Hard, Painful Lessons Emerge From Turmoil

Los Angeles continues to be the best textbook--however painful it is to open these days--that Orange County could possibly study.

The Rodney King verdict-- incredulous as it may have left you--must be laid against a much broader backdrop than a two-month trial. It’s another point on a continuum of mistrust and hostility toward the Los Angeles Police Department by a segment of the city’s black population.

When that mistrustful community was then told, “You may not like the verdict, but that’s the way the system works,” it didn’t silence the anger because that community already felt disenfranchised. The King videotape was its smoking gun, and when even that gun didn’t faze a jury, the inevitable sense of anger and despair ensued.

In other words, it’s much easier to accept the old saw, “Oh, well, we’ll get ‘em next time,” if you feel like the deck isn’t perpetually stacked against you.

The L.A. lesson for Orange County is to strenuously avoid getting to the point where large segments of the minority community so despise law enforcement that their faith in the justice system rests on a single jury verdict, no matter how momentous the case may be.

That’s because the inescapable fact of life is that juries sometimes screw up.

We’re now hearing that the verdict epitomizes white America’s indifference toward the plight of blacks, especially at the hands of police. For that premise to hold, you would have to argue that every jury with no blacks would have acquitted the four LAPD defendants.

However, Marshall Schulman, a former prosecutor who has been a prominent Orange County defense attorney since 1965, cautions against that rush to judgment.

“Juries are like fingerprints,” he said. “You can have one jury on one set of facts and one presentation and have them come in with a not guilty verdict, and have another 12 with the same set of facts come in with a guilty verdict.”

Although he said he was astonished by the King verdict, Schulman said it would be a mistake to attribute it to the jury’s racial makeup. He said Orange County of 20 years ago also had the reputation of having extremely conservative juries and being a “difficult place to go” for a defense attorney.

Instead, Schulman said, local jurors “though conservative, were independent thinkers, and I think a cut above intellectually what I found in L.A. County.” They strongly believed in the judicial system, couldn’t be steamrollered by either side and, as a result, Schulman said, were fearless.

Wylie Aitken is another longtime Orange County attorney who’s seen the county’s makeup change. He said Orange County “would have been probably a better venue than Simi Valley. Orange County with its present demographics is not as right-wing as some people like to believe it is,” Aitken said. “From the standpoint of demographics and having a more open mind and attitude, Orange County would have been a better jurisdiction.”

However, Aitken hastened to add he’s glad the trial wasn’t held here because had the verdict been the same, the county’s image as a “lily white, highly, highly conservative” area would have been cemented in people’s minds. Aitken said the trial should have been held in the third choice--the Oakland area--because the jury makeup would most closely have matched that of Los Angeles.

But, like Schulman, he said the public has to have faith in the justice system, even in its imperfect state.

The anger in L.A.--and I’m talking about the legitimate anger, not the wilding sprees by those who don’t care a bit about race relations--suggest that the City of Angels may be too far gone.

There are some signs, however, that Orange County is reading its L.A. text.

Twenty years ago--maybe as recently as 10--defense attorneys for white cops might have thought Orange County would be a perfect venue for a racially tinged case. But as we residents know, the county is changing: a population that was nearly 80% white in 1980 is 65% white today.

Although there are occasional rumblings from parents and teens that patrolmen hassle Latino kids whom they suspect of being gang members (the dangerous seeds of a Rodney King-like affair somewhere down the road?), others say the police structure has grown tolerant.

You may have seen in Thursday’s Times, for example, that police chiefs in Fullerton and Laguna Beach criticized the King verdict. That took guts.

Rusty Kennedy, head of the county’s Human Relations Commission, said the county is “setting standards where intolerance is frowned on.”

Let’s all hope that is reality, not rhetoric because a local version of the Rodney King case and the burning of South L.A. awaits at the end of the line if Kennedy is not right.

If, as in large sections of Los Angeles, people feel they have no stake in a society, they have little compunction about destroying it.

Kennedy is convinced he is right. “Clearly,” he said, “law enforcement leaders today are a new breed of managers, with skills and attitudes that I think are significantly different and more modern than those of two decades ago.”

If they are, Orange County need never see itself burning to the ground.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.