Stern Facade Opens to Reveal Parks as Politician

The plush banquet tables were surrounded by grocers who spoke little English. Trays of Korean dishes sat ready along the wall.

And there on the stage, wearing an immaculately pressed suit, standing precisely straight, but looking momentarily confused at an introduction in a language he does not understand, was Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard C. Parks.

Running for mayor of Los Angeles -- a quest the former police chief is officially exploring -- is an adventure through a host of cultures and constituencies, not to mention cuisines. Despite an aversion to spicy food, it is a task that Parks has dived into with characteristic energy and 17-hour days.

Gone is the stern face and the dark blue uniform of his days at the Los Angeles Police Department. It has been replaced by a series of sleek, tailored suits and a bright, open smile. His sentences still quake under the weight of dependent clauses and jargon, but now they are peppered with wry jokes and gentle teasing aimed at his wife, Bobbie, who accompanies him “everywhere ... after 5 o’clock.”

A run by Parks against Mayor James K. Hahn, the man who denied him a second term as head of the LAPD, has been rumored almost from the moment the former chief entered politics two years ago, winning a City Council seat from South Los Angeles in a landslide last spring.

Some -- including political advisors to Hahn -- have suggested that Parks’ whole campaign could be viewed as nothing more than an exercise in sour grapes to punish the mayor for replacing him with Police Chief William J. Bratton.

The 60-year-old Parks denies that charge, saying his life is too rich for revenge.

The reason he is exploring a run for mayor, he told one audience last month, is because “I’m silly enough to think that I could make a change.”

Political analysts say Parks boasts some enviable advantages, chief among them that he is well known across the city.

“He’s almost royalty,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “Royalty, in politics, has always been the police chief.”

By contrast, the other two major candidates who have entered the race so far, former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg and state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley), are well known among political professionals, but are relatively obscure to most Los Angeles voters.

To be successful, however, Parks, who was the LAPD’s second black chief, must reach beyond his law enforcement credentials and his base of voters in South Los Angeles, political analysts say.

“He’s pretty much an unknown on a lot of issues,” said political consultant Harvey Englander. “He’s yet to really talk about what he’ll do as mayor.”

For now, Parks says he is more interested in hearing what voters have to say. As he decides whether to enter the race, he and his wife have put together a whirlwind tour of kaffeeklatsches, fruit plates and shrimp cocktails at community centers and private homes across the city to hear voters’ thoughts about the direction of Los Angeles.

He does not want to launch a campaign “in a vacuum, and just decide, ‘We know best,’ ” Parks told a group of supporters wilting in the unseasonable heat of a downtown office building one recent evening after the air conditioning had been turned off for the night.

Instead, he said, “we decided to come up with a concept of going out into the public ... finding out what’s on their mind.”

He’s dubbed the events “chats with Bernard,” and has done his best to lend them a relaxed, spontaneous feeling.

As police chief, Parks almost never went anywhere without a security detail. Now he shows up alone or with his wife, who smiles knowingly as he jokes about stealing money from her clothing allowance to pay for his campaign. (Recently, Parks reported that he had lent his campaign $50,000.) Sometimes, Bobbie Parks’ sisters come too, serving cold drinks to guests and listening placidly to speeches they’ve now heard half a dozen times.

Parks works the crowd, samples the snacks -- although not the kimchi, which he said is “just a little too spicy for me” -- and jokes about the Lakers.

But these are not casual gabfests.

They are designed to introduce Parks to the concerns of voters outside the South Los Angeles council district he represents, voters who may think of him only as the grave incarnation of a sometimes troubled Los Angeles Police Department. Parks served the LAPD for more than three decades and headed it for five years until Hahn denied him a second term as chief in 2002.

Squiring himself around the city, Parks has quickly proved that he knows how to script himself to a target audience and stay on message.

He presents himself as a candidate who personifies leadership and diversity, who can assemble the sort of coalition that made Tom Bradley the city’s first black mayor after stops at the LAPD and on the City Council. Parks, who frequently mentions Bradley, is determined to emulate the model.

But the city’s demographics have changed since Bradley was first elected in 1973; blacks are a proportionately smaller part of the electorate while the Latino population has increased and now makes up more than 20% of Los Angeles voters.

Parks, who vacations in Mexico, has joked that he considered running for mayor of Cabo San Lucas. But as of yet, his tour has not taken him to any of the communities in East Los Angeles or the eastern San Fernando Valley, which are heavily populated by Latinos. A planned “chat” in the Echo Park neighborhood near downtown had to be rescheduled.

The councilman says he plans events in Latino communities in coming weeks, and in the meantime, the question of his appeal to Latino voters continues to come up.

“I’m wondering whether or not Latinos as a community will be supportive of [an] African American,” Albert Robles told Parks at last week’s downtown event. On the floor near Robles’ feet, as if to underscore the point, was a framed photograph of a beaming Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who captured more than 80% of the Latino vote when he ran against Hahn in 2001 and who is mulling a second challenge.

Parks answered with a swipe at Hahn: “You’ve got to look at what has been offered to this community by the current administration,” he said.

Unlike Hahn, who talks about public safety almost everywhere he goes, the former police chief does not typically trumpet law-and-order concerns

Political strategists say he does not need to: Voters will subconsciously associate him with the Police Department and trust that he has the know-how to keep them safe.

Still, Parks’ stewardship of the LAPD during the Rampart corruption scandal is expected to be an issue in the mayor’s race.

“Obviously, he wasn’t successful in managing the department,” said Bob Baker, president of the city’s police union, which feuded with Parks when he was chief. “It would leave one to believe that he would not be successful in managing the city, which is even more complicated.”

When asked, Parks offers a vigorous defense of his tenure. But for the most part, his comments seemed designed to showcase his mastery of other concerns facing the city.

With Korean American grocers last month, he emphasized the importance of bringing more diversity to City Hall and made sure everyone knew he had promoted a Korean American police officer at the LAPD.

Earlier that same day in Van Nuys, he sat at the head of a sleek conference room with Valley business leaders, hitting economic development themes and promising that he alone among the candidates has the guts to take on the city unions.

Later, perched precariously close to the edge of a swimming pool in the backyard of a supporter in his home district, he talked of the allocation of resources to South Los Angeles communities and stressed his commitment to education.

But no matter where he goes, there are a few points Parks never fails to deliver. Chief among them is that Hahn is “not a leader,” has offered no vision for the city and has reacted with passivity as federal and county investigators probe city contracting.

Los Angeles has “a chance as a city to be the best experiment on the planet,” he told a mostly African American audience last month. “We can show people that ... we can learn to live together as inclusive groups. There are no more majority populations in our city.”

Talking to the Korean grocers, he said Los Angeles is the “most diverse city in the world” with more than 100 languages spoken.

The grocers -- deputizing a spokesman who was fluent in English -- responded with a barrage of questions:

What advice would he give neighborhood councils? How would he improve police protection to area liquor and grocery markets plagued by robberies? What would he do to improve the Korean community’s access to government leaders?

Overwhelmed, Parks begged his questioner to give him just a few queries at a time. But then he dived in, offering detailed answers.

Running an exploratory campaign for mayor, he’s said several times, is fun. It was a message he repeated at the Garden Suite Hotel in Koreatown.

Standing on the stage, as an emcee delivered a long introduction in Korean, Parks quickly recovered from his momentary confusion.

“I didn’t know what he was saying,” Parks said. “But I am going to take it as very positive.”

Times staff writer Patrick McGreevy contributed to this report.