May Day mayday

The life of the Los Angeles Police Department is seasonal: There is the period of stability that gives way to rising tension that erupts in calamity that is followed by self-evaluation that produces reform; reform fixes some problems and helps restore stability until new tensions produce new catastrophes. And so on. That has been the case at least since the late 1980s, when rising racial tensions crested in the beating of Rodney King, which gave us the Christopher Commission report and its landmark recommendations -- some of the most significant and lasting in the department’s history. Then the riots of 1992 upended the LAPD again; the Webster report analyzed that event and produced another round of reform. The Rampart scandal of the mid-1990s started the cycle all over again.

So it can only be with a sense of weariness that any L.A. veteran pages through the LAPD’s latest self-examination, this one of police actions during this year’s May Day demonstration in MacArthur Park. Here again comes the LAPD to announce that it has looked hard at itself, identified its shortcomings and is, at last, prepared to improve.

In fairness, this latest effort is better than most, and ranks with some of the tough outside reviews over the years. It cites serious failings by command officers and breakdowns in leadership and communication, and it spares no feelings in skewering some of the top officials whose missteps helped create the chaos in MacArthur Park. The department should be commended for taking seriously its charge to examine itself.

Still, there are dispiriting revelations in the report that lead one to wonder how much the LAPD today is genuinely changed. Of the scores of officers on the scene that evening, not one appears to have attempted to intervene to stop the improper use of batons against protesters. Training in the department seems to have lapsed perilously -- the Metropolitan Division’s basic training course was cut in 2005 and was inadequate even earlier than that, the result being that many officers did not understand proper crowd-control techniques. These findings suggest cultural and institutional defects that Chief William J. Bratton has had five years to address but that continue to bedevil Los Angeles’ most important agency.

Bratton recently received a second term as chief of the LAPD, and he deserved it. This report speaks to his willingness to air the department’s troubles and caps his generally impressive response to the May Day incident. And yet the same document makes clear that Bratton has much left to do. The challenge for him in his second term is to break the LAPD’s cycle of disaster that has cost this city so much in money and pain.