Chief Daryl Gates

Melanie E. Lomax, a longtime civil rights lawyer and former head of the Los Angeles Police Commission, was killed late Sunday in a single-car accident near her Hollywood Hills home, police said Monday. Lomax, 56, was declared dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was taken by paramedics after the 2005 Jaguar she was driving rolled down her driveway and tumbled 20 feet down a steep embankment. Police sources said Lomax may have had a heart attack.

It is the nation's most popular drug-education program, offered in at least 60% of school districts nationwide, reaching 25 million youngsters here and in 41 other countries. It is a program that has drawn praise for its efforts to bring uniformed police officers into the classroom to promote self-esteem and clean living. Even Chelsea Clinton is a graduate. But you don't DARE in Spokane.

Casual drug users--the people Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates says should be shot--rarely receive jail sentences on their first offense in Ventura County despite the county's tough law and order image. Possession of a gram of cocaine on first offense, a felony that carries a possible one-year jail term, probably will land the casual drug user in the county probation department's diversion program, prosecutors said this week.

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, reversing his stand of the day before, said Thursday that two officers who publicly acknowledged their homosexual lifestyles recently will be allowed to wear their uniforms at a police recruitment booth during a gay pride festival in West Hollywood this weekend. Gay activists who had criticized the chief's opposition to letting the officers wear their uniforms on the off-duty assignment said they appreciated Gates' new stand.

On the day he became a Los Angeles police commissioner, Stanley K. Sheinbaum--economist, philanthropist and vanguard of the American liberal intelligentsia--zipped off to London to mingle with world leaders at an international economics conference chaired by former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The following morning, Sheinbaum heard a knock on his hotel room door. It was James Callaghan, the former prime minister of Britain and now a member of the House of Lords.

In another legal blow to the Los Angeles Police Commission, a divided appeals court has ruled that the City Council acted properly when it overturned a controversial commission decision to put Police Chief Daryl F. Gates on involuntary leave in the wake of the police beating of Rodney G. King. By a 2-1 majority, the 2nd District Court of Appeal upheld an earlier decision by Superior Court Judge Ronald M.

The city's largest black police officers' association has concluded that the LAPD discriminates against black officers and the African-American community in the way it recruits, trains, promotes and manages blacks on the force. The Oscar Joel Bryant Assn., in a major "position paper" to be presented today to the Los Angeles Police Commission, was prompted to act after the incident last March in which four white officers were accused of assaulting Rodney G. King, a black motorist.

Whenever Samuel Benitez, who now lives in Portland, Ore., even thinks about his old job as a Los Angeles policeman, he says he starts coughing. And the closer he gets to Los Angeles, the worse the hacking gets. Benitez, 35, claims that the cough is caused by stress from working for the Los Angeles Police Department. Complaining that the cough disabled him, he recently won a lifetime tax-free disability pension of $1,480 a month, plus $51,390 in back benefits.

An attorney who won a $44,000 jury award for his clients in a civil rights case against Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and several of his officers has submitted a bill that could cost the city nearly $1 million in legal fees. Submitted by Stephen Yagman on behalf of himself and three other attorneys, the bill brought immediate criticism from the city attorney's office Wednesday. Deputy City Atty. Don Vincent said the bill would total $987,684 if approved as submitted by Yagman to U.S.