The Urgency of Police Reform : Los Angeles must not shrink from this huge but necessary task

Los Angeles policing has had a bad year. Therefore, so has Los Angeles.

Most people look up to police officers as protectors. Most people want to support the police, help the police and help make life safer for themselves and their children.

Most people are deeply distressed by police scandal. They do not want police to become fallen heroes. They do not like moral ambiguity in their police department. They prefer, understandably, a dichotomy as clear as the good guys versus the bad guys. That way the public always knows what side it’s on.

That admittedly simplistic dichotomy is a useful foundation for the broad public support that any police department requires in order to operate. For policing is not only essential and important, it is expensive. For example, the L.A. Police Department gets $558.7 million in the current budget. That represents 15.2% of the total city general fund budget of $3.7 billion.

Even so, politicians, knowing of the public’s concerns, are always reluctant to cut back on policing, even when a bad economy saps tax revenues. But broad support for policing is imperiled when the police fritter away the public trust through questionable use of their authority. Once the public-support trend lines head south--once people begin to perceive their police in a new, perhaps more skeptical light--police institutions are in trouble.

Los Angeles may be at that very point now. This is the deep and widespread concern.

THE LAPD PROBLEM: No city in America has a clearer, better idea of what is wrong with its municipal police than Los Angeles. The now-famous “Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department” saw to that. Released July 9 after months of hard work by scores of volunteer lawyers and investigators, under the chairmanship of former Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, the report was a knowing but sympathetic prescription for reforming the 8,450-officer LAPD. The report did not say that the LAPD was hopeless and most officers were bad. On the contrary, it concluded that its problems were susceptible to solution by a process of reform.

That finding was the silver lining in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, which was publicized worldwide. Out of that outrageously violent arrest came a long overdue overview of the Police Department. Had the videotaping, by an amateur, never occurred, it might have been years before any major reform was attempted. But now that Los Angeles knows what it must do, it will be to its great and enduring shame if it fails to get the reform job done. That’s why many people are looking forward in the spring to the transition to new leadership: As recommended by the Christopher Commission, Los Angeles is searching for a new chief. It would be the first turnover in police leadership in almost 14 years.

THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT PROBLEM: No one single incident led to calls for a thorough, Christopher-Commission-like inquiry into the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. But that force had a bad month last summer that had about the same effect as the King beating.

In August there were four controversial use-of-force incidents involving sheriff’s deputies. One was the shooting of a former mental patient in the back, a case in which many neighbors disputed the official version of what happened; another was the shooting in the back of a young Latino after an auto chase; a third was a shooting in a predominantly Latino housing project that almost set off a riot.

The resulting public outcry led to the appointment, by Sheriff Sherman Block, of a review panel. And then to the appointment, by the County Board of Supervisors, of former prosecutor and judge James G. Kolts as special counsel to probe excessive use of force by deputies. With the credibility of Block’s own panel in question, the Kolts appointment was viewed by hopeful citizens as an effort to emulate, if not duplicate, the quality work of the Christopher Commission. That seems essential.

POLICING’S FUTURE: The 8,000-officer Sheriff’s Department is too important to be allowed to drift. Its mission--to provide policing throughout the county, in those communities and areas that are without their own local constabulary--is vital to the quality of life in this region. Sheriff Block has often seemed the very model of the professional law enforcement executive--and less doggedly set in his ways than his counterpart at the LAPD. But if Judge Kolts does his job properly, that image will be fully tested, as it should be.

It is a measure of the kind of year L.A. policing had that, by year’s end, the calls for reform of the Sheriff’s Department were almost as urgent as those earlier in the year regarding the LAPD. This is the magnitude of the challenge now facing Los Angeles. Will it measure up--and reform its police? Or permit the opportunity to slip from its grasp, dooming the area and its police to further misery and heartache in the years ahead? That is the question for L.A.