Mader’s Ouster Could Hinder Police Reforms

The ouster of Katherine Mader as inspector general of the Los Angeles Police Department represents a pivotal moment in the long struggle for civilian control of the LAPD.

Stripped of nuance, it means that the civilians have lost; the uniforms have won.

As the department’s first inspector general, Mader had what turned out to be an impossible job. She was sent to penetrate an entrenched, openly hostile bureaucracy, and bring accountability to an institution accustomed to answering to itself.

She had some remarkable successes. She exposed, for example, the special rules that Los Angeles police used when one of their own broke the law by beating a spouse. Under those rules, there were few prosecutions.

But Mader, personally aggressive and politically unsophisticated, lost the support of the civilian Police Commission when the man who hired and protected her, Raymond C. Fisher, gave up the commission’s presidency and his private law practice last year to take a job in Washington as associate attorney general in the Justice Department.

The dynamic Fisher, an appointee of Mayor Richard Riordan, was replaced by another lawyer and Riordan appointee, Edith Perez, under whom the commission reverted to its traditional, non-adversarial, nearly reverential relationship with the Los Angeles police chief. In part, this reversion is attributable to the forceful personality and competence of the current chief, Bernard C. Parks. He has a well-worked agenda for the department, which comes as a relief to commissioners uncertain about their own reform agenda.

In such an admiring atmosphere, Mader’s unsavvy political presence and headstrong ways were irritating reminders that three’s a crowd.

In the short term, her ouster may pose no threat to the public interest. Parks is a ramrod-straight micro-manager and a strict disciplinarian, who by most accounts is doing a good job of restoring credibility and pride to a department that has been relentlessly criticized for years. In fact, he is so strong on discipline that even the police union wants an independent inspector general to check up on him.

But in the long term Mader’s resignation under pressure could create the impression that police misconduct is again being tolerated in a city where it has twice helped trigger deadly riots in less than 30 years.

Perhaps acting out of a short-term desire to protect and comfort the chief it named, the Police Commission not only has succeeded in forcing out Mader. It also has undercut itself by making a remarkable parallel effort through the charter reform process to limit the independence of Mader’s successors. If that effort were to succeed, the inspector general no longer could provide either the commissioners or the public with a reliably clear window on the Police Department.

The commission’s efforts to, in effect, cripple itself are in one sense bewildering. But they also offer an unmistakable lesson: It takes dramatic events like the Rodney King beating to bring about reform. Erosion, however, can sweep reform away with hardly any drama at all.

Parks undercut Mader by simply refusing to have anything to do with her. His legal overseers on the Police Commission let him get away with it.

Concerns About Future

What happens the next time, if the chief is not as good as Parks?

If this Police Commission persists in its current approach, the powers of the independent civilian watchdog to keep such a chief in check will by then be badly weakened.

The apparent point person behind this weakening is Police Commission Executive Director Joe Gunn, himself a former police commander and deputy mayor to Riordan, who pushed for Parks’ selection as chief and has openly tried to rein in Mader.

Gunn, on behalf of the Police Commission, has asked the two other city commissions now drafting charter reforms to dilute the inspector general’s powers to operate independently. The Police Commission, according to the charter amendment that Gunn is seeking, wants the inspector general to report to the commission’s executive director rather than to the commission itself.

The appointed charter commission rejected this suggestion as contrary to the public interest because it would put the inspector general under the thumb of the commission’s executive director; the elected charter commission has not yet taken it up.

The remarkable thing is that the Police Commission made the suggestion at all.

Comprising civilians who are appointed by the mayor to serve part-time, the Police Commission historically has been flying blind because it lacked a strong, independent staff. It has been easily misled, unable to determine whether the department’s top brass were answering its questions truthfully--no small matter in a police bureaucracy known for heavy infighting.

In an attempt to give the commission and the public a reliable pair of eyes, a panel headed by former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, which was appointed to investigate the department in the wake of the King beating, recommended that the commission employ two key staffers: an executive director with an enhanced status and a powerful inspector general, with the authority to examine the disciplinary system. Voters approved the new arrangement.

But the current commission, in the words of a lawyer who worked with the Christopher Commission, seems bent on “poking out one of its own eyes. . . . I think their antipathy to [Mader] and their oversensitivity to criticism of the department has perhaps led them to ironically undermine their own independence.”

Parks, meanwhile, has shown that even without the Civil Service protection that voters also stripped from the police chief after the King beating, the office of chief in Los Angeles remains extraordinarily strong.

As former Chief Ed Davis once observed, he would rather be police chief than mayor, because he did not want to give up power. His assessment may still be true.