputation for bigotry and brutality that underlies that mistrust, some readers came away convinced I am anti-police, or at the very least anti-LAPD. That isn’t so.

The most pointed reaction was from police officers who felt that I did not give them credit for trying to change the department to better reflect a changing Los Angeles. I replied to some of their letters personally, but felt that a follow-up column was also called for. Little did I know the chance to write it would come so soon, or so explosively.

Quite apart from their impact on what some consider the Trial of the Century, the Fuhrman tapes have reopened deep civic wounds in Los Angeles, wounds inflicted by the Rodney King beating and its riotous aftermath. Fuhrman’s ugly, epithet-laden boasts of having beaten and harassed minorities may have come as a surprise to Anglos in this city, just as they were surprised by the King beating. But, like the King beating, the tapes only confirmed for everybody what many minority residents of this city suspected, even if they had not experienced it for themselves--as my mother did.

My Aug. 6 column related how my mother was routinely harassed by police officers while walking home at night from her job as a waitress. The experiences filled her with fear and mistrust of the police. And enough of her doubts were passed on to me that I gave up childhood dreams of becoming an LAPD officer. Some readers did not see the obvious irony of my mother’s predicament: A young woman walking alone at night in a tough neighborhood should have been glad to see the police.

The most deeply felt reactions I got to that vignette were from Latino police officers, proud of the work they do and happy to relate that their own parents were just as proud of them for doing it. Obviously, not all Latino parents discouraged their children from police careers. I knew that from personal experience, having relatives in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the California Highway Patrol.

But that only adds to the irony I was trying to emphasize in that column. Latinos are born into a conservative culture that, almost instinctively, respects authority. So, a few criminals aside, most Latinos in this city want to respect the police. They also appreciate the job police do, given that many Latinos live in high-crime areas. And, given the way the local economy is losing blue-collar jobs, being a police officer is still a respected, and respectable, career that even the poorest Latino youngsters can aspire to.

The problem is, Latinos have never really been given a chance to show just how much they appreciate and respect the police. That’s not because of skeptical journalists like me. It’s because of cops like Mark Fuhrman.

For too long, the standard in police-community relations in Los Angeles was set by thugs wearing (and, need I add, dishonoring) badges, rather than by thoughtful and caring police officers like the LAPD Latina I recently spoke with. She has a beat in the barrio and goes out of her way to educate other Latinas she meets that they have rights in the United States that they might not be aware of, such as having abusive husbands arrested.

Sadly, as made public in court last week, Fuhrman even reserved some of his bile for cops like her, complaining not just about women and African Americans in the LAPD, but about “Mexicans that can’t even write the name of the car they drive.”

Compare Fuhrman’s bigotry with these insightful words from a Latino LAPD officer who wrote me after that Aug. 6 column: “Street crime is not going to go away until the Latino community and the LAPD come together and synergistically unite their efforts.”

I couldn’t agree more. So I return to another point from that column: We’ve got make community-based policing a success in Los Angeles.

It surely won’t be easy, given the numerous of ethnic groups and languages that the LAPD must work with. But this city’s barrios are excellent places to experiment. The people in those communities are willing to cooperate. And all those “Mexican” cops Mark Fuhrman so disliked could be just the right men and women to make it work.