Brewer Assails Plan to Add 3,000 Officers

In unusually pointed remarks, retired Police Commission President Jesse A. Brewer has criticized Mayor Richard Riordan for pledging to increase the department’s ranks by 3,000 officers in four years, a promise that Brewer described as “very impossible” to achieve.

Brewer also leveled criticism at Deputy Mayor William C. Violante, a former police union president and one of Riordan’s first appointees. “Violante has shown that he really doesn’t want to serve the people in this city the way they should be served,” Brewer said.

Brewer’s comments--which appear in the latest issue of the American Civil Liberties Union’s quarterly publication, Open Forum--represent his sharpest public criticism of the new mayor. Asked to amplify them, Brewer credited Riordan with “trying to do what’s right,” but nevertheless said he was concerned about some of his early moves as mayor.

Brewer, a former deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department who once was the highest-ranking African-American in the history of the department, led the Board of Police Commissioners through the stressful transition from Chief Daryl F. Gates to Chief Willie L. Williams. Brewer and the other four police commissioners who served under Mayor Tom Bradley were replaced by Riordan, as were commissioners on other boards.

“I wish that the mayor had talked with someone before he made that promise because I think that’s a very impossible commitment he made,” Brewer said in the interview. “It would be detrimental to the LAPD to just try to fulfill that campaign promise without concern for the other areas that I would be concerned about.”

In the interview, Brewer said he also advised Williams to begin making the rounds at police roll calls in order to counteract what he viewed as the mayor’s “campaign to capture the hearts and minds of the people on the street.”

“My concern,” Brewer said, “is Willie Williams might be undermined in what he is trying to do.”