Police Union Gets an Insider’s Edge : Ousted Riordan Adviser Plans Strategy in Contract Battle Against City

In one day, Geoffrey L. Garfield went from loyal aide to Mayor Richard Riordan to a thorn in the mayor’s side.

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Immediately after leaving his City Hall job in February, Garfield took up battle with his former boss as a political strategist for the Police Protective League, which is locked in a contract battle with the city.

As the police union’s hired gun, Garfield is the man who brought carjacking billboards to neighborhood streets, who encouraged angry officers with picket signs to converge on City Hall, and who announced a campaign to embarrass city leaders by disclosing personal information about them.

One City Hall insider characterized Garfield as a mercenary who is loyal to whoever is paying his check. But Garfield, who boasts of bringing New York City-style politics to Los Angeles, says he has to believe in the fight he is waging.

“The kind of political consultant I am is a cross between an assassin and a Secret Service agent,” Garfield said. “Sometimes you fire the bullet and sometimes you take the bullet, but in either case you have to believe in your heart what you’re doing.”

His defection to the police union has turned him into a persona non grata in some quarters of City Hall. He is the subject of fierce private attacks by officials. The city attorney’s office has even condemned him in a legal memorandum.

But Garfield says he has no personal grudge against Riordan or others he wrestles with in the public arena.

“In politics, an elected official is first a symbol and secondly a personality,” Garfield said. “When you target the symbol, it’s business. I have never targeted the mayor personally. I actually like the mayor. He’s a self-made millionaire and I want to be just like him.”

Riordan says he does not take his former aide’s attacks personally.

“He has been given a job to do by his employer,” Riordan said in a recent interview. “And while I have to disagree with the job that’s being done--I think it’s destructive of the city and against the best interests of the Police Department--I don’t think you can blame Geoffrey Garfield.”

Other city officials are less charitable. They accuse Garfield of playing games with the city’s public safety in order to add another political victory to his resume.

None of the antipathy seems to bother Garfield, a hard-nosed political strategist with a flair for colorful sound bites. He loves a good fight, and finds himself today in one of the most intense battles of his career.

Police officers who head the union say Garfield is so aggressive that he sometimes has to be restrained. “Geoffrey is very tough,” union President Danny Staggs said. “He can, if need be, go for the throat. At times, we’ve had to say to him, ‘We don’t have to go that far.’ ”

Garfield says he feels a special advantage in this fight because he knows both sides well.

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He first worked for the police union as a consultant in 1992. He later joined Riordan’s fledgling Administration as assistant deputy mayor for public safety. While Garfield was in that job, Riordan praised him for being the first member of the mayor’s staff to respond to the city’s emergency operations center after the Northridge earthquake.

But when Garfield was forced out during an office shake-up, he quickly rejoined the police union. And to the shock of some Riordan staffers, Garfield began taking on the mayor’s office with a vengeance by directing more of the union’s attacks at Riordan.

Garfield says his stint in the mayor’s office familiarized him with Riordan and introduced him to the mayor’s advisers--including William Violante, the former police union president who hired Garfield and is now a Riordan deputy mayor.

“I understand the mayor’s overall philosophy and I believe I know the strategic abilities of his brain trust,” Garfield said. “It’s like an enormous chess game and I like to think I have a good reading on how they are going to react to our moves.”

Among Garfield’s most controversial creations so far have been the billboards that went up in March, showing a gunman pointing a pistol at a woman’s face. The ads sparked an outcry. Garfield has urged critics to lighten up.

“I don’t think they were in poor taste at all, but they weren’t put up to be liked or disliked,” he said. “They were put up to get people’s attention. You tell me--did they work?”

Garfield said he views the billboards as a mixture of strategy and psychology. The gunman was shrouded in black, he said, to denote evil. The woman is a blonde, for good. The race of the gunman is unclear, a nod to ethnic sensitivity. And the pistol pointed ominously at the victim, Garfield said, is a phallic symbol.

Shock advertising is something Garfield studied at Baruch College’s Graduate School of Political Management. He has fine-tuned his campaign skills in big cities across the country--an anti-casino gambling referendum in Detroit, a stadium initiative in San Jose, a police reform referendum in Los Angeles.

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In working to defeat the police reform initiative, he produced a television commercial that showed footage of trucker Reginald O. Denny being beaten and suggested that political interference prevented officers from responding.

The ads were met with a cascade of complaints from television stations who were expected to run them and from proponents of the police reform ballot measure. Eventually, Garfield toned down the commercials by deleting the riot scene.

Some of Garfield’s critics say he is treating the contract dispute as just another campaign to win.

“What everybody has to understand, including Garfield, is that this is not a political game,” Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said. “Very important issues are on the line--things like public safety, employee morale and how you turn Los Angeles around. This is not just another political campaign.”

Garfield says he fully understands the importance of the controversy--but disagrees with the city’s position. And there is nothing wrong, Garfield says, with having a little fun in the process.

“If I don’t have fun in what I’m doing, I don’t do it,” he said. “If a job gets monotonous, boring or routine, then it isn’t for me. This job, this whole controversy, is none of the above.”

Profile: Geoffrey L. Garfield

* Born: Feb. 24, 1958

* Residence: Downtown Los Angeles

* Education: Bachelor’s degree, Alabama State University; fellow, Baruch College Graduate School of Political Management.

* Career highlights: Has been a political consultant on a variety of national campaigns. Most recently, he has been Mayor Richard Riordan’s assistant deputy mayor for public safety and the Los Angeles Police Protective League’s director of communications.

* Interests: Co-producer of a TV movie on the life of the late Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Had a brief appearance in Spike Lee’s movie, “She’s Gotta Have It.”

* Family: Single

* Quote: “The kind of political consultant I am is a cross between an assassin and a Secret Service agent. Sometimes you fire the bullet and sometimes you take the bullet, but in either case you have to believe in your heart what you’re doing.”