IN LOS ANGELES, A NEW ERA

By Dan Cray

The enduring image of the Los Angeles Police Department--cops whaling away with nightsticks at a prostrate victim--was engraved on the nation's retina by the Rodney King beating in 1991. Greg Dossey's job for the past few years has been to reverse not just that image but the reality behind it as well. His efforts, along with some department-wide soul-searching, are paying off. There were 583 misconduct claims against Los Angeles police officers last year, about half the number recorded a decade earlier. Sixteen cases made it to court--by far the lowest number since 1980.

Dossey helped bring that about by initiating a massive retraining of the L.A.P.D. rank and file. The 25-year veteran officer converted 8,000 use-of-force reports into a statistical database, which he then used to re-create a blow-by-blow account of prototypical police altercations. With that information in hand, the L.A.P.D. assembled a panel of experts who spent five years testing new, custom-tailored apprehension techniques.

Now 100 officers are retrained each week, with each officer required to come back for a two-day refresher every 18 months, beginning in 1998. Physical trainers and martial-arts experts regard the program so highly that even the Navy Seals send officers to it. Dossey calls it "the most ambitious arrest-control training program you'll find."

At the department's stone-pillared training academy, guidance on use of force comes from a cadre of eight instructors rather than the plethora of training officers used in the past. After the Rodney King incident, the brass discovered that cops on the street could not even agree on whether the officers involved in the beating were following official procedure. "The idea," says Charles Binse, a department commander, "is to teach from the same book."

Dossey's research revealed that in two-thirds of altercations, the officer and the suspect ended up wrestling on the ground; previous training methods had presumed upright resistance. The revised training curriculum emphasizes ground fighting, joint locks and dodging punches and kicks. An officer's initial attempt to grasp a suspect's arm has been replaced with the more flexible "C grip," a loose grab that does not tend to provoke an angry response. They learn to wait for backup so they can use "team takedowns" to apprehend a suspect more easily. Recruits are taught how to "talk someone into jail," says Sandy Jo MacArthur, the department's human-relations sergeant.

If those methods fail, other options range from chemical sprays to shotguns that fire beanbags. And the use of such impact devices as batons has dropped from more than 1,000 incidents 10 years ago to just 63 last year. "The side-handle baton is so heavily associated with the King incident that they just don't want to be caught using it," says Randy Minini, a sergeant in charge of physical training. "Use of force has become the most controversial aspect of police work."

Some older officers dismiss the retraining as a p.r. stunt. But the statistics show there can be a morning after that terrible night of the batons.

--By Dan Cray