And Now a Contract for Police Reform : Tentative deal stands to liberate LAPD and City Hall

The Los Angeles police union appears ready to approve the city’s new contract offer on Thursday, and that’s reason to sigh in relief. The police officers have been without an employment contract for two years.

The city, after handing water and power workers a nice raise, had pleaded poverty. In anger, the police union went a bit off the deep end, putting up, and then taking down after a public outcry, billboard posters advertising the city’s crime problems. From there, matters could have gotten a lot worse.

But now, with a new contract under their belt, the police could go about their work with a measure of assurance and respect. Also, City Hall must go about its work, and that includes Mayor Richard Riordan continuing to put all possible support behind the Christopher Commission’s still-endangered reform proposals.

In fact, the new contract in some ways could make achievement of some of the reforms more difficult. The mayor, rightly in our view, had wanted the deal to include bonus money for patrol work (the kind of police work emphasized in the proposed reforms) and greater assignment flexibility for Chief Willie L. Williams.

When Williams took over the LAPD two years ago, he inherited not only a tradition-bound agency not wholly openhearted to outsiders but a bureaucracy saddled with inflexible civil service rules. The police union--unwisely, we think--resisted the patrol-bonus idea as being somehow unfair to detectives (who are paid better anyway); the flexibility rules got shot down, too. Both ideas are good ones that should be revived later.

Having made plain these reservations, we nonetheless are pleased that a contract tentatively has been agreed on and that the work of the police seems about to be freed of distraction. Under Williams, the LAPD has an improved public image and greater public confidence, but it must work hard to maintain the momentum. Many officers do not oppose the general thrust of the Christopher reforms and in fact could provide the energy needed to carry them out. That energy must not be wasted.

Several factors appear crucial to us. One is the relationship between the mayor and the chief, which must remain positive and creative. Neither side must lose patience with the other. The mayor needs to realize that getting control of a long-established bureaucracy like the LAPD will take years; the chief has to understand the pressures on the mayor, especially in a time of rising citizen fears about crime.

Other key factors are the City Council, which holds the purse strings, and the Police Commission, which is the civilian overseer of the department. Commission members--all so new to the job--need to accelerate their learning curve so they can strike the right balance: neither intervening and trying to micro-manage the department nor staying so aloof that they fail to hold the chief and his top people accountable to basic public policies.

Once signed, the LAPD contract should mark both the end of labor troubles and the beginning of the new era of reform. There is much about the LAPD that can make the city proud. The goal of the Christopher reforms is not to diminish the Police Department’s stature but to help it protect and serve the people even better.