The Good Cop : As President of the Police Union, Danny Staggs Says He Tries to Take the High Ground During Contract Negotiations

It’s a fine mess Danny Staggs has got himself into. Seated in the audience at the Wilshire Theater’s Ebell Club, he is surrounded by hundreds of protesters who hammer the floor with picket signs and shout taunts at Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan.

Up onstage and clearly flustered, Riordan yells into a microphone.

And in the folding chairs around Staggs, gray-haired women with proper hats glare at the demonstrators and squawk: “Hooligans! You’re acting like hooligans!”

It was supposed to be an opportunity for the mayor to present his budget to supportive neighborhood associations in the mid-Wilshire area. Now, as the meeting wobbles toward riot, a ruddy-faced man takes the stage and issues a threat.

If the protesters don’t settle down, he says, he’s going to ask the uniformed police officers hovering on the sidelines to clear them out--an interesting proposition, since the protesters are off-duty cops themselves, many still strapped with their 9-millimeter handguns.

“This isn’t good,” observes Staggs, who, as president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, is at once a city employee, a police officer, and the boisterous throng’s elected leader.

Most cops, in fact, would probably find a domestic dispute at Tom and Roseanne’s place more appealing than Staggs’ current assignment: guiding a police union through contract negotiations in the problematic realm of post-riot Los Angeles.

On the ride over to the demonstration last Wednesday, union spokesman Geoffrey Garfield sums things up: “This is not a job. This is punishment for something he did in the past.”

So it would seem.

Staggs stepped straight into a fusillade of controversy last December when the 7,557-member Los Angeles Police Protective League threw out its previous president and elected him.

Morale was already dismal. Ticket writing and drunken driving arrests dragged. Veterans were bailing out in substantial numbers. On top of that, the ACLU challenged the Police Department because so many officers live outside the city limits; female officers leveled sexual harassment charges at the department; and critics challenged certain physical fitness tests at the academy as discriminatory.

Then there was the matter of two officers allegedly opening fire on a Highway Patrol car.

Meanwhile, underlying that turmoil, is the fact that for two years the force has gone without a contract or cost-of-living pay increases.

In May, the city and the union finally negotiated a deal--a 3% hike this year and next.

“It’s not a great contract, but it’s a fair contract,” Staggs said at the time.

But the union rejected the agreement 3 to 1, and dissidents attacked the president for his audacity at even bringing it to them, beginning a recall process that still hangs over Staggs’ head.

A three-day blue flu followed, along with threats of similar wildcat activities during the impending World Cup games.

None of which fit into the picture of police life a little boy envisioned 40 years ago.

Staggs was born and spent his early years in the Carolinas but moved to South Gate at age 8, with his recently divorced mother and her mother.

With their father out of the picture, Danny and his older brothers Barry and Kenneth turned to a neighbor for male guidance.

“He became a father figure to me. I admired him,” Staggs says.

As it happens, the neighbor was a cop, and one by one, the Staggs brothers became cops, too.

Not long after joining the LAPD, Kenneth and Barry began working with the Protective League (motto: “Protecting Those Who Protect Others”). Both eventually were elected to the board, as they rose through the department ranks.

As Danny worked his way from division to division, though, he found that his familial connections didn’t always serve him well with management.

“It seemed that every time I went somewhere for an interview . . . it was like, you’re wasting your time, you’re one of those Staggs brothers. Consequently I felt, well, I guess if I can’t (be) promoted, I’d better get more involved in the League. It seems to be the only place I can be effective.”

Staggs--who is married and has two adolescent sons and a 12-year-old daughter--began working with the League as a delegate, representing officers in job disputes. He worked full time as a board member for five years, before stepping up to the presidency.

His office, in the Protective League’s distinctly unstylish digs on the fringes of Skid Row, displays a photograph of Staggs when he walked a Downtown beat through what cynics referred to as “wine country.” Standing in a stiffly starched uniform, he writes a ticket to a man passed out cold on the sidewalk.

Along with the usual oak-framed, cop memorabilia--badges, handcuffs, commendations--Staggs’ office is a gallery of awards and trophies he won in amateur track and running competitions. That physical prowess served him well during five years as a fitness and martial arts trainer at the police academy. And that experience worked to his benefit come league election time.

“Twenty-five percent of the force went through the academy when I was there,” he says.

Still, that recognition hasn’t been enough to save the white-haired president from the brutal criticism that came in May, when he handed his constituents the contract the league leadership and city had worked out.

