Do Not Slow Down, Los Angeles : Christopher panel’s status report gives city a clear warning

The Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department continues to perform an invaluable service for Los Angeles and for the future generations that will live here.

Rather than play political games, the Christopher Commission (as it is better known) continues to insist that the city’s leadership do what it said it would do in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident: to fundamentally reform a proud but troubled police department. In order to accomplish reform, it also means that the incumbent chief must do what he said he would do, which is to leave office this spring and make way for a new chief. And it means the voters of Los Angeles must do what they really ought to do if they care about the city--about the ability of all races and colors to live and work together in harmony--and that is to pass police-reform Charter amendments in June.

This is the urgent message conveyed in the commission’s six-month status report. Do not slow down, Los Angeles; do not fail the future by failing to seize this moment.

A clearer message could not have been sent. Indeed, by putting its cards on the table and looking everyone concerned squarely in the eye, the panel, in the status report issued last week, redoubled its value to Los Angeles as an unvarying compass of common sense. Its value will no doubt be all the more evident as the reform process winds its tortuous way toward the June 2 ballot showdown.

OUT OF THE DARKNESS: The Christopher panel would be the last to suggest that its July report was anything remotely resembling the last word in police reform. But the tableau of its recommendations has been widely praised, here and across the land, as a sensible way to proceed. Indeed, there is on the table no better way. The only other direction is backward--back into the darkness of an LAPD above accountability and of a city with entire communities at odds, if not at war, with its police.

The status report adopted an imperative but measured tone. It recounted the considerable progress that has been made, by the LAPD itself, by the City Council and by Chief Daryl F. Gates, who has begun making some needed institutional changes. And it pointed out the areas of improvement and structural reform that still must be made.

AND ON TO REFORM: It must be kept in mind that the purpose of this commission was not to review the performance record of any one individual. It was to examine, in light of the shocking beating of King on March 3, the performance of the department in its relations with the community, as well as its inner functioning. In its conclusion last July the commission recommended not only the appointment of a new chief to shepherd the reform era but a Charter change to make the department more accountable.

Those recommendations now threaten to become personalized and perhaps bitterly charged. The issue is not one man or one chief or one personality--that trivializes the historic moment and degrades the magnitude of the reform effort. The issue is to embed in the department significant structural and operational reforms that will chart a better course in years to come. To that end the Christopher Commission made the sensible suggestion that the current chief, in office for nearly 14 years, should move on to allow a newer generation of officers to take command and carry forward the reforms. And in July, Gates said he agreed with that view and gave April (and later, June) as when he would retire.

The polarization that has characterized so much of the police reform controversy will ease when the chief retires. New LAPD leadership, along with strong City Council support and voter passage in June of Charter reform, will create the foundation of a new Los Angeles Police Department.

Any party that fails to do the assigned task betrays the public trust.