A Commission to Find Out the Truth : Christopher team gets down to important and difficult work in aftermath of King beating

It’s been almost two months since the nation was jolted by the videotape that showed several L.A. police officers beating a defenseless motorist. By now, there are few people anywhere who have not seen that awful sequence of police brutality or who do not know the name of the victim of that beating, Rodney G. King.

Los Angeles and its shaken Police Department will probably never be the same as a result of the events that occurred in Lake View Terrace March 3. And the changes that take place as a result of that incident can be either for the bad or for the good. We have already seen too much of the bad--overheated rhetoric by both critics and supporters of Chief Daryl Gates, and bureaucratic wrangling at City Hall as the Mayor, Police Commission and City Council argue over who (if anyone) has the final say on Gates’ tenure as head of LAPD.

If ever there was a time for a calm, level-headed look at the King incident and what it says about problems in the LAPD, it is now. That is why the hearings that begin today, when the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department holds its first public session, are so fundamentally important to the future well-being of this city. The 10-member commission was created to take a hard look at the King beating. Not at exactly what happened, since that issue is before the courts, where it properly belongs. But at why it happened, and what can be done to keep that sort of outrageous police behavior from ever recurring.

By the time its important work is done, the commission will be more easily identifiable as the Christopher Commission, after its leader, Warren Christopher, chairman of the respected O’Melveny and Myers law firm and former deputy secretary of state under President Carter. Los Angeles has few citizens as distinguished or respected. Indeed, in his presidential memoirs, Carter referred to Christopher, who patiently negotiated the release of the U.S. hostages from Iran in 1980, as “the best public servant I ever knew.� The panel’s other members, if less well-known, are no less respected and trusted by their colleagues and neighbors, and include some of the city’s finest legal, academic, business and law-enforcement minds.

The commission faces a daunting task. It must explore some painful issues with calm honesty and point the way toward a better LAPD. If it does its work as well as we expect it to, it will benefit us all.