All Lose When Cops Resort to Blackmail : Public safety: Times are tough for the LAPD, but if we let them manipulate elected officials, we forfeit our freedom.

The notion that Los Angeles police are going to negotiate with the city through blackmail is a frightening thought and raises serious questions about whether we are living in a civil society or a police state. Maybe the police don’t consider “soliciting adverse information on City Council members”--as a spokesman for the Police Protective League announced on Friday--to be blackmail, but I think the rest of us do, and it brings the potential for abuse of power by the police into very sharp focus.

The struggle going on between the elected city officials and the police union over a contract is sad, protracted and difficult. There is no question that the LAPD has a very tough job, and although most of us respect and rely on the police, they have gone through several rough years and suffered serious damage to their reputation. Too many have made mistakes, especially when it comes to minorities. But the violence on the streets today is unprecedented and it should not surprise us that police feel they are risking their lives without backing from the council and the new mayor they supported so strongly for election.

Some of their expectations may have been misplaced, not because Richard Riordan is any less supportive of the police today than he was a year ago, but because what he said he wanted to do supports the police force in the aggregate, but not necessarily at the individual level. The mayor said that he was going to increase the number of police on the street by hiring more and by getting officers who now hold desk jobs back out on the street. But when he said that he wanted money to hire additional police, the union complained that he would be better served by using that money to pay them more. Doubtless there is room for compromise, but it is a conflict in goals that was not quite so apparent a year ago.

Mayor Riordan--and the Christopher Commission--recommended putting desk officers back out on the street and providing incentives and recognition for officers who cover a beat. It’s not hard to understand why officers holding desk jobs would resist a return to a beat--if you spent your professional life striving to succeed, imagine the serious change in expectations and aspirations it would take for those currently working inside to feel happy about going back out on the street, especially when patrol is considered a dead-end job and is probably more dangerous today than it was five or 10 years ago.

There are other factors: Police noted that in the city’s settlement with the Department of Water and Power earlier this year, unions representing DWP workers won a 9% raise (police ignored the fact that the DWP has separate funds to pay for the increase and that no other city employees have won raises). Officers have been working for two years without a contract, and the constant tattoo of media attention following the never-ending trials stemming from the Rodney King beating has left them angry at the elected officials, angry at their own leaders. It is hard to believe that most LAPD officers support the harsh tactics their leadership is espousing, but they have already sent in a second team of negotiators who learned one important lesson from the first team: Don’t give in.

Of all the crises Los Angeles has faced lately, this breakdown of civility and the negotiating process between the city and the police union threatens to be the most dangerous. Police power must be subservient to civil authority or we do not have a democracy. Threatening personal exposure of elected officials is a blatant abuse of police power and against the law.

The rest of the police “public relations” campaign is equally repugnant to a city struggling out of recession. We cannot afford to pass up national conventions or to menace sporting events such as the World Cup soccer matches and expect to encourage businesses to come or stay here. We need the tourists. We need the business. And we need peace within the government. There is, after all, a certain logic to the proposition that if there is less business, there is less tax money, and a decreased ability of the city to pay its employees.

There are remedies in law to settle the contract dispute. The City Council could--and very likely will--declare an impasse. At that point, the state will send a mediator to the city to listen to both sides. Once the mediator has exhausted the possibilities, the next step is fact-finding, in which case each side elects one fact-finder and those two select a third. That process could take months.

In the end, if no agreement is reached, the city imposes a settlement and has the authority to give police officers immediate salary increases, something it cannot do now. But in the end, if that happens, the police will remain frustrated, the rest of the city’s employees will be equally disheartened and morale will plunge even lower.

It is not enough to say that we need better leadership. Maybe we need to rethink what an urban police force can do and what it cannot do. Perhaps there are other alternatives for them and for the city, but the city must come first. Peace is critical, but so is freedom, and we lose our freedom if our elected officials are controlled by the police.