Once Burned by Limelight, Parks Is Taking Nothing for Granted

Five years ago, under a different set of rules, in a very different climate, Bernard Parks was in the same position he is in today: a leading contender to become the next chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Colleagues slapped him on the back, civic leaders asked for favors, and even Parks couldn’t help but think the job was probably his. As it turned out, he came up one vote short, largely because the Police Commission and other city leaders wanted to bring in an outsider. After that disappointment, he was unceremoniously demoted by the man who won the chief’s job, professionally stymied and publicly humiliated. Through it all, Parks persevered, determined to get another chance to become the department’s top cop.

The battle-scarred deputy chief isn’t taking anything for granted this go-round even though Mayor Richard Riordan--who will make the ultimate selection--is said by confidantes to be leaning toward selecting him. The Police Commission is interviewing six candidates and will forward the names of three finalists by July 29 to the mayor, whose choice must be approved by the City Council.

Parks’ tone these days is philosophical, his words are cautious and he talks of “five years of maturity, [and] five years of understanding.”

“Someone is going to make a decision and you have no control over it. You have to live by that decision and spending a lot of time and energy on that part is a waste of time,” said Parks, 53. “The most you can do is be yourself and live by your record.”

His record is an extensive one, consisting of 32 years of service at the LAPD. During those years he has attracted his share of supporters and enemies, earning a reputation as a tireless worker, a strict disciplinarian and a hands-on manager who pays uncommon attention to even the most minute details.

When a report was released last year on the progress the LAPD had made on reforms since the Rodney G. King beating, Parks was the only command officer who seemed to study it intently, the author said.

“Parks was the only one who prepared a reaction to my report and invited me in to discuss it,” said attorney Merrick Bobb, who works as special counsel for the Police Commission.

Bobb said Parks showed up to the meeting with a copy of the report with pages dogeared and passages underlined to discuss the findings he agreed with and others he disputed.

As with the findings in that report, Parks doesn’t take criticism of the department lightly. He is a staunch defender of the department and believes that the LAPD remains a trend-setter in law enforcement. He also does not believe that problems of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and racism are as bad as some department critics contend.

Parks said reforms for the sake of reform are unnecessary at the LAPD. The department, he said, needs to “narrow down the recommendations” that came from the 1991 Christopher Commission reform panel, “so that they are in a workable order and we can come to a conclusion on them.”

Such views are unsettling to some reform advocates, who take a much tougher line and believe the department still has a ways to go on issues of discrimination, harassment, excessive force and accountability.

“Everybody looks at Parks and wonders if he is going to be progressive in [the] area of reforms or take the department back to the dark ages,” said one department observer.

Parks’ supporters contend that he is one of the LAPD’s most ardent advocates of reform, but does not seek credit for his efforts.

“I’m not going to sit here and spend a lot of time trashing the LAPD,” Parks said in a recent interview from his sixth-floor Parker Center office. “On the other hand . . . I’ll spend a lot of time working on problems and getting results.”

Among his accomplishments, he said, is conducting one of the most thorough audits in LAPD history, focusing on sexual harassment at the West Los Angeles station, investigating police misconduct allegations made by former LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman and providing career opportunities for minority officers.

Three years ago, the police officers union accused him of reverse discrimination stemmingfrom promotions in the narcotics division.

Parks effectively silenced the union’s attack by pointing out that the association, at that time, had never had a black or female director.

If anyone is sensitive to the concerns of minorities in law enforcement, supporters say, it is Parks, who has doggedly risen through the ranks of a department that has few faces of color in command positions. If he becomes chief, he said, he would make sure that every employee has an equal opportunity for advancement and he would not tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind.

Additionally, Parks said, as chief he would make the mental health of LAPD employees a priority because he believes many personnel problems occur because of stress related to the job. Healthier officers, he said, will work better with their colleagues and provide better service, which Parks said is the bottom line in police work.

“The community only wants three things from police,” said Parks, paraphrasing UCLA professor James Q. Wilson, an intellectual force behind community-based policing. “They want you to arrive when they call, they want you to solve their problems and treat them properly. . . . The key is that we owe them that in the sense that they pay a billion dollars a year to employ this organization.”

