Kroeker Begins His ‘Transfer’

Outgoing Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Mark Kroeker hunkered over his living room coffee table, peering down at a map of Bosnia and speaking energetically about the region’s political complexities and challenges when suddenly he stopped in mid-sentence.

“It makes me feel like a rookie again,” he observed between packing suitcases of spare clothes, classical music recordings and family photographs. “I feel the excitement I did just before I joined the LAPD.”

Kroeker, recently passed over for the LAPD’s top job, was talking about his decision to leave his employer of 32 years to become deputy commissioner for the United Nations International Police Task Force in Bosnia.

He spent the weekend at his Santa Clarita home packing, and used his hours Monday saying goodbyes to colleagues at work and at an evening reception.

Kroeker sees the move as a “transfer” of his duties in Los Angeles, a continuation of his career as a public servant. Kroeker was popular with both cops and the public, having been favored by a wide majority of the LAPD’s rank and file for the chief’s job.

“I’m not going off somewhere to feed the pigeons,” said Kroeker, 53, the son of missionaries who grew up to head the LAPD’s Valley and South bureaus. “I’m still a cop.”

Though Kroeker acknowledged concerns about the direction of the LAPD under Chief Bernard C. Parks, he refused to criticize the new chief or say how his own leadership might have been different.

“There are no ‘might have beens,’ ” Kroeker said during an interview in his Parker Center office on Monday, his last day as a Los Angeles police officer. “All we have is what is. And I’d rather deal with that. The wisest thing, in my view, is to the let the chief be the chief.”

If Kroeker’s thoughts have not already turned to his new assignment, they soon will.

He boards a plane today for Washington, where he will be briefed by State Department officials on his new assignment--training municipal law enforcement officers. After more meetings in New York on Friday, he’s bound for Sarajevo, where he already has a dinner appointment for Sunday evening.

Kroeker has spent the past few days reading government reports and searching the World Wide Web for newspaper articles and other information on a region he describes as “the great unknown.” Kroeker is packing several LAPD manuals and policy books to help him guide the way.

“As complicated a situation as Los Angeles is, it’s a known quantity for me,” Kroeker said. “Certainly, in the Bosnia equation, I’m a rookie. I’ll need to be doing a lot of listening, a lot of paying attention, just like when I started at the department.”

Kroeker said he received about a half-dozen job offers since Mayor Richard Riordan selected Parks for the chief’s job in August. The United Nations job, he said, was not one he could let go by.

“I tried this one on and it fits,” said Kroeker, who was raised in Africa and Europe by Mennonite missionaries and has previously served as an international police advisor in Haiti, Rwanda and Burundi. “It’s irresistible. There is a whole people in need over there . . . and everything they are trying to do comes down to the cop on the beat.”

On Sunday, as he packed the few belongings he’ll bring with him to Bosnia, Kroeker reached for a wood carving he brought back from Haiti that sits atop his fireplace. how long going for

It’s a man with his arm around his wife and child.

“To me, that’s what it’s all about--the unity and safety of the family,” he said. “Whether it’s the streets of L.A. or the streets of Bosnia that should be the objective, and that is my goal.”

At the same time, because of safety factors and the possible short-term length of his post, Kroeker will be departing for the new job without his own family. He said he will miss his wife, Diane, with whom he is “madly, madly in love,” and his three children, one of whom, Katrina, is a Los Angeles police officer. Kroeker said he will reassess his new job after some months there.

Besides his family, he says he will miss most the “front-line officers who are out there doing it everyday.”

His voice getting emotional at the end of his last work day in Los Angeles, Kroeker said, “I love the LAPD. There’s nothing like it anywhere in the world.”