Alatorre’s Chance for the Spotlight

The Christopher Commission Report provides Councilman Richard Alatorre the chance to step from the wheeling-dealing of political back rooms into the bright spotlight of citywide leadership.

Alatorre is chairman of the Los Angeles City Council’s Public Safety Committee, which will begin hearings Monday on the reform proposals contained in the commission’s 228-page report on racism and brutality in the Los Angeles Police Department. His committee will vote on the recommendations, most of which must be approved by the full council, Mayor Tom Bradley and, in some cases, the voters.

It’s not the first big job thrust upon the 48-year-old Eastside politician. In his 12 years in the state Assembly and six as a councilman, Alatorre has undertaken many difficult, sensitive tasks. But they have been back room work, trading favors, bartering votes, making threats, calling in old political debts and running up new ones. This doesn’t bring the fame that catapults politicians into higher office.

Beginning Monday, Alatorre will have a chance to demonstrate other, more substantive, talents. He will be in charge of shaping a reform package acceptable to Mayor Tom Bradley, the council and to Christopher Commission members who do not want to see their work wasted. And he’ll have to sell the package to a variety of groups outside City Hall, ranging from strongly anti-Daryl Gates civil rights organizations to those more supportive of the LAPD. He’ll have to win support from African-Americans and Latinos, from Anglos and Asians, conservatives and liberals.

If Alatorre can do all that, he’ll move toward the top of the list of candidates for mayor in 1993.

When we talked in his office Wednesday about his pending role, Alatorre shrugged at the prospect of moving into the spotlight. The coat of his well-tailored suit was carefully arranged on the back of his chair. His black hair was neatly combed, his smile quick and pleasant. But the lines on his face bore witness to the intense, sometimes painful, life he has led.

A shrug is often what you get from this man of few words. Alatorre scorns many of the conventions of politics. He smokes and swears and casts bored looks at the ceiling when his colleagues make dumb speeches. He shows the same contempt to reporters who question him too closely.

Alatorre has always been a politician of unrealized potential. He came to City Hall under a cloud, paying a record $141,966 fine to settle a lawsuit filed against him by the city attorney for failing to disclose the source of campaign contributions for his council campaign.

Politics have taken a personal toll on Alatorre, with two failed marriages and a fight against alcoholism that brought him into a sobriety program. We talked about that a couple of years ago.

“You know, I look at it from a positive,” he said. “I’m happy I stopped. I never looked at myself as having a problem as it related to alcohol, but I got to the point where it didn’t work for me. And what I learned (is that) where other people have normal outlets for their rage, for their anger, for their hurt, I didn’t. I suppressed it all. “

As Alatorre likes to say, “What is then is then; what is now is now.”

And now, he looks like a man with a plan.

Alatorre had been silent in the weeks after the LAPD’s beating of Rodney G. King. He said he was awaiting the Christopher report, although some people accused him of being afraid of the politically powerful Police Department. The silence had ended. “I support the conclusions of the Christopher report,” he said.

As a Latino, he was deeply offended by the cops’ racial slurs revealed in the report, and angry over revelations of weak LAPD discipline in brutality cases.

He wants to shift the debate from Police Chief Gates to LAPD reform. “The more pressure we put (on Gates), the more it is described as the mayor vs. the chief, the greater the disservice to the people of L.A.,” Alatorre said.

Alatorre is leaning toward recommending a special fall election to expedite the process of bringing appropriate Christopher Commission proposals to the voters. “The sooner the better,” he said.

The major Charter change would limit the police chief to two five-year terms, with elimination of the strict Civil Service protection that now gives Gates lifetime tenure. If the voters approve that, Gates has indicated he’ll retire. Thursday, he said “I think that’s the way we ought to go.”

Alatorre hopes for an election fought on an issue of reform, rather than Gates. Even so, it could be a classic, with all the fury engendered by the King beating out in the open, in a single-issue campaign.

It could also be a citywide campaign platform for Alatorre to complete his transformation from back room politician.