Starting Down the Road to Reform : Stirred by a vision, Los Angeles moves to repair the damage

It just may be that the Christopher Commission report now has a momentum of its own. Within 72 hours of its release, Los Angeles appeared to be moving step by step toward a surer, firmer sense of what it must do. For that, everyone who sincerely cares about the future of this city and its police department must be grateful.

Just Tuesday, the 200-page-plus report of the 10-member Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department issued a raft of recommendations dealing with basic and sometimes alarming issues--from entrenched racist attitudes to flawed management. Some of the proposals were complex, but this city knows quality when it sees it, and before long more and more people shared the same vision: that it’s time for the LAPD to change. In effect, the report had pointed the way out and Los Angeles seemed to be ready to say, “Let’s go.”

A SPECIAL ELECTION: By Friday John Ferraro, the president of the City Council, among others, was proposing a special election later this year for the voters to consider a key recommendation: to restructure the chief’s office, making it more accountable to the mayor and the City Council. That would be done by limiting the tenure of any chief to a maximum of 10 years through the one-time-only renewability of an initial five-year term. The Times supports holding such a special election, though scheduling it any later than Thanksgiving will risk inconveniencing voters on holiday and diminishing turnout.

We urge the council to begin hearings immediately on how to word the ballot-measure language. Should a chief be eligible for two five-year terms? Or an initial term that’s longer? There’s no magic in five years; the most important point, and the trick for the council, is to reinstitute the principle of accountability to overall civilian authority without reintroducing opportunities for manifest political cronyism.

It’s crucial to emphasize that the issue of reform transcends the issue of who is chief. Yes, it would be better if the current chief departed before a November special election; among other reasons, no long-range interest of the city is served by making that vote a referendum on the chief’s popularity. Daryl F. Gates, who has served as police chief with hard work and unquestionable dedication for 13 years, needs to reflect deeply on the risk of confusing the issue of governmental structure with the fleeting issue of his personal popularity.

THE SPECIAL OPPORTUNITY: The City Council should regard the commission report as a very good blueprint for what it must do. Sure, no one who served on that panel--as hard as he or she has worked since April--takes the position that it is anything more than the sincere and honest effort by concerned laypersons to understand what went wrong and to try to propose ways to repair the damage. But its recommendations reflect the considered wisdom of some of the most respected police experts both within and outside the department; moreover, what it has proposed is neither utopian or radical. It is doable--and worth doing.

The key now is to cool the rhetoric. Understandably, critics were all over Gates when he took some key assignments away from Assistant Chief David D. Dotson, whose critical testimony before the commission was known to have irked the chief. It is of course exceedingly unfortunate when a department head gives the public good reason to believe that an employee is being penalized for telling the truth--or at least the truth as the whistle-blower sees it.

Even so, perspective is needed: Los Angeles will gain nothing if every bump and jostle on the road to reform seem like the end of the world. Emotions are running high now, egos have been bruised. The way to move forward is for everyone to lower the volume and get to work.