Mayor’s Office Seen Directing Ouster Effort

While Mayor Tom Bradley has refrained from calling for the ouster of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, his chief of staff has been busy orchestrating moves to “turn up the heat” on Gates and force him to resign over last week’s police beating, it was learned Thursday.

The behind-the-scenes campaign, directed by Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani, is designed to exert so much political and public pressure on Gates that he eventually will give up his $168,000-a-year post for the good of the Police Department and the community, said City Hall sources familiar with the effort.

Within days, Bradley is expected to fill one of two vacancies on the city’s Police Commission with an appointment intended to jolt the Parker Center police headquarters, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The mayor also revealed Thursday that he is considering whether to create an independent citizens panel to investigate the Police Department.

Bradley refused to be interviewed for this story and Fabiani declined to discuss his strategies to persuade Gates to leave after 13 years in office. But in an interview Fabiani left little doubt about his sentiments.

“We have received literally thousands of letters and phone calls, and a vast majority have sought the chief’s resignation,” he said. “This is clearly a broad-based outcry on the part of all segments of the community and it’s growing. We see no signs here at City Hall that people’s anger is diminishing.”

The mayor and his staff realize that it could take weeks, perhaps months, before Gates could be coaxed into stepping down, the sources said.

In an interview Thursday, Gates said he has no intention of walking away from the department during a crisis.

“The rocks are all being aimed right at me as if I created all this, the entire problem, and that my ouster will solve the problem,” Gates said. “I don’t feel that way. So therefore I don’t have any plans to leave the department--much to the unhappiness of a lot of people, I’m sure.”

Asked if he was aware that the mayor’s office was plotting to hasten his departure, Gates said: “I haven’t any idea. I suspect they’re over there thinking very hard.”

Gates said he recognized that the mayor considers him a “political liability. . . . I think any political leader who thinks the chief of police is a liability wants to get rid of him.”

Regarding Bradley, the chief added, “Nobody’s asking him to retire, and he’s been there longer than I have.”

Bradley has carefully sidestepped questions about whether Gates should quit over the March 3 incident in which three officers were videotaped striking Rodney G. King, 25, of Altadena, more than 50 times with nightsticks while 12 other officers watched.

“That’s a decision that the chief has to make and I’m not going to intervene in that,” Bradley said at a recent news conference. “If I were to do it (call for Gates’ resignation), you would simply have another distracting . . . controversy between the mayor and the chief, and I’m not going to contribute to that.”

Bradley and Gates have feuded for years. Last fall, their animosities boiled over when Gates said Bradley had written a “dumb letter” calling for an investigation of alleged police improprieties surrounding a violent drug raid on apartments near 39th Street and Dalton Avenue.

For years, the mayor has been frustrated by his inability to dismiss city department heads under Civil Service protection rules. Bradley proposed a City Charter amendment on Tuesday that would subject the police chief and all other department managers to a performance review and possible dismissal every five years.

After tolerating one embarrassing episode after another from Gates, the mayor’s office seized the King incident to go after the chief because it outraged virtually everyone in Los Angeles rather than a single ethnic or community group as in the past, the sources said. The mayor’s advisers felt that with the national spotlight focused on Gates and the department, the King beating presented the best opportunity yet to push the 64-year-old Gates into retirement.

The mayor’s current strategy of using Fabiani to bring intense pressure on Gates while he remains publicly silent on the chief’s status is a familiar one. The same approach was employed by Bradley recently in soliciting the resignations of three city department heads--John Tuite of the Community Redevelopment Agency, Warren Thomas of the zoo and Ken Topping of the Planning Department.

But driving Gates out of office could be more difficult.

“Daryl Gates is not Ken Topping and the LAPD is not the Planning Department,” said one city councilman, who said he was aware of the mayor’s plan to oust Gates but asked to remain anonymous. “I don’t think they will succeed.”

The chief enjoys strong support from the City Council, which could not muster enough votes Wednesday to summon Gates to City Hall to explain how his department is responding to the King beating.

Council President John Ferraro said several members have “hinted around” that Gates should resign, but “I don’t think any of them are brave enough to come out and say it.”

Sources say that the strategy to remove Gates, largely devised by Fabiani and approved by the mayor, includes the following:

* Bradley plans to fill the two vacancies on the Police Commission with prominent candidates who will send a strong message to Gates that he will be held accountable for police misconduct. The first of the replacements is expected to be announced soon, possibly as early as today.

In a meeting with community leaders this week, Bradley was urged to appoint strong community leaders who “would be willing to take a hard look at Daryl Gates and the department, and would have the guts to remove him,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League.

Bradley began overhauling the commission late last year by appointing two prominent minority lawyers, Dan Garcia and Melanie Lomax, and sources say that their mission is, in part, to scrutinize Gates’ performance. Two other commission seats became vacant last week when Herbert F. Boeckmann and Reva B. Tooley resigned in protest over a new ethics law that required them to disclose their personal finances in detail.

* The mayor intends to set up a blue-ribbon commission consisting of citizens who would examine the Police Department from top to bottom. The mayor’s office has researched the possibility of transferring the Police Commission’s subpoena powers to the citizens group, said a source familiar with the plan.

On Thursday, Bradley announced that he is considering whether to appoint such an independent panel, but said that he has not yet made up his mind.

The panel would be similar to the Knapp Commission, which was established in 1970 by Mayor John Lindsay to investigate police corruption in New York City. Three out of four Los Angeles residents favor setting up a civilian board to review alleged cases of misconduct by police officers, according to a Times poll conducted last week.

* The mayor’s office will maintain constant pressure on Gates to resign by establishing contact with a broad cross-section of community, business and college groups who have called for his ouster.

On Thursday, students at USC and members of the anti-abortion movement staged protests calling for Gates to resign. A standing room only crowd jammed police headquarters to attend a commission hearing and chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Daryl Gates has got to go!” And the executive board of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor passed a resolution demanding that Gates quit.

“I think the sense of outrage and urgency is unprecedented,” said Mark Ridley-Thomas, head of the local Southern Christian Leadership Conference who is running for the 8th Council District seat. “And it is a calculated mistake on the part of the chief to underestimate how deep this sentiment runs. . . . I don’t think that this is something that will go away.”

Police Commissioner Garcia said: “I don’t envy (Gates) in his role right now. I think this is the toughest thing he has ever faced. How long it will persist I don’t know.”

Over the last two days, the campaign by the mayor’s office received an unexpected boost: On Thursday, U.S. Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh ordered a Justice Department review of all police brutality complaints against Los Angeles police during the last six years to determine if the King beating is part of a pattern of misconduct. And on Wednesday, conservative columnist George Will, one of Gates’ favorite writers, castigated the chief. “Gates has long been a special pinup of the kind of conservatives who cotton to primitivism,” Will wrote.

Fabiani said: “Clearly, George Will’s expression represents a conservative viewpoint that is not ordinarily critical of the chief. One of the real questions now is how far the protest in Los Angeles will spread. . . . The George Will column seems to indicate that no letup is in sight.”

The chief’s adversaries, including those in the mayor’s office, said they are hopeful that Gates will dig himself an even deeper hole through his public remarks. They point to the fact that Gates, in apologizing to King, said in part, “He’s on parole. He’s a convicted robber. In spite of the fact that he’s on parole and a convicted robber, I’d be glad to apologize.”

Ridley-Thomas said: “The apology was half-hearted, disingenuous and missed the point. And there was no good reason to do that.”

Times staff writers Bob Baker and Jesse Katz contributed to this story.