Gates Suspends 3 Officers, Fires 1 in King Case

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates fired a rookie officer and suspended three other officers without pay Tuesday as a result of the Rodney G. King beating.

The four officers have been indicted on criminal charges in connection with the March 3 attack and face trial in Los Angeles Superior Court later this month.

Acting on an investigation by the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division, Gates dismissed Foothill Division Officer Timothy Wind, 30, who joined the force last May and was on probation at the time of the beating.

Gates also ordered Sgt. Stacey Koon and Officers Laurence Powell and Theodore Briseno relieved of duty without pay--effective immediately--pending the outcome of an administrative Board of Rights hearing on misconduct charges. If the allegations are upheld, they could face a maximum penalty of dismissal from the force.

Last month, the four officers were informed of the pending discipline and that Police Department investigators had concluded that the allegations against Koon, Powell and Briseno were “such that retention (on the police force) is not warranted.” Wind was informed that he faced immediate termination.

Powell and Wind are seen on a videotape of the March 3 incident striking King more than 50 times with their batons after a car chase in the northern San Fernando Valley. Koon, the supervisor at the scene, twice shot King with a Taser electric stun gun and Briseno was shown kicking the suspect in the head.

In other developments:

* Public television station KCET aired an audio-enhanced version of a videotape of the King beating in which a voice is heard saying, “Nigger, hands behind your back!” The enhancement was done by George Papcun, an acoustics specialist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

* Superior Court Judge Bernard Kamins, who on Monday dismissed one charge against Koon in the pending criminal case, Tuesday refused to toss out any more charges against the officers.

* Five Foothill Division officers who witnessed the King beating told the Los Angeles County Grand Jury that King’s behavior appeared to justify the use of force, although one officer said the incident left him “traumatized.”

* Two Los Angeles Unified School District police officers who stood by during the beating have been fired from the school police force after they failed to report the incident to district officials.

Gates’ action Tuesday to discipline the four officers in his department was conveyed to them during their pretrial hearing in criminal court. It brought an immediate response from attorney Patrick Thistle, who works with the Police Protective League and who will represent Wind in his appeal:

“Wind is entitled to the same due process hearing as the others. The charges are the type that will impact on his life in the future--such as his ability to obtain employment--and I believe that that triggers a constitutional right to a full hearing.”

Wind has five days to appeal his firing to Gates. Because he is a rookie, police say Wind is only entitled to a hearing before one commanding officer in order to fight his ouster, instead of having a three-member Board of Rights hear his case.

However, a recent appeals court decision held that probationary officers accused of serious infractions are entitled to a full hearing.

At the same time, Thistle argued that such hearings should be conducted by an outside agency because “the chief of police has already decided that (the officers) are guilty of misconduct of a grievous nature.”

In a three-count notice of termination to Wind, the chief alleged that the rookie “unnecessarily struck (and) kicked King numerous times” and submitted an arrest report which “failed to accurately depict the details of the arrest.”

Cmdr. Rick Dinse, who as head of the Police Department’s criminal and administrative investigations of the beating spoke for Gates, said the chief’s orders, signed last Thursday, stem from recommendations reached in six-week internal affairs investigation and reviewed by Valley Bureau supervisors.

Dinse said the decision to fire Wind and suspend the others on the eve of trial--which had been scheduled to begin Monday--was coincidental.

“This action was not delayed or hurried up to coincide with anything happening in the criminal aspect of the case,” Dinse said. “That is separate.”

The sergeant and two officers have five days in which they can choose which high-ranking officers they want to sit in judgment. Each officer draws six names from a box, and from those they can choose three who will decide their fate. Normally, a hearing follows within 10 days.

But Dinse said the officers could ask that the hearing be delayed, perhaps until the end of their criminal trial.

Separate three-man boards will preside at hearings for the suspended officers, making final recommendations to Gates. Guilt can be established by “a preponderance of the evidence” at such administrative trials, rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” as required at criminal trials. The chief can accept or reduce whatever penalty the board recommends, but he cannot increase it.

Gates’ five-count complaint against Koon charged that the supervising sergeant failed to stop Powell and Wind in their unnecessary use of force, failed to ensure that a personnel investigation was initiated after the beating and failed to accurately depict the details of the incident on his sergeant’s daily report.

The complaint charged that Powell unnecessarily struck King numerous times with his baton, submitted an inaccurate arrest report on the incident, improperly utilized the patrol car computer to send personal messages and made an improper racial remark to another officer on the computer.

Briseno was accused of unnecessarily kicking King.

While the administrative charges were being made public at Parker Center, a pretrial hearing in the criminal case against the officers was being held two blocks away.

Judge Kamins, as he did Monday, continued working through a four-foot-high stack of motions submitted by prosecutors and defense attorneys asking for everything from dismissing the charges to moving the trial.

He acknowledged that the trial will be “a little bit delayed” because Koon has pneumonia and the defense has not been given all the evidence by prosecutors.

Kamins ordered both sides to submit questions for prospective jurors by Friday, saying he has “hundreds” coming in next week. Their reponses, he said, will guide him in making decisions about postponing the trial or moving it to another county in the wake of massive publicity, stemming from the videotape of the beating that has been broadcast worldwide.

KCET replayed the video Tuesday night as part of a 90-minute special on the Police Department and the King case. The station’s copy of the video had been audio-enhanced to remove the sound of a helicopter that was circling above the scene.

A voice can be heard on the KCET tape saying the racial epithet while apparently ordering King to place his hands behind his back. Another voice is heard on the tape saying: “Hands behind your back! Behind your back!”

The FBI has provided local authorities with audio-enhanced copies of the tape on which no slurs could be detected.

Cmdr. Dinse, when asked about the different results, replied: “I can’t explain that at all.”

Dinse said the Police Department “counted on the FBI to have the best enhancement.” He said the Police Department would ask to hear KCET’s tape.

Papcun, who assured KCET he was willing to testify to his findings under oath in court, told the television station he was able to do his enhancement “with appropriate equipment that transduces the full range of audio frequencies relevant to understanding the speech in this recording.”

King’s lawyer, Steve Lerman, has said for weeks that the beating had racial overtones. He told The Times last Friday that he heard the slur used twice when he played the tape on a stereophonic videocassette recorder at an electronics store. Dinse said at the time that he had listened to the portions of the tape Lerman had pinpointed and found the words “unintelligible.”

The grand jury has met five times since indicting the four officers. No charges have been lodged against the other 17 Los Angeles officers who stood by and watched.

Of the seven witnesses it heard in the second phase of its investigation, the grand jury took testimony from five officers who witnessed the beating.

Transcripts from those sessions, obtained by The Times, described the King beating as one of confusion, fear and noise that made police commands all but inaudible.

Officer Ingrid E. Larson, a rookie, told the grand jury she saw officers repeatedly strike King although he was already down on the ground.

“He was never standing,” Larson said. “He was on his knees when I first saw him, and then when they hit him a few times, he went down to his stomach. It seemed like he was trying to get up, but he did not. And then he went down, like face down, I think.”

Larson said she did not view the beating as an abuse of authority.

Discussing the incident afterward with her partner, she said he told her: “There are occasions when you will have to hit somebody, but don’t ever get to the point where you want to or you enjoy it.”

In a related development, the California Legislative Black Caucus asked Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner to file criminal charges against the 17 Police Department officers who were present at the beating but took no action to stop their colleagues. The caucus, in a letter to Reiner, cited a Penal Code section that makes it a crime for an officer to fail to suppress an unlawful or riotous assembly.

A spokesman for Reiner earlier said the section does not appear to apply to police officers.

Times staff writer Sandy Banks contributed to this story.