A Closer Look at the Week’s 2 Gunfights

Twenty-four hours after the week’s first big gunfight--and only 36 hours before the second--life had pretty much returned to normal at the ClassRoom.

This was the Northridge saloon that had been robbed by a team of bandits Tuesday night as members of the LAPD’s controversial Special Investigation Section secretly waited and watched outside. Moments later, the SIS officers had the robbers trapped in a residential cul-de-sac. Three of the four robbers were killed and a bystander was wounded.

Nine o’clock on Wednesday night found the ClassRoom doing modest business. There were about 15 patrons drinking, a band setting up on stage and Elaine Smith tending bar.

“I think the police did a good job,” Smith said. She wasn’t there the previous night; the regular bartender needed a night off after the robbery. “They saved the taxpayers a lot of money.” She was referring to the cost of trials and incarceration.

“I don’t mean to sound coldblooded,” she added, “but they’re coldblooded.”

This sums up one of the two most common public reactions to the SIS shooting, a vote of confidence that was reinforced Friday morning by the police heroism in North Hollywood. The televised scene of police officers armed with 9-millimeter pistols confronting brazen bank robbers armed with rapid-fire AK-47s served as a graphic reminder of the courage required for the job. LAPD spokesman Cmdr. Tim McBride would mention the two gun battles in the same breath Friday morning as examples of the increasing firepower police face.

Yet the extraordinary events of Friday morning actually don’t answer or even address the questions raised by the SIS operation Tuesday night. SIS tactics have raised controversy for years and have prompted a number of lawsuits. In 1995, a federal grand jury evaluated an SIS case but returned no indictments. On Thursday the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI opened a preliminary civil rights investigation.

A society frustrated by crime and violence is increasingly losing patience with the principle that even crime suspects have civil rights. And while many people applaud SIS tactics, it’s worth remembering that the wounded bystander, 20-year-old Grover Wilson Smith, may only be alive because an SIS officer’s aim was a bit off. Police are not trained to shoot to wound, but to shoot for the torso. The shotgun blast shattered Grover Smith’s right leg.

Unlike the Friday morning true-life TV drama, there apparently is no videotape record of what happened to Grover Smith, who apparently panicked over unpaid traffic warrants when a police helicopter and patrol cars converged on his neighborhood. Attorney Stephen Yagman says his client had been hiding behind a tree and, upon realizing he wasn’t the subject of the search, walked toward police with his arms raised, saying, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” Police say the SIS--a unit with a history of misguided secrecy--fired because he reached toward his waistband as if he had a gun.

As a young black male, Grover Smith roughly matched the description of the robbery suspects. The only suspect to survive is named William Smith. They are not related to each other or, for that matter, to the ClassRoom bartender. William Smith, who allegedly fled the getaway car as the SIS opened fire, has been charged with robbery and murder, based on the deaths of the three alleged accomplices.

Coming only 2 1/2 days later, the North Hollywood shootout quickly called to mind the SIS operation in Northridge. The differences, however, outweigh the similarities.

McBride had to repeatedly explain to reporters on Friday that the North Hollywood bank or its robbers were not under surveillance before the stickup. That extraordinary drama began routinely enough--with a nearby police patrol unit responding to the report of a robbery in progress.

By contrast there has never been anything routine about the SIS and its full-time undercover surveillance duties. In the annals of American law enforcement, such a unit may not be unique, but it is unusual.

SIS operated with such secrecy that until a Times investigation in 1989 few people outside of law enforcement were aware of its existence. Although surreptitious surveillance is common, there’s nothing standard about squads dedicated full-time to this task.

That series documented several troubling facts. SIS members, for example, sometimes deliberately ignored outstanding arrest warrants and failed to react to relatively minor felonies such as car thefts in order to wait until robberies had occurred to move in on suspects. Because suspects were typically career criminals, the arrests would have been a parole violation that would have landed them in prison. By waiting for more serious crimes, the unit allowed people’s lives to be placed in great danger. One shudders to think what would have happened had the bad guys killed somebody after SIS ignored a lesser crime. Would the veil of secrecy have been lifted?

The Times series raised other troubling points. Although LAPD brass contended the SIS shootings were consistent with policy, meaning the officers legitimately felt their lives or the lives of others were in immediate danger, the gun battles often were so one-sided that the suspects never fired a shot. (In Northridge, SIS officers said they opened fire after a suspect pointed a gun. Police have not said whether the suspects had fired.)

The tactics have provoked Yagman’s accusations that the SIS is a “death squad.” LAPD brass say the allegation is absurd--that SIS has arrested many, many more suspects than it has killed or wounded.

But the 1989 series raised other questions about the unit’s overall effectiveness. The closest parallel it found was a Washington, D.C., police surveillance unit, but that squad had a better arrest record and was involved in fewer shootings. Other police departments launched similar units but disbanded them as not cost-effective. The SIS’ checkered past includes the killing of one its own members by friendly fire. At least one SIS member sought a stress disability pension after being involved in several shootings.

The “reverence for life” policy the LAPD adopted after the series never seemed like much more than political window dressing. This all happened years before the Christopher Commission, when then-Chief Daryl Gates wielded autocratic control with little oversight from the elected officials. Now the mayor, the City Council and the Police Commission all have greater clout.

“There are many unanswered questions in every shooting,” said Katherine Mader, the Police Commission’s inspector general, who was recently given oversight of officer-involved shootings. The SIS shooting, she told me, would be evaluated no differently from any other.

Given the shooting of a bystander, the Police Commission may now wish to give the SIS a closer look. The North Hollywood shootout--L.A.’s most dramatic firefight, McBride said, since the Symbionese Liberation Army gun battle of 1974--will echo longer and more loudly.

Too bad, we may agree, that the LAPD apparently lacked the suspicion to have put the SIS on the case. Today, perhaps, if the opportunity presented itself, they’d have arrested these guys the first chance they got, before all hell could break loose.

Or, if not, at least they’d have been ready and waiting outside the Bank of America.