EDITORIAL QUESTIONS UNANSWERED.

The Halloween party death of an innocent raises serious issues about the LAPD's cultureTHElast thing the beleaguered LAPD needed was another controversy over its use of force against minorities.

But that's exactly what the Los Angeles Police Department got when an officer with just three years' experience went to investigate a noisy party early Saturday at a home in affluent Benedict Canyon on the West Side.

What he and his partner, an officer with just two years' experience, found was a Halloween party with more than 100 guests in full swing. Hardly sinister.

Yet within minutes, one of the guests, an aspiring actor named Anthony Dwain Lee, was dead, shot as many as five times by Officer Tarriel Hopper.

It was a horrible mistake, and made no more understandable because victim and shooter were both black. A cop shot and killed an innocent man, and LAPD officials immediately declare ``it did not appear'' the officer ``did anything wrong,'' without providing answers to a hundred questions.

Hopper was walking around the house - possibly without legal justification - looking for the person in charge because someone at the front door told him they might be in the back yard. As he made his way along a walkway, he glanced through a glass door and saw three people, including Lee, who was dressed like a street gang member. According to police accounts, Lee drew a very realistic-looking replica gun and pointed it at Hopper, who fired repeatedly through the window.

If Lee wore a cowboy costume instead of a gangster one, would the same thing have happened? If he was white instead of black, would the same thing have happened?

We'll never know.

But when an incident like this occurs, especially involving a police force drowning in scandal, the public deserves an immediate explanation, a full account of what went wrong - and quickly. All weekend, the entire country saw and heard about the shooting on TV and radio, but LAPD had little to say and the top brass apparently didn't understand the scope of the problem, or their need to get involved and to speak up.

Did the officers have any reason at all to believe they were dealing with serious crimes rather than a noisy Halloween party? How could the officer leap to the conclusion that the man he saw through the window was trying to kill him?

In the context of a Halloween party with many people in costume in a safe neighborhood where the only problem was a noisy party, would any reasonable person leap to the same conclusion - or would he or she assume it was a Halloween party prank?

This is a serious question because the underlying accusation against the LAPD is that its culture is so imbued with an attitude of aggression toward the public, particularly the poor and minorities, that incidents like the killing of Anthony Dwain Lee happen too often regardless of the officer's race.

Is there any other explanation for why Officer Hopper shot first and asked questions later?

Was he riding around on patrol in a state of mind where anybody who looks like a gangster or flashed something that looks like a weapon is fair game?

There could well be an explanation for this tragedy, like the circumstances at the party were more dangerous than initial reports suggest, or there's more to Lee and Hopper's exchange than we've heard.

The public has a right to know whether Anthony Dwain Lee died because of an unfortunate accident, or whether he was killed by a trigger-happy cop exercising lethally poor judgment.

These are questions the LAPD must answer. And the answers need to come from the top.

The latest tragedy and the department's inability to confront it candidly will only worsen the LAPD's public-relations woes.

Police officers have a brutally difficult job. They are required to make life-and-death decisions instantaneously. The public understands this reality and is willing to forgive honest mistakes that come in moments of crisis.

But it won't tolerate recklessness - or questions left unanswered.