‘British Colonels or Something’ : LAPD Event Leaves Bad Taste in Union’s Mouth

The officers arrived at mess in their formal dress uniforms or wearing tuxedos. Pinned to some of their chests were decorations for heroism and service. A bagpiper played “The Roast Beef of Old England.” Dinner was roast prime rib.

After the meal there were cigars and toasts. Standing as one, the officers hoisted glasses of port wine to pay tribute to their nation, their leaders, their fallen comrades.

It might have been a regimental dinner at Sandhurst or West Point.

But this affair was held at the Los Angeles Police Academy, and the men in the stiff white shirts and black ties represented most of the Police Department’s top brass.

The Sept. 9 event was their first “Command Officers Mess Night,” for which Chief Daryl F. Gates, several deputy chiefs, commanders and about 60 other high-ranking police officers plunked down $45 each to build camaraderie while creating a bit of departmental history.

“It was just a good evening of guys from the Office of Operations getting together for an excellent meal with all the trimmings,” said Assistant Chief Robert L. Vernon, who organized the mess and acted as its president.

Indeed, several participants agreed that the event helped enhance morale among Office of Operations command personnel--those who run the department’s 18 station houses and detective bureaus.

However, the off-duty extravaganza has been criticized as pompous by the Police Department’s union.

“These guys think they’re all British colonels or something,” said George V. Aliano, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League. “They’re starting to think that they’re somebody rather than regular sworn public servants like the rest of us. They see us on a completely different level, so they won’t even listen to us.”

Aliano said the mess typifies why the union and the Police Department’s management have been unable to negotiate a new contract for the city’s 6,900 officers.

The old contract expired in July, 1985, and negotiations have since sputtered. Still at issue is Gates’ unwavering position that officers give up their current right to seek outside arbitration on disciplinary transfers, promotions and probationary terminations.

“They want to tell us what to do all the time,” Aliano said. “It’s a paternalism that permeates everything. We’re talking dukes and earls here.”

In its October newsletter, the league published an outline of protocol for the mess that had been distributed to Office of Operations command officers. The league printed the one-page outline under the headline “The Pompous Aristocrats or Why the Distance Grows.”

Parody Circulating

Currently circulating throughout the department, meanwhile, is an anonymously written “Mess Night Protocol for Enlisted Swine,” a biting parody of the mess night protocol.

The parody calls for toasts of tequila instead of port wine and replaces the “Roast Beef of Old England” with the “The Burrito of Old Mexico.”

“All toasts must be made by boot lickers trying to gain favor of the president (of the mess) and must make the president look like a great leader,” the parody states.

Mess organizer Vernon bristled at the suggestion that his commanding officers were trying to emulate aristocracy.

Vernon said that contract differences aside, Los Angeles’ street cops and their ranking supervisors are “more together than we have been for a long time. We’re all police officers, and I resent being called anything but that.”

“Our whole idea was to build camaraderie, not to degenerate it,” Vernon said of the mess. “What’s wrong with the executive members of the department getting together socially for a good dinner on their own time?”

Paramilitary Flavor

Vernon said he was not trying to emulate British military tradition when the Los Angeles police mess night was conceived. Rather, he said, he borrowed from U.S. Marine Corps style to adopt “our own Los Angeles police tradition. It was a little more relaxed, in the tradition of the paramilitary.”

Nonetheless, officers were required to attend the mess in formal dress, he said, because department policy forbids personnel from drinking alcoholic beverages in their field uniforms.

The dinner itself was rich in protocol, according to some who attended. Smoking was allowed only after “Mr. Vice” (vice president of the mess), Capt. Robert W. Riley, announced that the “smoking lamp is lit.” Bottles of wine were not to touch the table as they passed--always to the right--from officer to officer; applause was restricted to tapping on the table, and officers were gently admonished that “toasts are never bottoms up.”

Did it all make for a fun evening?

“I’d say it was a nice evening,” said Cmdr. Billy R. Wedgeworth, who oversees police operations in West Los Angeles. “It was very nice.”

Vernon called the mess an overwhelming success. It will likely be repeated next year, he said.