L.A. and the LAPD Need Those Tapes : Matter of Fuhrman interviews transcends Simpson case

It is up to Judge Lance A. Ito to decide whether segments from former police detective Mark Fuhrman’s volatile interviews with a screenwriter, taped between 1985 and 1994, are crucial for the jury in the O. J. Simpson case to hear. But there is no question that the importance of the invective from the 19-year LAPD veteran reaches far beyond the courtroom.

Few who heard the excerpts Tuesday were not sickened and profoundly disappointed. Ito permitted defense attorneys to play or display excerpts in which Fuhrman used America’s most historically loaded racial epithet repeatedly--41 times. On the tapes he also speaks of a brutal police beating and a successful attempt to dupe investigators of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division.

NEW AND OLD ISSUES: The behavior that Fuhrman described, whether fictional or real, further undermines the LAPD and raises both new and depressingly familiar questions about the attitudes and behavior of some police officers and about departmental policies on promotion and discipline. The tapes must become public as a painful first step toward answering those questions. Without their release--and a full but expeditious investigation--the department and the city cannot heal the wounds ripped open by the Rodney King beating in 1991 and the riots that followed acquittal of the LAPD officers involved. Without full disclosure and investigation, serious doubt will remain about whether the department has indeed taken sufficient steps to reform itself and to eliminate the race and gender problems that have stained its reputation. Questions remain, as well, about whether cops who still harbor such renegade attitudes remain on the street, or even get promoted--as Fuhrman did.

Fred Goldman understandably considers the tapes controversy an unnecessary diversion from the trial of Simpson, accused of murdering Goldman’s son, Ronald, and Nicole Brown Simpson. But the tapes have become, in Judge Ito’s words, a matter of “overriding public interest.”

The tapes fully can be made public in one of two ways. Laura Hart McKinny, who interviewed Fuhrman in connection with a screenplay she wrote, could simply release them. She has thus far refused to do so, instead only permitting members of the city Police Commission and representatives from the city attorney’s office to listen to parts and take notes. McKinny claims that unlimited release of the tapes would dissipate the value of her screenplay. She should rethink her position in light of the pain and shame Fuhrman’s comments are causing within the LAPD and across the city. Her financial remuneration could come at a price that Los Angeles and its many good police officers cannot afford.

QUESTION FOR ITO: If McKinny fails to act on her own, Ito should quickly approve a request for the tapes filed by the city attorney, representing the Police Commission. The commission, in cooperation with the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division, has already launched an investigation into possible police misconduct mentioned by Fuhrman.

The LAPD has made significant efforts to reform itself. Long before the 1992 riots, first under court mandate after a discrimination lawsuit and then voluntarily, the department aggressively recruited women and minority officers. It has instituted new training programs on the use of force and cultural sensitivity. But that good work is now threatened. The city--not just Police Chief Willie L. Williams and the Police Commission but Mayor Richard Riordan and the City Council--must promptly push to get to the full truth of the Fuhrman tapes. The precious public trust placed in the Police Department cannot be compromised.