Chiefs, God and Ed Davis : The Former Top Cop Criticizes Gates’ Stand

Police chiefs in Los Angeles, says Ed Davis, sometimes come to believe they are “ordained by God” to command the force.

He ought to know.

The 74-year-old Republican state senator was chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from 1969 to 1978. Earlier, William H. Parker served for 16 years, the longest of any Los Angeles chief. Chief Daryl F. Gates, who says he will leave next April, will have held the high-profile job for 14 years.

“Under the present system an incumbent eventually can believe that he is the department,” Davis said in his Northridge office.

For that reason, Davis said, he endorses the Christopher Commission’s recommendation that Los Angeles police chiefs be limited to two five-year terms “so that no one can say, ‘I am the department, they can’t survive without me.’ ”

Davis said he was “embarrassed for the institution” by Gates’ recent reluctance to step aside, “embarrassed that someone could think he had an irrevocable right to stay on.”

While Gates’ decision to leave in April may have quieted the clamor for his ouster, Davis remains unsatisfied. By failing to leave now, Davis said, “that means he (Gates) has full power to run the whole department.”

“Any of the people who testified against him, or disagreed with him are not going to feel free. I think it will be inhibiting.

“He doesn’t need the money,” the acerbic Davis said this week, continuing his rare blast at his successor. “The city doesn’t need him. It’s pretty obvious the report card of the Christopher Commission was not favorable for the department. It has huge problems and must address them, and that’s difficult to do if he’s going to stick around another nine months.”

He indicated that the past practice of bringing in interim chiefs during the selection process for a permanent replacement has worked well. After Chief Tom Reddin, who served from 1967-1969, an interim chief held the post until Davis’ selection.

The limit on a chief’s tenure is among several Christopher Commission recommendations that Davis said he supports, including a call for community-based policing, which the panel said stresses “problem solving, rather than arrest statistics.”

To Davis, “rapport” with the community is the only answer to solve current hostilities. He has a unique vantage point: Davis was appointed chief only four years after the Watts riots.

“You had an estranged citizenry and estranged police,” he said. “Police were still carrying personal rifles in the trunks of their cars because they knew the riot was going to start again tonight.”

Davis figured he could overcome the hostilities by creating an environment for residents and police to meet. He came up with the now-entrenched Neighborhood Watch program. To further ease the tensions, Davis instituted what he called “team policing”--an early variation of the community-based model--which Gates would later largely dismantle.

Davis merged patrol officers and detectives into 65 teams, responsible for certain areas, or “turf,” where they would work with local residents to help identify and solve crime problems. Command was more decentralized, giving patrol officers greater autonomy. Teams were judged not on the number of arrests made, but on how much crime was reduced in their areas.

Davis said that, at the time, he was trying to bring the Police Department out of a “50-year culture lag.”

In the last decade, team policing virtually disappeared at the LAPD. “Chief Gates began to emphasize priorities that turned away from team policing . . . and recentralized authority in headquarters, in part because of budget constraints,” according to the Christopher Commission report.

The former chief believes that if team policing had survived “there would have been better rapport between the police and the citizenry.”

Davis, of course, had his own share of controversies in the Police Department. He was best known for his often outrageous remarks, such as his 1972 suggestion to hang airline hijackers at Los Angeles International Airport.

At one point under Davis’ tenure, officer-involved shootings in Los Angeles were higher than anywhere else in the country. Minority communities complained to the Police Commission about the conduct of Davis’ allegedly abusive officers. “His reign did have some of the same problems” as Gates’, former Police Commissioner Stephen Reinhardt, now a federal judge, recalled.

Since his election to the state Senate in 1980 from Santa Clarita, Davis is widely considered to have mellowed.

Although a conservative, he once cast a key vote for a bill banning job discrimination against homosexuals. After the March beating of Rodney G. King, Davis urged passage of a bill to make it a felony for a peace officer to watch another officer use unnecessary force.

“Make what I said about Gates kinder,” he asked his visitor as he prepared to leave for another appointment. He said he always liked the chief “until he started to say, ‘It’s mine.’ ”