The youngest of four children, Parks grew up in South-Central Los Angeles and has lived in the city for his entire life. Parks, whose father was a police sergeant for the Harbor Department, says family is very important to him.

Indeed, friends and acquaintances say his wife, Bobbie, is Parks’ strongest cheerleader in his quest for the LAPD top job. According to some observers, she made no secret of her unhappiness with the mayor and then-Chief Willie L. Williams when her husband was demoted from the post of assistant chief to that of deputy chief. Williams made the move, suggesting that his top assistant, whom he promoted when he took office, was partly to blame for the department’s lack of progress in various areas.

Many department observers contend that Williams, not Parks, was to blame for any lack of progress. But several sources said that Parks undermined his boss, bad-mouthing his leadership behind closed doors. Parks denies it.

“Is it disloyal when a city official asks how the department is doing on particular issues and you tell the truth?” asked a department insider who is a Parks supporter. “If it is, then maybe he was.”

Parks put it this way: “If you don’t give [subordinates] direction . . . they certainly can’t be criticized if they missed the mark if they don’t know what the mark is.”

That won’t happen in his command, he said. The issue, he stated, comes down to three words: “Leadership, leadership, leadership.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Candidate Profile: Bernard Parks

Age: 53

Residence: Los Angeles

Education: Bachelor’s degree in public management, Pepperdine; master’s in public Administration, USC

Career highlights: Has held numerous assignments with the LAPD, including training, narcotics, patrol, detective and internal affairs work. Promoted to assistant chief under former Chief Willie Williams but demoted back to deputy chief two years later.

Interests: Golf, attending plays and community functions, spending time with his children and grandchildren

Family: Married, with four adult children, three daughters and one son.

Quote: “The community only wants three things from police: They want you to arrive when they call ... to solve their problems and treat them properly.. The key is that we owe them that in the sense that they pay a billion dollars a year to employ this organization.’

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Q&A;

Define community policing. What would you do to implement it?

“Any legal effort by the community and the police to solve problems by the integration and coordination of services.. Eventually we need to get to community-based government. [The police] are already decentralized, we’re already open 24 hours a day, we’re already organized by area, heavily involved in abatement problems and we already have a significant network of community people.. We can’t be in a position that leads people to believe community-based policing means we abdicate what we do.. We have a limit as to what we can do. If we don’t watch it, we’ll become everything to everybody, which we have no ability to deal with.’

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How would you gauge police productivity? What role do arrests play in that area?

“The worst thing you can do in police business is come up with one criterion. I think you have to have the normal things that we count, you have to know arrests, crime rate, but you have to go beyond crime rates.. You have to get into the fear of crime issue. I think you have to get into victimization studies to find out, ‘Are we even touching on all the victims or are we only getting to only one-third of the victims?’. We’ll have to get into some surveying of communities to understand what are they truly interested in.’

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What would you hope to accomplish in the first year of your adminsitration? What key reforms still need to be made?

“We need to raise the bar on the quality of service. We need to give the citizens of Los Angeles a much higher level of service. We need to work are our interpersonal relationships internally and carry over on how we treat people externally. We need to make sure everybody in this department believes they have an equal opportunity to be successful.. The No. 1 issue that I look at is the whole issue of behavioral science and the mental health of our employees . so we are not continually recycling employees who are ill-trained or untrained and keep creating problems internally and externally.’

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How would you deal with racism, sexism and discrimination within the department?

“There has to be a very clear message from the chief of police of fairness of equal opportunity. There has to be a very direct and very quick reaction when people act out differently than what the parameters are.’

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How would you hold captains, lieutenants and sergeants accountable for police effectiveness?

“In an organization this big the two most important points for accountability are the chief level and the captain level. . . I think that captains and deputy chiefs have to understand that they are responsible for everything that happens under their command. If something goes haywire, as it always will, they have to be able to articulate what it is that is in place that reduced the negative impact or helped resolve [the problem] in some fashion. They can’t say it just happened and we don’t know why and we don’t know how to correct it.’