BY HARRY RING
LOS ANGELES - The NAACP branch here has demanded a federal probe of the episodes of police violence and racist victimization graphically described by ex-cop Mark Fuhrman in taped interviews.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles NAACP called on President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno to support such an investigation.
The interviews were taped by a screenwriter, reportedly as material for a film script. The tapes were obtained by defense lawyers in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.
Now retired from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Fuhrman was the detective who allegedly found a bloody glove at the Simpson estate. The prosecution says that it was Simpson's and that it was stained with the blood of the murder victims.
The defense countered by seeking to establish that Fuhrman was a notorious racist and entirely capable of planting the evidence.
Fuhrman testified under oath that he had not used the epithet "nigger" in the past 10 years. The defense then won a court order that provided it, and the prosecution, with copies of the interviews. In these interviews, conducted between 1985 and 1994, he reportedly uses the racist epithet at least 30 times. He also reportedly talks about planting and manufacturing evidence to frame up individuals.
Boastful of cop violence
Sections of the tapes have been leaked to the press,
including Fuhrman's boastful account of the savage 1978
police beating of alleged suspects in a shooting of two
cops at a mainly Latino public housing project.
Describing the police attack at the Boyle Heights project, Fuhrman said, "I was [in the] first unit at the scene. Four suspects ran into a second-story apartment, and we kicked the door down, grabbed the girl, one of their girlfriends, by the hair, stuck a gun to her head, used her as a barricade.
Describing the beating they inflicted , Fuhrman said, "We had them begging that they would never be gang members again."
He added: "We basically tortured them....We broke `em. Their faces were just mush."
In the apartment, he continued, there was "blood everywhere - all the walls, all the furniture, all the floors.Several of the victims, Fuhrman said, were thrown down two flights of stairs. One person suffered a cracked knee. Another required 70 stitches.
Responding to angry community protests at the time, the LAPD conducted an 18-month "investigation."
Fuhrman told his interviewer he had been the primary figure in the probe. "They knew damn well I did it," he said. "But there was nothing they could do about it....We were tight. I mean, we could have murdered people. We all knew what to say."
Sixteen cops were charged and all were cleared.
In a move to placate the concern and anger triggered by
the Fuhrman interview, LAPD chief Willie Williams met
August 19 with figures from the Black, Latino, Asian, and
Pacific Islander communities.
Williams told them he is personally reinvestigating the Boyle Heights incident. He asserted he would not tolerate the kind of things Fuhrman has boasted of doing.
Williams was installed as the first Black LAPD chief in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating by cops. He replaced Daryl Gates, whose naked racism and stubborn defense of club-wielding, trigger-happy cops had made him a liability. The installation of Williams as chief was touted as a new day. The "few bad apples" and "troublemakers" on the force would be reined in and law-abiding citizens would no longer have reason to distrust and hate cops.
The Fuhrman revelations confirm what growing numbers of people recognize. The "new day" has as much substance as a campaign promise by a capitalist politician.
One longtime resident of the South Central Black community, Jerry Brown, 60, told a Los Angeles Times reporter that the Fuhrman tapes simply confirmed his dim view of the police, a view born of years of experience with them.
"A leopard doesn't change his spots," said Brown. "The old LAPD is alive and well. Nothing has changed."