Many Masters Compete to Chart LAPD’s Course

Since wresting control of the Los Angeles Police Department from then-Chief Daryl F. Gates four years ago, the city’s political leadership has increasingly inserted itself into the department’s management, a development that reflects lukewarm confidence in the current chief and that police officials say has derailed efforts to tackle long-standing LAPD problems.

According to Police Department leaders, City Council members and sources close to Mayor Richard Riordan, politicians and political appointees in recent months have deluged the department with unsolicited advice, as well as demands for reports, studies and updates. Some of the requests are made through official channels; others are informal. All require staff time, and some affect such basics as the deployment of street cops and the missions they are assigned to handle.

In part, the cascade of requests reflects the city leadership’s concern about the department’s ability to lead itself, and in part it demonstrates the LAPD’s waning power. Once able to rebuff political interference, the Police Department now has tolerated it for so long that it no longer can hold off the politicians it once backed down.

Virtually everyone associated with the process has contributed to the growing stage-management of the LAPD:

* Mayor Riordan says he is committed to letting Police Chief Willie L. Williams run the department, but he and his aides have drawn fire for playing an active role in management decisions, largely because they lack faith in the chief’s abilities and worry that without their direction the LAPD would languish.

* Council members are quick to criticize the mayor and his commissioners for interfering in the department’s inner workings, but they too have ordered up studies, consultants and other projects because, like the mayor and some commissioners, many of them worry about the LAPD’s ability to carry out certain missions.

* Williams’ aides complain about outside interference, but they have failed to meet deadlines, produced reports that do not answer the questions asked by political figures and dawdled with programs considered important by the city leadership.

Combined, those factors have resulted in a flood of new demands on the Police Department. By last year, the chief’s office counted 55 reports and projects that the LAPD was undertaking at the behest of the mayor, council or Police Commission. A copy of the chief’s list obtained by The Times shows that the projects ranged from the broad (updates on the department’s diversity and expansion efforts) to the picayune (studies on the LAPD’s bottled water policy and its home-garaging of Police Department cars).

And that does not include the dozen or so consultants at work at any given time or the numerous community focus groups that have suggested ideas of their own. It also does not count informal requests by council members and others, nor does it include the demands placed on the LAPD by agencies such as the Justice Department, which is probing police records for possible evidence of civil rights violations.

“It is overwhelming,” said one top LAPD official. “It’s been allowed to creep up on us, and now it’s to the point where almost all we do is respond to requests and prepare for hearings. There’s no time for planning. There’s no pursuit of a central mission.”

With few exceptions, top police officials say the result has been a department almost permanently on the defensive, unable to gain its footing during the five years since the beating of Rodney G. King, the retirement of Gates and the appointment of Williams. Some department brass blame Williams, others gripe about the mayor and ambitious council members. Still others suggest that the reform measures of the early 1990s created a weakened office for the chief of police, one in which any LAPD leader would struggle with political pressure.

Whatever the causes, the results are beginning to show.

“The department is under incredible strain to grow quickly, and then there are all of these other things: shootings, work force parity, use of force. We say, ‘Hire faster’ and then say, ‘Don’t hire any more problem officers.’ We want them to implement community policing, modernize, end sexual harassment and discrimination, do this, do that,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick, who heads the Public Safety Committee and who has recently clashed with police commissioners as she struggles to exercise department oversight without stepping over the line into political meddling.

Chick acknowledged that two major consulting projects at the LAPD are underway at least in part because of her efforts and that she has aggressively sought out information about the department’s inner workings. Still, despite some criticism of her approach, Chick conceded that politicians should not be directing the day-to-day activities of the city’s police force.

“We have to be careful,” she added. “Or just the stress alone is going to wreak havoc on the department.”

The Vote for Change

Until 1992, the city’s chief of police served without limits on his tenure. The chief could be fired, but it was difficult to do and could not be done without cause.

