Tough Style Made Binkley Ever the Outsider : Law enforcement: To many in the community, he was a savior. But critics say his tough management approach ultimately tipped scales against him.

Of the many stories that are told about Lawrence L. Binkley’s tenure as Long Beach police chief, perhaps none is so revealing about his relationship with the force as the anecdote about how he once stood outside a locked door at police headquarters, banging long and angrily to get in.

Officers eventually heard the chief’s cries and opened the door, but Binkley remained ever the outsider from Los Angeles, able to gain more respect and support from the public than from his own force.

Bright, ambitious and tough, Binkley will leave behind a mixed legacy. For most of his time in the chief’s office, he was a favorite of community groups and City Hall, which credited him with bucking a powerful union and making badly needed improvements in the long-troubled department. But to many officers he was the chief from hell, determined to bring them to heel with rigid policies, a bullying, vindictive style, and unreasonable demands for loyalty.

“He’s by far the worst chief in the history of the department,” declared a high-ranking police official who did not want to be identified. “It was like working in a concentration camp. It was a reign of terror. . . . If anybody disagreed with him, he’d come after them. He was very vengeful. He didn’t forget anything.”

So long as Binkley enjoyed the backing of City Hall and the public support of his commanders, he was able to survive, dismissing gripes about his management as predictable union grumbling. But when the city’s top officials began to look upon him with disfavor, it was all over for the 51-year-old chief, who was fired Jan. 17 by City Manager James Hankla after a six-week personnel review sparked by complaints from Binkley’s command staff.

Hankla, who had staunchly defended Binkley in the past, said in his dismissal letter that he had lost confidence in the chief’s ability to lead the 672-officer force--though he found that there was “not sufficient evidence” to conclude that Binkley had engaged in any wrongdoing. Binkley is being allowed to remain on the payroll until mid-February, when he qualifies for retirement.

Binkley, who has filed legal challenges to the city’s actions, could not be reached for comment. But in interviews earlier this month, he protested his treatment by city management and defended his record, pointing out that he had always received favorable job reviews.

“I know I was a tough guy and a hard guy to get along with--but I didn’t deserve this,” insisted Binkley, a sharp-featured man with a military bearing. “Have I ever, ever, treated an employee like I’ve been treated?

“When was I vindictive?” continued Binkley, who filed for stress-related dis-

ability leave shortly before he was fired, contending that the difficulties of his job had left him nervous, anxiety-ridden and plagued by headaches.

Binkley, a 24-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, arrived in Long Beach in early 1987 with a reputation as a no-nonsense administrator who had played a key role in Los Angeles’ smooth handling of the 1984 Olympics.

He soon concluded that the Long Beach force was short on discipline and training, was understaffed, inbred, technologically unsophisticated--and at times corrupt.

“You had some high-ranking officers who were very corrupt” and some “brutal cops,” Binkley asserted in a recent interview. “You had sexual discrimination (within the department) that was blatant.”

He set about to “bring back some integrity” to the department, as he put it, instituting a series of rapid-fire reforms.

“We’ve changed so much that the place is shaking right now,” Binkley declared in 1989.

He cracked down on discipline, firing officers for a variety of offenses and setting up internal stings. He created special task forces to combat drugs and gangs, and increased the force’s minority hires. He also computerized record-keeping and crime analysis, purchased new equipment and instituted sensitivity training to improve officers’ treatment of the public.

It all seemed to have an effect. Though rising crime remains a nagging problem in the city, local leaders say the department is more polished and professional than when Binkley arrived, more attuned to the community and more responsive.

Councilman Les Robbins, a county sheriff’s deputy, has said that Binkley hauled the department “into the 20th Century.” According to the department, citizen complaints of all types have fallen dramatically, from 746 in 1989 to 206 for the first 10 months of last year. Complaints alleging excessive use of force dropped from 121 in 1989 to 83 for all of 1991.

At the same time that Binkley was making sweeping internal changes, he was careful to cultivate relations outside the department. If a councilman or community group called the chief’s office with a particular crime problem, Binkley was often quick to respond, sending out special patrols and establishing undercover operations.

“I think public relations was one of his strong suits,” said Councilman Tom Clark.

Binkley devoted countless evenings to meeting with neighborhood organizations, winning over even antagonistic groups with charm and his spit-and-polish demeanor.

“We think he was a wonderful chief of police, and we’re sorry this has happened,” lamented Nancee Tinsley, president of a neighborhood group in the affluent Naples district, which at one time had been so disgruntled with police coverage that it considered setting up its own small police-type force.

Councilman Warren Harwood remembers a neighborhood meeting in his North Long Beach district when his constituents greeted Binkley with belligerence and anger over rising crime problems.

“Binkley came up and met with abuse,” recalled Harwood. “He was calm and cool. By the end of the program, they were supportive. . . . People were impressed with him.”

