A Week of Painful Losses Tests Police Chief’s Mettle

Shortly before dawn on Super Bowl Sunday, Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton’s phone rang at his Los Feliz home.

He was told that one of his officers had shot and killed the driver of a stolen Toyota Camry after a brief car chase through South Los Angeles. The victim proved to be heartbreakingly young: 13-year-old Devin Brown.

Bratton showered and drove to the scene. He was already thinking: “This thing will get legs,” he recalled during an interview with The Times.

So began a week that seemed to pile one test upon another for Bratton, a political crescendo that threatened his most cherished goals: reducing crime, reforming the Los Angeles Police Department and improving race relations.

Hours after the African American eighth-grader was killed, racial tensions were laid bare. Neighbors and some community leaders said the shooting was clear evidence that the LAPD did not value the lives of young black men.

“These are very tense times,” Bratton said. “Anyone who dismisses it lightly is crazy. The community ... is extraordinarily angry.”

The night before the boy was killed, Bratton went to bed thinking that his biggest challenge in the coming week would be persuading the City Council to put a city sales tax increase on the May ballot to pay for more police.

Since coming to Los Angeles a little more than two years ago, Bratton had believed that he could mend historically poor relations with the black community by reducing violent crime in the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.

Expanding the LAPD was vital to attaining that goal, he had argued. But so far, he had failed to persuade political leaders or voters to provide money, most recently in November, when voters defeated a similar countywide sales tax increase.

The vote made it clear that old wounds still festered. Black voters in South L.A. were especially opposed. The response this week to Devin’s shooting, Bratton said, shows “we are locked in a time warp.”

At the scene of the boy’s death early Sunday, Bratton began learning details.

LAPD Officer Steve Garcia and his partner had begun following a stolen car a few minutes before the shooting near the intersection of West 83rd Street and South Western Avenue.

Garcia, a nine-year veteran in the LAPD’s Newton Division, saw the car run a red light near Grand and Gage avenues, and followed with lights and sirens for about four minutes, police said. Devin, who attended Audubon Middle School, was driving a car that had been reported stolen a couple of hours earlier, police said.

The Camry jumped a curb, stopped, then went into reverse, sideswiping the patrol car, officials said. Garcia, who by then was out of the car, fired 10 shots, killing Devin. Police took a 14-year-old companion into custody.

Bratton said he spent most of Sunday being briefed by investigators and on the phone with community leaders.

His initial prediction was correct: Community outrage over the shooting was swift and widespread.

The boy’s killing was the latest in a series of events this year that pulled the spotlight away from Bratton’s calls for more police, and back to the bitter, lingering issues of police conduct in minority neighborhoods.

In January, a jury had awarded $2.4 million to two Inglewood police officers who were shown in a videotape striking a handcuffed black teenager. And earlier this month, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley had said that he would not prosecute the LAPD officers involved in the televised beating of African American car-theft suspect Stanley Miller.

To community activists like the Brotherhood Crusade’s Danny Bakewell, it was a pileup. “We can’t get finished dealing with one,” he said, “before we’re on to the next of them.”

Bakewell and others saw the events of 2005 as part of a long, infuriating history of similar insults -- from the police shooting of Eulia Love in 1979 to the videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King in 1991.

By Monday, Bratton’s plans for the week had clearly been smashed. He was scheduled to make a report to the Los Angeles Police Commission on Cooley’s decision not to file charges against officers in the Miller case and also was to appear before the City Council on the sales tax proposal.

Now, preparations for both of the pivotal appearances were complicated by the need to react quickly to the shooting. “I was juggling three balls at one time,” he said.

In crafting his response to the shooting, Bratton cited two goals: One was to calm public rage. People “have a right to be upset,” he said. But he also wanted to remind them that “nothing is gained by emotion leading to violent action. We have been down that road too many times in this city, and in America. It gets to nothing.” His second goal was to cast the issue as a key test of LAPD reforms enacted under a federal consent decree. Let the process work, he said, again and again.

In a meeting early Tuesday at the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper, Bratton used his Blackberry communication device and an eyeglass case to show black leaders how the stolen Camry had backed up into the patrol car. He tried to assure people that new shooting policies for the department were only weeks away. But activists and politicians said he was moving too slowly.