That all changed when voters approved Charter Amendment F, a reform measure that implemented some of the recommendations of the Christopher Commission, the blue-ribbon panel whose report charted the city’s reform efforts. Among other things, the measure established a five-year term for the chief of police and limited the chief to serving a maximum of two such terms.

Williams was the first chief selected under those rules.

Even reform supporters acknowledge that the term limits place Williams in a difficult position. The politicians making requests are the same ones who could soon rule on his request to serve a second five-year stay at the LAPD’s helm. How, reform critics ask, can Williams be expected to say no to those people?

Not that politicians only now are taking an active interest in the Police Department. Gates, for one, used to lecture his captains on “the care and feeding of your city councilman.”

But the ex-chief said he believes the reforms of the early 1990s fundamentally altered the city’s balance of power, a view privately echoed by a number of city leaders but expressed with particular venom by Gates.

He blames the backers of the reform initiative for what he calls “a horrible mistake.” He calls Warren Christopher, the secretary of state and chairman of the reform commission, “ignorant.” And he accuses others, especially The Times, of backing a misguided effort to overhaul the LAPD.

“This all goes back to Proposition F, the recommendations of the Christopher Commission and the support of the L.A. Times,” Gates said. “They took away the chief’s ability to say no to politicians. Williams is not able to say no if he wants another five years.”

Although Gates and some city officials blame the Christopher Commission and its reform plan for weakening the office of the chief of police, others say the problems stem from Williams, not from the office he inhabits or the rules that govern it. Retired Chief Edward M. Davis, for instance, brooked little insolence from the mayor and council. But Davis left after eight years as chief, and he supported the five-year term and the two-term limit; in fact, he proposed them.

Likewise, former Police Commission President Gary Greenebaum said the real problem is not with the department’s structure or with the voter-approved reforms; it is with the chief.

“There is almost an abdication of leadership on the part of the chief in many respects,” said Greenebaum, who was a major backer of the reform measures and was Riordan’s first commission president. “Certain people have stepped in to try to salvage things. And other people may have tried to take advantage of it.”

Williams, who declined to comment for this article, sees nothing wrong with outsiders playing a role in LAPD management.

“To some police officers, just having their chief deal with politicians is viewed as morally corrupt,” Williams wrote in a manuscript for his soon-to-be-released autobiography, a copy of which was sent to The Times. “I had to get across to my new department that we were not an island, but a landlocked continent. . . . We were part of city government, not apart from it. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to live in a city where the citizens do not have ultimate control of the police through their elected and appointed representatives.”

New Assertiveness

No issue has more thoroughly dominated Williams’ tenure or defined his reason for being selected as the LAPD’s chief than the call for police reform. But time and again, responsibility for managing that process has been transferred from the department to the commission or to others.

Take, for example, a highly touted pair of innovations: a computer system to track potential problem officers and a unit to investigate sexual harassment and discrimination.

Police commissioners grew so frustrated by the department’s inability to develop the computer system--and by City Hall’s refusal to pay for it--that the commission dipped into its own tiny budget. Similarly, the city government never paid for the harassment unit, so it remains dormant; nevertheless, in a gesture of no-confidence in the Police Department, the commission has insisted that once it is funded, that unit will report to the commission, not the chief.

Meanwhile, the city has found millions to support other LAPD programs, expanding the size of the department and reoutfitting officers with better cars and equipment. As with other areas, that shift in priorities reflects a combination of willful politicians--Riordan has doggedly advanced his LAPD expansion agenda--and less forceful Police Department leaders, who have done little to promote some of the reform proposals.

Even the monitoring of the Christopher Commission reforms has slipped away from the LAPD. At first, the department tracked progress toward implementation of the reforms, but members of the Police Commission eventually grew frustrated with the department’s work. Last year, the commissioners finally gave up, formed their own task forces and hired an outside consultant to do the work that they believed the department was failing to perform.

“We can’t just sit here and do nothing,” one commissioner insisted. “Someone has to see that these problems are addressed.”

