BY MARIKA LYNCH AND CURTIS MORGAN

 Allegations of police abuse spilled over from the radio airwaves into a tense Miami City Commission meeting on Thursday but perceptions about what happened in Little Havana's streets clearly depended on which side of the gas mask participants were on.

 Ana Piniella-Gott, echoing dozens of demonstrators -- including at least eight who have filed formal complaints of excessive force following Saturday's federal raid to grab Elian Gonzalez -- described hostile officers strong-arming and cursing peaceful protesters.

 ``We came to this country looking for freedom and escape from police brutality and that's actually what we got,'' Piniella-Gott said. ``What we got here on Saturday, you don't even see in Cuba.''

 Despite mounting heat from political and exile leaders, police remained steadfast that their swift, tough tactics had cooled off a town that could have turned into a tinderbox.

 Lt. Armando Guzman, a Miami SWAT team commander with 20 years on the city streets, encountered throngs spewing curses, hurling bottles, burning trash -- a belligerent mob on the verge of blowing up.

 ``I was shocked,'' said Guzman. ``I personally observed two ladies in their 50s in the middle of the street lighting fires.''

 STEPPED OVER LINE

 But police also acknowledged officers, in scattered cases, may have stepped over the line. Chief William O'Brien, a former commander of the Internal Affairs Division, pledged his department would investigate every complaint.

 ``Is there a chance, a possibility or even a probability that one or more of our officers might have overreacted in a situation? Of course there is. This was an incredibly stressful situation,'' O'Brien said.

 The outcry was loud enough to bring Gov. Jeb Bush to Miami. He met with O'Brien and Miami-Dade Police Director Carlos Alvarez early Thursday, then held a news conference to pronounce officers' actions appropriate, ``with the exception of isolated cases.'' Bush later told a group of business leaders that police had trouble separating the peaceful from troublemakers.

 Nearly a week after disturbances, allegations against Miami Police continued to rise. Attorney Ellis Rubin said he's representing a dozen people claiming to have been roughed up or threatened.

 They included Christopher Quintana, 11 years old and 90 pounds, arrested for inciting a riot after reportedly leading 200 people to block traffic.

 Quintana, his father, Guillermo Quintana, and brother Alexander, 16, said they had stopped to help a man whose car had broken down. Tear gas flooded the street and, Guillermo Quintana said, an officer grabbed Christopher from the back of the family's Chevrolet Malibu, tugged him by the ear and said, ``Wait until you get to jail,'' followed by some obscenities.

 EIGHT COMPLAINTS

 The American Civil Liberties Union in Miami also reported at least 100 calls. Chapter President John de Leon said the organization was considering taking cases if people could document them.

 ``The fact people feel strongly enough about what has happened to call the ACLU suggests an area which should give everyone concerns,'' de Leon said.

 Lt. Bill Schwartz said police could not discuss the eight complaints filed with the Internal Affairs Division because they are open investigations. Internal Affairs alone had fielded 83 calls, he said, 71 of them negative toward police.

 Alejandro Lugo, 34, an aviation teacher at Homestead Middle School, said he filed one of the complaints. He said he asked to cross a line of police to get to his car when officers raised their batons and ran toward the crowd.

 One officer tackled him, he said, and threw the five-foot seven-inch, 165-pound Lugo to the ground. Two other officers also hit him, and his nose was broken, he said.

 Other complaints:

 Maria Martel, a cousin of Elian Gonzalez, defiantly held up a picture of her husband, Luis Alberto Perez, at the commission meeting. It showed him with bloodshot eyes, swollen cheeks and stitches under his left eye.

 Perez said officers beat him after he asked to cross the road, with his wife and children, to go to his mother's home. His brother, Daniel Perez, jumped in and, police say, attacked three officers with a bat. He is still in jail on attempted murder charges.

 Piniella-Gott, a Delta Airlines saleswoman, and her brother Rafael Piniella, a general contractor, said they were struck, thrown to the road and arrested after complaining about the treatment of another protester. Their 67-year-old mother, Emma, a retired architect, also emerged with bruises.

 ``The images keep going over and over in my head,'' Emma Piniella said. ``It was brutal, simply brutal.''

 Janet Ray Weininger said she was roughed up at Versailles, the Cuban restaurant on Southwest Eighth Street. Weininger's father, Thomas Willard Ray, an American pilot, was killed in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. On Saturday, two officers in riot gear with batons waded into a crowd, she said.

 ``One of them came up straight at me and slammed me in the face with the shield saying `I'm going to kill you.' I told him, `Stop!' and he hit me again with his shield. I was dizzy. He again said, `I'm going to kill you.' ''

 Fausto Gomez, a lobbyist whose father also was a Bay of Pigs veteran, later confronted the officer: ``I said, `What you are doing is basically taking frustrations out on a poor, innocent woman.' `Well, I did what I thought I needed to do,' is what he told me.''

 The Tuesday arrest of immigration attorney Grisel Ibarra, who had been collecting bond money for protesters, also added fuel to the criticisms.

 VOLATILE ATMOSPHERE

 Police insist the streets were far more volatile than community leaders will admit.

 When Guzman, a SWAT commander assigned to the hottest spots, arrived at the corner of Flagler Street and Northwest 27th Avenue, he found about 800 people setting fires in the streets. Officers were showered with rocks, debris and epithets. At that instant, Guzman said, he knew police would have to act fast and with force before things spiraled into destruction and violence.

 ``Every major disturbance that I've seen has started like that,'' he said.

 Police argue that officers on the street are better judges of crowd psychology and control than bystanders or politicians watching it on TV. Protests quickly turned to vandalism. By nightfall, gatherings became excuses by some to cause havoc, said Lt. Rene Landa, another SWAT commander.

 ``I'm talking about criminals, I'm talking about professional agitators, I'm talking about a possibility of communists in our community, I'm talking about gang members,' he said. ``That's who was out there.''

 Guzman said many untrained observers mistook no-nonsense tactics as abuse.

 ``When you're talking about a civil unrest situation, we try to control the situation by the superiority of numbers,'' he said. ``Unfortunately, not everybody that is arrested is going to just say, `OK, I'm going to jail.' People don't understand that.''

 The move that so many protesters complained about -- being thrown to the ground -- is basic police training to control someone resisting arrest.

 But officers were stung themselves: While lots of protesters were peaceful and polite, many called them pigs, communists and worse -- which also demoralized officers, Landa said.

 ``This is our community and now all of sudden, we've become the guys that are hated, the bad guys,'' Landa said. ``I think it's being played wrong in that sense.''

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald