LOS ANGELES -- Police Chief Daryl Gates says he is sorry if anyone was offended by a remark he made about blacks and their chances of injury from choke holds, but failed to appease critics who want him fired.
Members of the Los Angeles Police Commission, at the direction of Mayor Tom Bradley, today planned to open an unprecedented disciplinary investigation into what Bradley called four years of 'disparaging' remarks about blacks, Latinos and Jews.
In an interview last weekend, Gates said he was investigating the possibility that controversial police choke holds caused more harm to blacks than 'normal people' because of physical differences.
'We may be finding that in some blacks when it is applied the veins and arteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people,' Gates told the Los Angeles Times.
Before a private meeting Tuesday with business leaders, Gates again refused to apologize for the comment and insisted it was not racist.
'You don't apologize for something where you don't believe you offended anyone. If anyone has been offended, I am sorry for that,' Gates said. 'I never said blacks were different from whites.'
Gates added that he had been contacted by several 'medical people' who said they are conducting research to determine if blacks are physically more susceptible to injuries from the choke hold.
But City Councilman David Cunningham, who compared Gates to Lester Maddox, the former governor of Georgia, and William Shockley, the two-time Nobel Prize winner who believes blacks are genetically inferior to whites, introduced a motion Tuesday to recommend the chief be fired.
Earlier in the day, John Mack, the local leader of the National Urban League labled Gates' remark 'racist' and called for a suspension, to give the chief 'time off to remove his foot from his mouth and the LAPD's choke hold from the necks of black people.'
Bradley, seeking to become the nation's first elected black governor, issued his order to the Police Commission after meeting with Gates Monday.
Mack said the Urban League will be represented at the commission hearing today to push for a ban on the chokehold and to prevent the study suggested by Gates.
A physician who appeared with Mack said there was no evidence to support the conclusion that blacks are more susceptible to choke hold injuries.
'I think the chief should stop playing doctor,' Mack said. 'We are deadly serious. That statement was racist any way you cut it.'
Critics of two types of choke holds used by Los Angeles police charged they have resulted in the deaths of 15 people, 12 of them black, since 1975.