As some programs and proposals have languished, new priorities have supplanted them. The O.J. Simpson murder trial focused attention on the failings of the crime lab, so city officials offered competing plans to retool that unit. Just last week, The Times reported a dramatic drop in LAPD arrests over the last five years; an angry Riordan asked the Police Commission to study the decline, and Commission President Deirdre Hill responded by pledging to form a task force and report to the mayor.

More broadly, Riordan’s pledge to add 3,000 officers to the department ranks--an idea that Williams initially opposed but then came to endorse--has dominated budget considerations and will play an even more significant role in upcoming years as federal money for the expansion dries up.

Since taking office in 1993, Riordan has spearheaded an enormous public investment in the Police Department, bestowing the LAPD with record-breaking budgets, hundreds of additional officers, new police cars, new computers and swollen overtime budgets. Given all that, the mayor said it is fair for taxpayers to expect results.

“I think the public has a right to ask questions such as: Why are arrests down 35% when the number of officers is up 18%? And why do the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the New York Police Department have increases in arrests? . . . And on traffic, what possible explanation would there be for traffic [citations] being down when even the most casual observer sees greater and greater disconcern for traffic laws?”

Across the city, meanwhile, individual council members and community groups have staked their claim to pet projects.

One council member called top officials in the LAPD’s West Bureau to propose new ways of managing overtime; Police Department managers agreed to study it. Another asked captains in her district to assign officers to dealing with illegally discarded tires; a task force was formed. Still another complained about an increase in thefts of bottles from recycling bins; a commander was assigned.

And when the Police Department moved slowly to enforce curfews for young people, Police Commissioner Edith R. Perez stepped in with a plan of her own, going so far as to elicit the American Civil Liberties Union’s input and support. LAPD officials simultaneously complain about Perez’s interference and wonder why it took a commissioner’s intervention to get the program moving.

“The plates,” one command staffer sighed, “are spinning wildly.”

Commission’s Role

Today, many close observers of the Police Department believe that the LAPD is so buffeted by political requests that it has lost its ability to steer its own course. Others warn that too many leaders could effectively leave the department leaderless.

“It’s extremely difficult for the department to have 21 bosses,” said Commission President Hill, a reference to the five commissioners, 15 council members and the mayor. “Everyone is extremely enthusiastic about their own ideas. The challenge is not to micro-manage while still leading.”

That challenge is felt with special intensity at the Police Commission, whose five civilian members are charged with oversight of the department. Hill and other longtime backers of LAPD reform believe that effective management of the Police Department requires a strong and independent Police Commission. That was the vision of the Christopher Commission, and it is an idea endorsed, at least in principle, by most city leaders, who acknowledge that some previous police commissions have not risen to that challenge.

“In concept, the Police Commission is intended to function much like a corporate board of directors,” the Christopher Commission noted in 1991. “In practice, the Police Commission’s authority has proved illusory.”

As a result, where some observers say the City Council’s role in Police Department affairs is unwelcome and the mayor’s is unexpected, those same critics say the commission’s is merely overdue.

“The Police Commission ultimately is responsible for the management of the Police Department,” Hill said. “We have to hold the chief and command staff accountable. We have not been a rubber stamp. And we won’t be.”

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LAPD Workload

In recent years, the Los Angeles Police Department has been deluged by mandates from the mayor, the City Council and the Police Commission. In 1995, Police Chief Willie L. Williams’ staff compiled a list of mandated projects and reports. Here are excerpts:

Mandated by Mayor Richard Riordan:

* Public safety plan

* City response to imminent earthquake alert

* Minority business opportunity committee report

* Bottled water policy

* Court overtime survey

Mandated by City Council

* Monthly response time report

* Fleet status report

* Biweekly status reports on black-and-white vehicles

* New technology implementation

Mandated by Police Commission

* Affirmative action goals

* Christopher Commission report--updates on progress

* Evaluation of sirens

* Cost analysis--special events

* Request for computer equipment

* Cost analysis--home garaging

Note: Listed are samples from each group. In addition, other reports and projects are being tackled by the Police Department in response to requests from city departments, community groups and others.