The State : The Police-Wage Dispute Is About More Than Money

The contract dispute between the Police Protective League and the city may finally be heading toward resolution after two years of often acrimonious negotiations. Along the way, the structural weaknesses of a government designed to diffuse power have been exposed--again. Add to that a mayor eager to get things done, a City Council protective of its authority, a police culture more akin to that of an occupying army, a city mired in recession and a citizenry fearful of crime--and you do not have the ingredients for easy compromise. If ever there was a reason to seriously consider reforming city government, it is how the police-contract dispute has been handled.

In all probability, Mayor Richard Riordan’s efficiency as a manager and negotiator far exceeds the system’s capacity to absorb it. In the eyes of one council member, Riordan is the most powerful mayor he has ever seen. Yet, that power is strictly political. It is not rooted in the City Charter. And therein lies a source of potential conflict.

When he thinks it is necessary, Riordan does not hesitate to bypass the formal power structure. He uses whatever resources he can, including people, to move aside barriers in order to communicate directly with the opposition. In doing so, he is guided by an intuitive understanding of what the dynamics of his opposition are. This skill made him a rich man and enabled him to get the city moving again after the Northridge earthquake.

But Riordan’s back-channel approach tends to set up a choice between getting things done or obeying the rules. On the one hand, there is a strong sense of urgency among city officials to nail down a police contract before the World Cup gets under way. On the other, they are concerned that elected officials not negotiate out of fear. As a result, relations between the mayor and the council during the police talks have had a roller-coaster feel to them. At the top, they have been united in their opposition to the police union’s blackmail threats; at the bottom, Riordan has ignored the council’s role in the negotiations.

Officially, responsibility for a contract rests in the City Council, with the city’s chief administrative officer doing the bargaining. Real negotiating power, however, resides in the Executive Employee Relations Committee, whose membership is the mayor, the president and pro tem of the council and the chairpersons of the budget and personnel committees. Yet, these five officials cannot seal the deal. Only the council can do that.

This has proved to be too small a box for a mayor like Riordan. No matter how persuasive and aggressive he has been as a member of the negotiating committee, he still has only one vote. And the City Council is certainly going to jealousy guard its contract responsibilities.

Late last week, this imbalance of authority produced a new twist. The city may not be able to afford Riordan’s offer but the council naysayers apparently don’t have enough votes to torpedo the contract. The mayor’s quest to get something done may have been achieved by bending the rules of accounting, with the taxpayers possibly picking up the bill.

Still, even in the best of all worlds, the nature of the leadership in the Police Protective League and, beyond that, the culture of the Los Angeles Police Department are at odds with the goal of an urban police department charged with maintaining law and order. Clearly, there is division within the union that makes negotiating with it like talking to a two-headed dragon.

The dispute over money, at least in part, is one over control within the LAPD. In many ways, it is a surrogate for cultural tensions within the department and between the department and the city. No one knows how large the militant faction within the department is. Some long-time LAPD observers call them “radicals” and “rednecks.” To use more neutral language, they are “middle-level management”--the detectives and desk sergeants who made it off the street and part way up the command ladder.

The culture they and their former chief created is rough, undisciplined and deeply resentful of outsiders. It is manifested in roll calls at which lieutenants keep their mouths shut while officers blast off at anybody and anyone who annoys them. It is manifested in the police-abuse complaints of citizens. It was documented in the Christopher commission report.

These officers are angry, frustrated and probably fearful of the changes ahead, especially the prospect of returning to the streets to work with communities they know only in terms of random violence and gangs. They have been obsessed with matching, if not beating, the wage contract won by employees of the Department of Water and Power. In their single-minded pursuit of this objective, the rest of city has not mattered. They have behaved like an army that does not recognize the superiority of civil authority. The resulting loss of public support may further erode departmental morale.

If the mayor had broader authority to negotiate contracts with city employees, he could be held accountable for the outcome. The process would be more direct and would eliminate half the debate now going on about who said what to whom, and who overstepped which bounds. Attention would be focused on whether the deal was a good one.

The city simply does not have the luxury of sustaining its diffused authority and ambling decision-making procedures. It needs machinery that allows it to be able to make decisions, to allocate its limited resources and focus on the future. Short of that, the city may now face the prospect of giving cops a raise at the cost of reduced police protection.*