For a time, Binkley held weekly breakfast meetings with a broad spectrum of Long Beach residents, ranging from insurance brokers to members of the city’s large and diverse ethnic population. He also created minority advisory groups to discuss police issues.

“He made a very conscious effort to make inroads into the various minority communities,” observed Frank Berry, a regional official of the NAACP who lives in Long Beach.

Although Berry suspected that Binkley may have been pursuing minority groups as much for career reasons as for the sake of improved relations, he said that Binkley made considerable progress in gaining “the trust and respect of a lot of people, particularly in the black community.”

In 1989, the highly publicized Don Jackson case--in which a local officer was secretly filmed as he appeared to shove the black police activist into a plate-glass window--further reinforced Binkley’s efforts to clean up his officers’ behavior.

Even the gay community, long at odds with the department, found Binkley much more receptive to their concerns than previous police administrations. “What’s happening here in Long Beach . . . is path-breaking for all of California,” said Rick Rosen, a local gay activist.

While Binkley was for the most part collecting kudos outside the department, trouble was brewing inside. War erupted with the police union, and officers grumbled about Binkley’s crack-the-whip approach.

“I had to get out or go down the tubes,” recalled Danny Reynolds, a retired police commander who left the department eight months after Binkley took over. “We had different management styles. Mine was more humanistic. He called me a ‘Mary Poppins’ because I wasn’t trashing enough people.”

Once, when Reynolds asked for some time off, he said Binkley retorted: “I like all my commanders stressed.”

At one point, officers say Binkley circulated a paper advising them that the department came first, and their families second.

Police sources said high-ranking officers were asked to identify colleagues who were disloyal and exhibited “a bad attitude.”

In one of more than a dozen lawsuits filed against Binkley by members of the department, Cmdr. Charles H. Parks, who is on disability leave, contends that Binkley threatened him with bad assignments and tried to get him to retire after he refused to write letters to a local newspaper condemning the union. The suit is still pending and Binkley has denied the charges.

“Many people were forced off the department--careers and reputations just ruined,” asserted Charles Clark, a retired commander whom Binkley demoted from a deputy chief’s position before Clark left the force in 1989. “He nit-picked you to death.”

Tom McIntosh, the attorney for two commanders who took their complaints to City Hall last month--lifting the lid on a caldron of discontent within the department--accused Binkley of engaging in verbal harassment and “little personal vendettas.”

There were “a whole slew of things,” McIntosh continued, “that if looked at individually, wouldn’t mean much, but together showed a pattern (of) him ruling (with) a sense of fear and terror.”

Officers describe Binkley as extremely controlling and intolerant of any dissension. “I think everybody in that department was more than willing to give him a chance, (but) the guy wants to be surrounded by yes men,” Reynolds maintained.

If Binkley became angry with someone, his subordinates said, he would stop talking to them and sometimes even instruct his inner circle to cut them off.

Members of the force further complained that Binkley drowned them in paperwork and was obsessed with putting everything into memos. His penchant for memos--which he apparently carried over from the Los Angeles force, where they were known as Binkleygrams--included orders to officers to record any negative comments they overheard about the department or the chief, or conversations they had with union officials.

Binkley also accumulated his share of enemies during his years on the Los Angeles force. Officers contacted there had many of the same complaints as their counterparts in Long Beach.

Binkley is not without his defenders in uniform, however.

Soon-to-retire Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates thought highly enough of Binkley to encourage him to apply for the chief’s job in Los Angeles. Though conceding that Binkley has “never been known to be a warm and cuddly guy,” Gates described him as “tough, but fair,” and said Binkley did “a marvelous job” of overseeing traffic control and security during the 1984 Olympics.

Los Angeles police Cmdr. Carlo Cudio, who worked under Binkley in Los Angeles and liked him, said Binkley was bound to encounter resentment in Long Beach because he was trying to reform a hidebound department.

“There’s going to be tremendous resistance from the troops,” observed Cudio, whom Binkley hired on a consultant basis to help overhaul the Long Beach department’s Internal Affairs section. “(Long Beach) is from the 1800s.”

As an example of what Binkley was up against in Long Beach, Cudio said, Internal Affairs, which investigates officers accused of wrongdoing, conducted only cursory investigations. “It was a disaster. It was horrible. They did investigations, where after they did them, it looked as if the investigator didn’t want to do them and sidestepped issues that needed to be looked at.

“To say whether Binkley was more harsh than he should be, I don’t know,” Cudio continued. “I wasn’t there. But I know he was trying to bring people up to at least (Los Angeles’) minimum standards.

“He’s kind of a tragic figure in a way,” Cudio mused. “He insisted that people do things the right way. That’s why people don’t like (him). But in my mind, he’s kind of a hero.”