Coming Renaissance of the LAPD : The importance of police reform--and Willie L. Williams

The inquiry into the Los Angeles Police Department’s failure to respond quickly and effectively to the riots must not degenerate into mean-spirited scapegoating. No one line officer can be blamed for the breakdown. Efforts to put all the heat on, say, a field commander like Lt. Michael Moulin are patently absurd. Successful policing is a team effort; likewise, unsuccessful policing of the magnitude that occurred the night the riots broke out is a team failure. To try to portray it any other way is just not real.

What makes the failure all the more troubling is that the LAPD has been a great team in the past. And the elements exist for the force to be so again. Even on the night of the breakdown, individual officers fought against the tide of disarray to perform heroically.

Near Normandie and Florence avenues, for instance, Officers Lisa Phillips and Dan Nee, in a lone patrol car, braved a bottle-throwing mob to rescue a woman who lay unconscious in her car, and they managed to get the seriously injured victim to a hospital. Said Nee later: “We want people to know that the 77th Street officers didn’t abandon them. All anybody wanted to do was to go back out there.” And there are many other heroic stories like that.

But the command disarray was almost total. The blame must rest where it belongs--not on the rank and file but on the top brass--where the LAPD has had problems for too long now. That is why Los Angeles needs Willie L. Williams, the highly regarded Philadelphia police commissioner, who is due to take over as chief in a matter of weeks. And that is why Los Angeles needs to approve Charter Amendment F, the police reform package.

The latest Los Angeles Times poll shows Charter Amendment F enjoying wide support among voters. But a poll in mid-May is not the same as an actual vote in early June. Every citizen who supports police reform and who supports the department must turn out to vote.

The reason is that Chief-designate Williams needs a resounding mandate. That requires not only the support of all Los Angeles but the implementation of the entire package of reforms recommended by the Christopher Commission.

The City Council has already begun to implement parts of the reform program, as has the LAPD to a limited extent. But passage of Charter Amendment F, coupled with the installation of Williams, will help the rank and file turn its back on the recent years of ineptitude and lassitude among the brass.

Every dedicated LAPD officer--the man or women who is not yet totally discouraged, not yet wholly cynical, not yet inclined to throw in the towel--is more than ready for a new day. This is a department that in recent years has sought to increase the percentage of black officers (now 7.3% of the department in a city that was 13% black in 1990) and has an increasing number of women and Latino officers. And it has many white officers--such as Phillips and Nee--who want to be proud of their department and want it to be the most effective and professional agency of city government.

A renaissance for the LAPD will be close to a done deal if the police reform passes. But the renewal can’t begin without Charter Amendment F. We hope that not only a thunderous majority of civilian voters will support police reform but that, in the privacy of the voting booth, cops will, too. Its passage June 2 is greatly in their interest, as well as in the interest of the entire city.