Police Story: Two Hard Towns

Lawless cops?

One is old and gradually shrinking in population. The other is relatively young and still growing. Yet Philadelphia (pop. 1,788,000) and Houston (pop. 1,442,000), the nation's fourth and fifth largest cities, share a common problem. Their police forces have earned evidently deserved reputations for brutality, especially among minority citizens:

Philadelphia: Tough-Guy Style A federal grand jury last week indicted three Philadelphia policemen for violating the civil rights of Machinist Edgardo Ortiz, 26. One night last June, according to eyewitnesses, the cops rapped on Ortiz's glass front door and demanded to question him about a report of a family disturbance. When Ortiz angrily protested, they smashed through the glass and pummeled him with fists and clubs in the presence of his wife and three-year-old daughter. Next, neighbors reported, the cops tossed Ortiz through a window, handcuffed him and threw him into a police van. They kept on beating him, said Ortiz, as they drove off to headquarters. He was booked for assaulting the police--and indeed is to be tried on that charge in Philadelphia's common pleas court this week.

The Ortiz case seems to be all too typical in Philadelphia. Police have also been accused of severely beating a black gas-station owner, a white college student and a British musician. In July, a cop with a previous record of assault shot and killed Jose Reyes, 28, a former mental patient, in the doorway of his home. The police say he was threatening the cop, but a witness told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth that Reyes had stumbled and "was goin' in the house on all fours" when the policeman, .standing over him, fired twice. The episode inflamed Reyes' Puerto Rican neighborhood--and provoked demonstrations outside city hall

Justice Department officials rate the city's police force "the most brutal in the nation. A local watchdog organization called the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia (PILCOP), set up two years ago with federal money, has logged more than 400 complaints about brutality so far his year. Reviewing 432 claims over a one-year period, PILCOP found that 54% involved blacks, although they account for just 35% of the city's population. From 1970 through 1974, another PILCOP study revealed, cops shot 236 people, killing 81 of them; half of those were unarmed. In researching a series of articles on the police that was published last spring, the Philadelphia Inquirer first discovered a pervasive pattern of beatings and torture by homicide detectives--and then found that cops were equally tough. The Inquirer decided to investigate police lawlessness after one egregious case--that of Robert ("Reds") Wilkinson, a mildly retarded auto mechanic who was beaten into confessing the fire-bomb murder in 1975 of a woman and her four children. Wilkinson was freed after a federal investigation in which witnesses said they had been intimidated and brutalized. The Inquirer has been front-paging such exposes ever since.

The problem, confined largely to black wards until two or three years ago, now extends to mixed, middle-class districts. Community leaders trace the responsibility straight to the top. "Talking to police captains was no good," says Robert Johnson, president of a local branch of the N.A.A.C.P. "We simply got laughed at." One big reason: the tone of tough-guy intolerance set by Mayor Frank Lazarro Rizzo, a former police commissioner. "When it comes to the police department," Rizzo has said, "I'll be there to defend them even if they make errors in judgment. Nobody will get to them while I'm mayor." Visiting Rome last June in the midst of student riots, Rizzo invited Italian officials to send some of their police to Philadelphia for training in handling demonstrations: "We'll show them how to eat those guys up."

U.S. Attorney David W. Marston, 35, a Republican appointed by the Ford White House, convened the grand jury that delivered last week's indictments and aims to secure still more, for corruption as well as brutality. "The most shocking thing," Marston believes, "is that the political leadership hasn't stood up and said, 'If this has happened, it's wrong.'" Rizzo has lobbied to get President Carter to replace Marston with a malleable Democrat, but so far has got nowhere. Carter owes Rizzo few favors. The city's blacks, hostile toward the mayor, voted overwhelmingly for Carter in November.

Houston: Frontier "Justice" If there is one major difference between Houston's and Philadelphia's outlooks on police brutality, it lies in the attitudes of the mayors. Elected four years ago on a wave of protest against abuses by cops, Houston's Mayor Fred Hofheinz says bluntly: "This is still a frontier city with a lot of law-and-order mentality. Many people support the police no matter what."

Houston's police reflect their city's racial makeup even less than the Philadelphia force, whose 8,184 members are 82% white. Houston has nearly 450,000 black and Hispanic residents, but its 2,886 cops include only 152 blacks and 156 Mexican Americans. Lately the freewheeling behavior of the Houston force has been spotlighted by a series of scandals. Five employees and patrons of a homosexual bar are suing eleven cops and the city for $3.5 million in damages stemming from an incident in which they say they were harassed and beaten. Among other things, the suit alleges that a vice-squad officer went to the home of one of the men, pulled out a switchblade knife, held it against the man's chin and said, "Do you know two Mexican boys hung and got gutted like hogs? You're the next son of a bitch who's going to hang out there."

Indeed, so many cases of brutality in Houston involve Mexicans that famed Lawyer Percy Foreman declares: "If six Mexicans beat up a policeman, it's murder, but if six policemen beat up a drunk Mexican and throw him into the river, it's a misdemeanor." Foreman is representing the family of Joe Campos Torres 23, whom police picked up in a barroom brawl, then beat senseless and tossed into the Buffalo Bayou. Police Chief B.G ("Pappy") Bond arrested one of the officers in the Torres murder but stoutly denies wrongdoing by his men in numerous other killings. Insists Dick DeGuerin, president of the local criminal-lawyers' association: "The mentality in this force is that we are the cops and the law and whatever we do is justified."

Nonetheless, Mayor Hofheinz strenuously opposes forming a civilian board to review complaints. Local attitudes he believes, are such that the board would be little more than "a rubber stamp for the department." Says he: "I know how this city works."

So does local District Attorney Carol Vance. Twenty-four times in the past four years, he has developed cases involving murder or attempted murder by policemen on duty, but the county grand jury has returned only one indictment--against an off-duty cop who shot a motorist after an accident. Says Vance: "Citizens here are generally behind the police." He believes "the feds" might eventually have to take on the task of prosecuting lawless Houston cops--iust as in Philadelphia.

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