LAPD Will Get Reform Deadlines : Law enforcement: Police panel will prod department to speed up implementation of Christopher Commission proposals. Reducing excessive force tops list.

Fed up with the Los Angeles Police Department’s slow pace in implementing many Christopher Commission reforms, the civilian Police Commission has decided to flex its muscle by giving top department officials deadlines to put a handful of the key changes in place.

Nearly four years after the Christopher Commission made its recommendations, the department continues to respond with “tolerance at best and in some cases antagonism,” said Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, the police commissioner overseeing implementation efforts.

Greenebaum said that police officials have often given muddled explanations on the state of the reforms. They claimed, for example, that some were in place when only a memorandum had been written, he said.

Some police officers in middle and upper management had engaged in “serious attempts at obfuscation” in dealing with the Police Commission, he said. “And certain people tried to bamboozle us,” he said, declining to be more specific.

Greenebaum, who has made a special project of ensuring that the Christopher Commission report does not gather dust on a shelf, said he believes Police Chief Willie L. Williams wants change. But he said Williams, brought in two years ago as the first outsider to head the department, “doesn’t have the solid backing of the command staff.” Change, Greenebaum said, has been “bottle-necked close to the top.”

The Christopher Commission, headed by Warren Christopher, a lawyer who has since become U.S. secretary of state, was formed to study the department after the videotaped beating of Rodney G. King. It concluded after a 100-day investigation that a fundamental change was needed in the attitude of the department’s leadership to combat a problem of excessive force by many officers. It also reported that racism and sexism were widespread in the department and made more than 100 recommendations to address those problems.

Greenebaum estimated Monday that at most 40% of the recommendations have been put into practice.

“There’s still a community sense of a lack of trust in the LAPD,” he said.

To prod the department, he said the Police Commission has prioritized what remains to be done and assigned deadlines. It has also announced that it intends to hold top officials, starting with the chief, accountable for implementation.

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The commission’s five top reforms are:

* Taking steps by Dec. 1 aimed at reducing excessive force.

* Changing the personnel evaluation system by January, 1996, to hold supervisors accountable for the poor behavior of those they promote.

* Incorporating by June, 1996, “principles of cultural and gender equity” into systems for making assignments, evaluating performance and imposing discipline.

* Giving patrol officers by June, 1996, more flexibility to address neighborhood problems “without being required to obtain prior approval for each action via a cumbersome chain of command.”

* And by July, 1996, making the department’s internal disciplinary system fair.

The Police Commission is holding a public hearing on these priorities, as well as on a 46-page step-by-step analysis of how to implement them, at Downtown police headquarters today.

The department’s chief spokesman, Cmdr. Tim McBride, responded Monday: “The Department’s position is that we have made great progress in each of these five areas as well as a good percentage of the rest of the Christopher Commission recommendations.”

McBride noted that a top official has been named the Police Department’s community policing czar, an in-service training program has been designed to promote awareness of various cultures, some disciplinary procedures have been revamped and officers now know in advance what sorts of penalties they will face for breaking various rules. He said the department also has been considering how to evaluate officers to encourage community policing--for example, by not punishing officers who spend time solving neighborhood problems even if this means they make fewer arrests.