Laughing in the Face of the Bureaucracy

You have to understand the bureaucratic mind, and its paranoid fear of the media, to comprehend why Randy Mehringer was denied a job as a police officer because he told a racial joke.

Unless there is more to the story than we’ve been told, a Los Angeles Police Department job interviewer asked Mehringer if he had ever told a racial joke. It so happens that Mehringer, while working out at the gym, had offered up to a couple of friends a bum joke about the Million Man March.

Wanting to be truthful, he told the interviewer about it. Afterward, he received a letter from the city telling him that he was rejected because of his “racially derogatory comments.”

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This didn’t make a lot of sense. The 27-year-old Mehringer had been a reserve police officer for two years as he tried for a regular spot. One of his supervisors, Sgt. George Hoopes, an African American, had said he was a “peer favorite” who “harbors no hidden animosity for any minority group.”

You’d think someone from the city would have talked to Hoopes and others instead of making up their minds to blackball Mehringer on the basis of a joke.

But as I watched a City Council committee probe the matter Monday, I realized that government doesn’t work that way. Sitting there, I developed my own theory of what happened, based on my years of covering the bureaucracy. Afterward, I ran it by an inside source who said I was on target.

If I am, it’s because of a longtime familiarity with an important precept of any bureaucracy, whether it be public or private--C.Y.A., or as they say in this family newspaper, C.Y.B.--Cover Your Behind.

Here’s what I think happened:

When Mehringer told about the joke, cold fear gripped the heart and bowels of the interviewer and others who processed Mehringer’s job application.

I can visualize the way they stewed and agonized. What if we hire him and, seven years down the road, Mehringer turns out to be another Mark Fuhrman? Given what his friends, co-workers and family say about the young man, this doesn’t seem likely. But just suppose, as the officials looked ahead, they visualized this unlikely event occurring. What would happen, they may have worried, if he beat an African American?

Bureaucratic minds see everything in terms of meltdown. They are obsessed with the worst-case scenario.

The Times would assign a team of reporters to the case. An editor would demand that the reporters find out who was responsible for permitting him on the department. “I want names,” the editor would scream.

In the manner of their craft, the journalists would dig through seven-year-old records until they found whoever approved hiring Mehringer. Suddenly, this person--perhaps by this time several rungs higher on the city government ladder--would end up on Page 1 of the newspaper. Later, the television cameras would be waiting. A career would be in ruins.

Moreover, if this case ended up in court, with someone suing the city, then hiring Mehringer would increase the city’s liability.

As I said, this scenario is pure fantasy. Nobody would be stupid enough to base official action on it unless they were paralyzed by the C.Y.A. doctrine.

After Mehringer was rejected by the department, members of the City Council Personnel Committee were clearly concerned that such chicken-hearted decision making will wreck the Police Department’s efforts to recruit more police officers.

Councilwoman Laura Chick said she wants high-quality cops, but she said the city must “have a balanced view.” Rather than blackballing someone because of “an isolated incident,” she said city personnel people should look at an applicant’s entire life in the outside world.

“Are we dinging people for trivial reasons? “ asked Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg.

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Meanwhile, Mehringer continues to serve as a reserve police officer in the Rampart Division, one of the most dangerous in the city.

As a reserve, he’s out in patrol cars in the Rampart Division. He carries a gun. He wears the same uniform as a regular cop. He does the same risky work. Racial tension is a daily and nightly backdrop to his work.

He’s good enough for the reserves, it appears, but not for the department.

The past weeks have been rough on him and his family. His father, Bud, a 28-year LAPD veteran in charge of West Valley juvenile detectives, and his mother, Kathy, a corporate vice president, were at the meeting when the committee discussed Mehringer’s case.

“He’s heartbroken,” the father told reporters afterward. “This has been a tragedy for our family.”

But “the system is going to work,” Detective Mehringer said. “I have been here 28 years. I have faith in my department and faith in the city.”