The Myth Unravels

I have long maintained the eccentric belief that Jack Webb invented modern Los Angeles. Remember those opening monologues in “Dragnet” where Webb’s alter ego, Joe Friday, delivered his mini-sermon each week about the city? That monologue was the device he used to define us way back in the 1950s.

The camera would pan over L.A., and Joe Friday would describe a city composed equally of grifting hoodwinkers and fear-struck citizens. The fear-struck types were always peeping out of their doors with the night chains locked.

That part of the message was common enough, but the next part was startling, at least for the viewers in the old cities of the East Coast. The camera would switch to City Hall or Joe Friday’s headquarters, the just-built Parker Center, and reveal a new form of city government. Competent, even bland, this government stood free of the old corruptions of the East. Cops did not take bribes. Managers were promoted through merit. The city ruled with benign authority according to the best business principles.

Each week, millions listened to that monologue and accepted its message about the new mega-city on the West Coast. How strange L.A. must have seemed from the perspective of Philadelphia or Boston. In L.A., we built freeways that did not collapse because of cheap concrete. In L.A., the new painting contract for city schools did not go to the mayor’s nephew.

That idea of L.A. government has endured through the decades, more or less intact. And, more or less, the myth was true. But now, little by little, it has begun to unravel. Los Angeles has started to resemble its brother cities back East in its dithering, its smelly deals and its paralysis. Each week seems to bring new evidence of the change.

Last week, for example, we were treated to the amazing spectacle of a deputy district attorney allowing his daughter to accept a recording contract from Marion “Suge” Knight, even while the deputy oversaw Knight’s criminal probation.

“Suge” Knight, of course, is the owner of Death Row Records and was the companion of rapper Tupac Shakur the night he was gunned down in Vegas. Lawrence M. Longo, the deputy D.A., saw fit not only to let his daughter accept Knight’s largess but also to rent his Malibu house to Knight’s attorney, who then turned the house over to Knight himself.

And no ordinary house was this. Sitting in the midst of Malibu Colony, such a house typically rents for $30,000 to $50,000 a month. So what is Longo’s defense? “I told ‘Suge’ Knight he was not going to get any special treatment from me,” Longo said. “That’s all there is to it.”

As an explanation, it almost takes your breath away. Still, it’s better than the explanation we’ve gotten from the D.A. himself, Gil Garcetti, who removed Longo from the Knight case in September but chose not to reveal the dismissal to anyone, including the judge in the case, until reporters began to inquire.

Why did he decide to keep a scandal under wraps? Could it have to do with the fact that Garcetti is running for reelection and already bears the handicap of the O.J. failure? We don’t know. Thus far, Garcetti has stonewalled, saying only that “we are taking the matter very seriously.”

Thanks, Gil. Meanwhile, in other quarters, the collapse of L.A.’s subway project proceeds apace. Usually described as “the largest public works project in U.S. history,” our attempt to dig a subway could supply fodder for a bookshelf of comic novels. We have sucked whole streets into tunnel shafts and wasted so many millions in cost overruns that the federal government no longer trusts us with its money and cut this year’s appropriation in half.

Then comes the new director of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Joseph Drew, who was hired supposedly to cut the dithering. In one of his first decisions, Drew tried to award a contract to a firm run by friends of City Councilman and MTA board member Richard Alatorre, overruling his own experts in the process. The MTA is now awash in legal investigations of its own.

And so it goes. The city tries to build a new symphony hall, digs a hole in the ground and then stops. The county builds a jail and lets it stand empty. The mayor announces the city will not spend a dime on a new football stadium, and then announces a plan to lay out $100 million in city funds for a new basketball and hockey arena. Everything gets started, nothing gets finished.

Finally, we learn that the Police Commission apparently has decided to push out Willie L. Williams, L.A.’s police chief and inheritor of the Jack Webb mantle. Irony upon irony abounds in the Williams case. He came from the Eastern city of Philadelphia and was hired, in part, to break up the old-boy network of white officers who had controlled the LAPD since the days when Jack Webb made the department famous.

But the Willie Williams experiment, like so many other things, didn’t work out. The LAPD continues to drift, bogged in low morale and uncertainty over its direction.

And so with the city itself. Somewhere along the road, the old myth of Los Angeles died and nothing has come along to replace it. We drift, dither and tarnish ourselves a little more each week. Jack Webb, you wouldn’t recognize us.