Tony Muhammad, western regional representative for the Nation of Islam, recalled leaving the Sentinel office feeling frustrated.

“We thought ... here we go again,” he said. “They were telling us it would take a long time, be a long process. It seemed like they were more concerned about policeman’s rights than the victim’s rights. And that was like a slap in the face.”

On Tuesday, Los Angeles Police Commissioner Rick Caruso urged Bratton to move faster on the new shooting policies, comments echoed by Mayor James K. Hahn later in the day. Public protests heated up.

By late Tuesday, Bratton had shifted course. He told high-level staffers to finish the new policy that night. LAPD officials also planned a rare news conference for Wednesday: a reenactment of parts of the shooting to show the department’s eagerness to be forthcoming.

Then Bratton donned his LAPD uniform and headed back to South L.A. late Tuesday. While mourners held a candlelight vigil and protest in Devin’s name, Bratton joined patrol officers in the 77th Street and Southeast divisions.

A call about a shooting that night at 108th and Figueroa streets, Bratton said, underscored his frustration.

Attention was on Devin’s killing, but the violence in South L.A., week in and week out -- 1,200 injury shootings last year alone -- draws little public outrage.

To Bratton, it seemed the main elements of the LAPD’s political troubles were playing out within a few blocks -- one in the light of the media, one in obscurity. “Even as they were grieving for this boy in the church, two miles away, these gangbangers were blasting away at each other with shotguns,” Bratton said.

Then, on Wednesday, despite Bratton’s plea, the City Council declined to put the sales tax measure on the ballot. The 9-6 tally, which fell short of passage by a single vote, was a crucial defeat for Bratton.

A coda to the drama came the next day, when a report from a 2004 incident landed on his desk. It was the investigation of the shooting death of Officer Ricardo Lizzaraga. It was a poignant reminder of still another challenge facing Bratton: making his officers feel safe.

Lizzaraga had been shot on a call involving a domestic dispute not far from where Devin had been shot. Lizzaraga’s killing shone light on why so many officers oppose further restrictions on the use of force.

Over the week, LAPD officers were buzzing about proposed changes to the shooting policy that Bratton had trumpeted in response to Devin’s killing. Some wondered if they would become more vulnerable. In 2003, six police officers were killed nationwide when suspects used moving cars to attack them, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The danger to officers, highlighted by the report on Lizzaraga, put a last bitter bookend on Bratton’s week. Having too few police, Bratton had told the City Council, makes officers in high-crime areas worry about their own safety, often at the expense of community relations.

“We had an opportunity to finally move on, but instead the City Council condemned us to stay in the time warp,” he said.

Bratton’s handling of Devin’s killing has so far gotten mixed reviews. Muhammad, for example, called the chief’s response “very cold.... I wanted to hear some compassion.”

John Mack of the Los Angeles Urban League gave better marks. “I believe Chief Bratton is deeply concerned,” he said.

LAPD Deputy Chief Earl Paysinger, commander of the department’s South Bureau and its highest-ranking African American, said it remains for the LAPD and city leaders to show residents that they can “be understanding, be empathetic and understand the history” as the investigation unfolds.

“It is important not to get stuck on this investigation.... It’s not this single episode,” he said. “It is a compilation of issues that the community believes they have suffered from for decades.”

Bratton insisted that he was still optimistic, though he was frustrated by his inability to hire more officers.

“If we can get through this without the city exploding and with new trust in the leadership of the LAPD and the African American community ... wouldn’t that be a great memorial to that boy’s life,” he said.

Throughout the interview, Bratton’s manner had been uncharacteristically grim and faintly heated when he spoke of the City Council.

Such expressiveness is a departure. Bratton nearly always speaks with the same flat, self-assured tone, and even people who work closely with him are surprised at how he never seems to let his public face slip.

At one point during the interview, he stopped and checked himself, before resuming in his usual, workaday tone.

The week had been frustrating, he said, shrugging his shoulders. “But hope springs eternal.”

Asked if he intended to stay in the job, Bratton gave a short laugh. “I think so,” he said.