Riordan Creates a New Role in Pushing LAPD Shake-Up

When Mayor Richard Riordan told Chief Willie L. Williams to speed up his leisurely efforts to reorganize the Los Angeles Police Department and put more cops on the street, he reversed the policies of his predecessors, who pretty much kept hands off the LAPD.

Riordan is trying to play down his part in the shake-up that Williams announced Tuesday, saying only, “I’m going to beat around the bush on that.”

But his aides eagerly confirmed that their boss and his advisers have for months been prodding Williams into revamping the management of a department that failed the test of the 1992 riot.

In Tuesday’s shake-up, Williams demoted his top aide, Assistant Chief Bernard C. Parks, a powerful LAPD veteran. The chief said he had lost confidence in Parks.

He elevated LAPD Chief of Staff Ronald Banks to a new No. 2 job, first assistant chief in charge of all department operations. Another change was the promotion of Cmdr. David J. Gascon, who has markedly improved the department’s public relations, to deputy chief. He’ll supervise implementation of Riordan’s Public Safety Plan, a program to increase the size and effectiveness of the patrol force.

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In the recent past, no Los Angeles mayor has pushed a police chief into doing anything, much less reorganize his department.

Under Riordan’s immediate predecessors--Tom Bradley and Sam Yorty--the police chief was more powerful than the mayor. Years of police corruption had given the town a taste for a Man-on-Horseback kind of chief, a tough dictator who would keep the mob out of the city and crooked cops off the force. A city Charter provision made it all but impossible to remove a police chief.

Chief Bill Parker created the pattern. He imposed ironclad, top-to-bottom discipline, enforced by completely loyal subordinates and relentless internal affairs investigators. The mayor and other politicians ceded power to him in return for a promise of honest cops.

While Yorty went along completely, the liberal Bradley, a former cop, initially tried to modify the Police Department’s right-wing tendencies but gave up. He hadn’t been on speaking terms with Police Chief Daryl F. Gates for a year before the riots and this hurt government efforts to cope with city tensions.

But the police beating of Rodney G. King and the riots changed the popular view that the Police Department should be independent of the mayor and City Council. Over Gates’ vociferous objections, the voters approved a ballot measure that gave the mayor power to hire and fire the police chief. In addition, the chief is now hired for a five-year term, with an option for another five. The voters had spoken. In this big and complicated city, the cops are now accountable to elected officials.

Riordan said Wednesday that he hopes the reorganization will bring efficiency to a command structure designed more than 40 years ago, when L.A. was a smaller and simpler place.

“It became like a pyramid structure, where so much power was given to the chief and very little delegated down into the broad areas of the city and particularly down to the middle management and lower-middle management,” the mayor said. “Today, the power is too centralized to do a good job.”

I asked him if he thought Williams would leave after his first term is completed. “I hope not,” he said.

But Riordan seemed to share his aides’ feelings that Williams needs some management assistance.

“The chief of police is a lot like a mayor or President of the United States, where they are expected to be a great charismatic leader, a symbol of the Police Department, to be out talking to community groups, the troops. And you’re also expected to be an expert manager,” said Riordan. “Rarely in the history of the world are those talents found in one person.”

He said the Williams plan will disperse power in the department down to captains and other middle and lower managers, leaving the chief free to be “out there as a symbol.”

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So Williams has given the hands-on job of making changes to Ronald Banks, a man he has grown to trust. And he has swept aside someone whom he had come to view as an obstructionist, Bernard Parks. All of this, with Riordan’s blessings.

The mayor said he’ll try to persuade council members to support Williams’ plan. “I’ll say to the City Council, ‘Whether you agree with the chief or not, don’t micro-manage the department. My job and your job is to judge the performance of the chief, and how can you judge his performance unless you give him the freedom to perform?’ ”

This sounds like the kind of endorsement a college athletic director gives a football coach with a 5-6 record. In his oblique way, the mayor is telling Williams to fix the department or else. That’s a huge change for Los Angeles.