The Battle Within the LAPD

Many of us have been in workplace feuds, but none with the intensity of those waged by the Los Angeles Police Department’s high command.

At times, according to documents filed in federal court Tuesday, the battling sounded something like the last days of the Ceausescu regime in Romania, with Parker Center, police headquarters, full of an odd combination of prayer, conspiracy and paranoia.

It’s all detailed in sworn statements by several present and past top Los Angeles officers. The statements were obtained by the city in its defense against a lawsuit filed by Assistant Police Chief Robert Vernon. The lawsuit is just one result of the bad blood in the office.

Vernon, the department’s controversial “Bible Bob,” sued for $10 million on the grounds that his career had been destroyed by a Police Commission-ordered investigation into whether his fundamentalist Christian beliefs influenced his police work. The investigation, conducted by Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, cleared Vernon. But Vernon, seeking retribution, went to court.

The best conspiracy story came from retired Detective Neil K. Spotts. He said he was ordered by Gates to investigate whether Vernon was investigating him--Gates.

The pursuit, said Spotts, took him to a meeting with one of Vernon’s men at the Biltmore Hotel. There, they left Spotts’ partner, walked through the Biltmore to a car in back and drove to the Ambassador.

This odyssey through L.A.’s grand old hotels reportedly ended in a dirty basement room of the Ambassador, where one of Vernon’s men covered a window.

You’d expect to find Sidney Greenstreet in a setting like this, or at least G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate conspirator. But instead, it was Chief Vernon.

Spotts tells the story: “Vernon said that he, Vernon, wanted to be chief, and further, ‘God wants me to be chief.’ Vernon and the other officers working with him in this investigation were operating on their own and in secret. I believed--and one of them confirmed to me--that Vernon and the others were ‘born-again’ Christians, operating as part of a secret group within the LAPD.”

Vernon’s lawyer denied that Vernon said anything about God wanting him to be chief or that he was investigating Gates. But the attorney did admit that, yes, Chief Vernon indeed was in the basement room.

The old Ambassador has been the scene of some mighty strange stories. Enough, in fact, for the late Walter Winchell, the famous gossip columnist, to work out of there when he was in L.A. But few have been as weird as this one.

Another police officer told how ambitious cops felt pressured to attend meetings of Vernon’s “God squad,” as his religious followers are called by non-joiners. Former L.A. Cmdr. Thomas Windham, who is now chief of police of Ft. Worth, Tex., said: “Vernon appeared to impose his religion on LAPD personnel and LAPD operations.

“A group began holding Bible study meetings at Parker Center,” he said. “I was asked to attend. . . . Vernon was the highest-ranking officer in attendance. . . . He presided over the meeting, which consisted of officers engaged in praying and reading from the Bible. There were about a dozen officers present in addition to Vernon, including high-ranking current members of the LAPD. The meeting took place in the eighth-floor cafeteria. I attended this meeting because I had been invited by another high-ranking officer and I felt obligated.”

Windham also said: “I was present when Chief Gates, on one occasion, cautioned Vernon about bringing his religion into the department and imposing his views on LAPD personnel.”

Despite this, Gates kept Vernon in his key job as head of the Office of Operations, in charge of all patrol officers and most detectives.

Finally, Deputy Chiefs Glenn Levant and Bernard Parks and Assistant Chief David Dotson and others took their complaints to Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who asked the Police Department to investigate. It was a sign of the intensity of their feelings that they went to the enemy--Yaroslavsky, the council’s strongest critic of the LAPD--for help.

The fight is not over.

Levant, Parks and Dotson are Vernon’s rivals to succeed Gates, and their accusations probably will be part of the dialogue that precedes the selection.

And the sworn statements are likely to be used as weapons in the acrimonious political campaign expected when the Christopher Commission police reform proposals go before the voters in June. It may take an election to settle this workplace feud.