Latino Civil Rights Activist to Get Medal of Freedom : Reseda: After his visit to Pasadena, Vice President Gore comes to West Valley police station.

Vice President Al Gore announced Friday in Pasadena that President Clinton is bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously on Willie Velasquez, a atino rights activist who founded the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project 20 years ago.

Gore, aiming to attract swing voters before the 1996 presidential election, told a Latino voter registration group the Clinton Administration would combat measures similar to Proposition 187--the measure that would prevent illegal immigrants from attending school or using most social services--in other states.

“We must create a future in which our children can look back on the demagoguery of this day and time, and lightly pass it off with an amused shake of the head. We will create that future by the sweat of our brow, by registering voters,” Gore told the audience at a banquet hosted by the Southwestern Voter Registration Education Project, which has launched a campaign to add 100,000 Latinos to the voter rolls before November 1996.

“We stand for the proposition that men and women of different ethnic, national origin, and language groups can live together in harmony. . . . We are a nation that looks like the world,” Gore said.

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Gore visited the San Fernando Valley late Friday night, showing up more than an hour late at the West Valley police station, where Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Willie L. Williams waited with a group of 20 community volunteers who aid police.

Riordan introduced Gore, who visited the station because it is the first in the Los Angeles Police Department to complete installation of a new computer system purchased with an $18.3 million federal grant. The system is intended among other things to ease officers’ paperwork burden.

“This is something extremely important to President Clinton and me, getting more officers out on the street instead of behind desks doing paperwork,” Gore said. “We’re looking at innovative new ways to prevent crime before it happens . . . This is the equivalent of puttng hundreds of police officers on the beat.

“If it works as well as it seems to be working, then it is something we want to use elsewhere around the country.”

One man in the group of civilian volunteers asked Gore about gun control laws, saying they should be stricter. Gore agreed, calling gun control an area that needs more attention.

Another volunteer, Anita Bloom of Encino, said she was thrilled when she was notified Thursday that she would be in the group welcoming the vice president.

“I’m on cloud nine,” she said. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. It’s such an honor for him to come to the West Valley.”

Gore’s talk to the Latino voter registration group reflected the consensus by White House strategists that Clinton must carry California in 1996 if he is to have a chance at reelection. But the President is coming under fire from California lawmakers who blasted him for ignoring the state’s economic decline, and now risks a backlash from military employees at bases targeted for closure.

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Only 11% of California’s Latinos vote, according to the Tomas Rivera Center, a Claremont-based think tank. Nonetheless, the Latino electorate has played a pivotal role in recent political contests, including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s close win over Mike Huffington, in which Latinos voted 67% to 22% for Feinstein.

Gore voiced support for voter rights measures such as the so-called motor voter law, and criticized Gov. Pete Wilson for opposing the law. “There are some states that don’t want to go along,” said Gore. “They don’t want to make it easy for people to register. That’s why we’ve sued Illinois, we’ve sued Pennsylvania, we’ve sued South Carolina and we’ve sued Pete Wilson.”

Gore also criticized the Republican-led Congress for bowing to right-wing “extremists,” including the Christian Coalition. “This new majority is taking its marching orders from the very powerful members of the coalition that got them there,” he said.

Times staff writer Lucille Renwick contributed to this story.