“Look at the way negotiations have gone,” says Officer Gary Morgan, who quit the union negotiating team and launched the recall campaign against Staggs, just before members voted down the deal. “Most of the problems have occurred because of the lack of leadership Staggs has shown.”

*

Staggs dismisses the recall effort as par for league presidents. He calls Morgan an aspirant to the union board who’s looking to make a name for himself.

“He said I’m not aggressive enough to the public,” says Staggs as he steers a rented Ford down 8th Street toward the demonstration at the Ebell. “Well that’s my personality. That’s my style. . . .”

As if to emphasis that point, Garfield edges in behind Staggs’ words.

The League’s former president was very aggressive, he says. “He had the look of the stereotypical cop. Big. Gruff. But when you have leadership like that, who do you then turn to? For every bad cop you’ve got to have the good cop. It’s always best to have the leader be the good cop.”

The union, spokesman Garfield says, has now positioned Bill (Get In Your Face) Harkness--an outspoken, old-school type listed as one of the Christopher Commission’s problem officers--as the bad cop in the contract negotiations.

“But the city can always go to the responsible president, who is diplomatic . . . urbane,” Garfield says. “That’s Danny.”

Staggs seems comfortable in that role.

“My projection on television and my projection to the public has to be different than the projection of an angry police officer,” he says.

Still, despite the neat gray suit and cellular phone, Staggs can’t quite shake the personna that tends to come with so many years piloting black-and-whites.

“Haight Ashbury’s a little north of here buddy,” he quips when a disheveled, longhaired man appears on a side street, strolling barefoot down the double yellow line.

As he passes a vast sidewalk display of wrenches, pliers and screw-drivers, he can’t help but comment: “Some mechanic’s missing a lot of tools right now.”

Staggs’ war stories--”put your hands up or I’ll blow your brains against the windshield,” he tells one rapist-armed robbery suspect--are as dramatic as any Joseph Wambaugh spins.

But he is fully aware that he serves the League at a pivotal moment in the city’s history, when the force is at a watershed between vastly different Chiefs, different styles of policing, and quickly changing attitudes and expectations within the rank and file.

The changes, as well as the inherent difficulty of representing cops in contract disputes, become apparent as he pulls up to the demonstration outside the Ebel Club on Wilshire Boulevard.

The demonstrators, reflecting a multicultural melange of pent-up anger, aren’t budging as they wave signs: “No Contract, No Police,” shout slogans--”We want bucks, Riordan Sucks!”--and bluster militant.

It’s doubtful the mayor’s private-sector employees ever confronted him so rudely.

And judging from their outraged expressions, some of the guests from the area’s mansion-infested neighborhoods had assumed that a labor union is what happens when the maid and butler have a fling--certainly not something in which their nice neighborhood policeman would engage.

Staggs pumps hands and accepts back slaps as he works his way into the building: “Good job, Mr. President . . . “ “Hang in there.”

In the fall, Staggs opposed a department sickout, and a judge later issued an injunction, banning the League from such activities. So last week’s blue flu was a wildcat action.

But Staggs refuses to see it as a mutiny.

He would have supported last week’s action if he could have, he says, adding that he opposed last year’s blue flu only because he thought it was premature.

“Now, I reach back into my holster and the holster is empty, we had our guns taken away back in November, when (the court) laid its order on us.”

As he sits in the back of the Ebell Club, Staggs is concerned that his members maintain a delicate balance--that they show the swarms of television cameras their outrage, without becoming outlaws.

“Come on, guys,” he mutters sotto voce, like a coach watching from the dugout.

But he knows that the membership’s patience for his moderate tact has worn thin.

In fact, the demonstration goes pretty much as planned. After Harkness and other designated speakers have their say, the protesters file out peacefully, joking with their uniformed counterparts, chuckling when a police helicopter swoops in and lets out a siren chirp.

On the drive back, Staggs is upbeat.

“It was important for the mayor to see that anger. He’s never seen it.”

Whether the anger remains contained, he says, remains to be seen.

“I do believe there are officers who will resort to any action. It can get out of control. But they have to remember that first of all they’re police officers.”

This week, as the union and city agree to bring a mediator into their negotiations, Staggs’ confidence in a settlement has grown.

But with the rank and file’s frustration undiminished, and the city’s budget unchanged, the League’s designated good cop remains balanced on a very thin blue line.