Police Panel Meets Strong Opposition in New Push for Reforms : LAPD: Leader of officers union assails effort as ‘a blueprint of negativity and micro-management.’

A public hearing on an aggressive Los Angeles Police Commission plan to push some long-delayed reforms through the Police Department produced fresh evidence Tuesday of the difficulty of the task--notably a huge chasm between the increasingly activist civilian commission and the leadership of the department’s rank-and-file.

In a statement notable for its bitterness, Cliff Ruff, president of the 7,000-member police union, attacked commissioners for not attending a ceremony this week in honor of a slain police officer, then slammed them for trying to implement “negative programs to second-guess what police officers do.”

“None of you have any concept of what the street cop goes though,” Ruff said. “We have a devastating morale problem contributing to the worst attrition rate ever on this job, and your response is a blueprint of negativity and micro-management.”

Ruff was referring to a newly minted, highly detailed Police Commission plan to implement the 4-year-old Christopher Commission recommendations aimed at overhauling the organizational culture of the Los Angeles Police Department, ending tolerance for prejudice and brutality and promoting the idea of accountability to civilians through community-based policing.

Ruff took a moment to go after Warren Christopher, the lawyer who headed the citizens panel that examined the LAPD in the wake of the Rodney G. King beating.

“Is Warren Christopher (now U.S. secretary of state) going to do to Los Angeles what he did to Yugoslavia?” Ruff asked, apparently referring to failed efforts to resolve the war raging in the Balkans. “Ask yourself, as you go through this, why would anyone want to work here?”

Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, the police commissioner who has taken the lead on the Christopher Commission reforms, opened the hearing by saying that the Police Department has “tried to protect itself from real systemic change.”

As a result, he said, the Police Commission decided to step in, prioritize the reforms and give top LAPD managers deadlines to put them into practice.

This is a departure from standard practice for the part-time, mayoral-appointed commission, which serves by law as the department’s head, but traditionally has been handicapped in asserting itself because it has had little staff and has had to depend for information on LAPD officers.

Recently, however, the commission expanded its staff in accordance with a Christopher Commission recommendation, and has moved to check independently on what the Police Department claims has been accomplished.

That checking has produced disappointment and frustration as commission staff members concluded again and again in written reports that they needed more information than the LAPD was providing to assess the degree to which reforms were in place. In some instances, staff questioned the veracity of LAPD officers’ claims that changes could not be made when it was the commission staff’s assessment that the changes were possible.

Explaining the commission’s newfound resolve, Greenebaum said in an interview this week that police managers have engaged in “serious attempts at obfuscation” and that some reforms have been “bottlenecked close to the top of the department” by the LAPD’s command staff.

Capt. Forrest Lewallen, head of the 90-member Los Angeles Police Command Officers Assn., said at the public hearing Tuesday that members of his organization have been unfairly tarred. They support the reforms and Police Chief Willie L. Williams’ efforts to implement them, he said.

Williams, meanwhile, told the commission that substantial progress has been made.

He cited figures showing that the number of serious crimes reported in the city are down for the third year in a row; that the number of incidents in which officers resorted to force declined 13% from 1993 to 1994; that pepper spray has replaced the baton as the weapon of choice when lethal force is not required; that officer-involved shootings have decreased from 162 in 1992 to 111 last year, and that complaints against police officers alleging misconduct have fallen from nearly 3,000 in 1992 to 2,000 last year.