Parks Lauded for Gains but Accused of Ignoring Public on Key Issues

In a spirited debate that spilled out into the hallway, the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission on Thursday heard testimony from police reformers who credited LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks with improving the agency’s relationship with city residents, but accused him of undermining community policing programs and brushing off concerns about racial profiling.

Parks, who also testified before the commission, dismissed department critics after the hearing as misinformed special interest groups and lawyers who have an interest in finding fault with the LAPD.

“We serve four million people in the city of Los Angeles,” Parks said. “We don’t serve the ACLU, we don’t serve individual lawyers who sue us.”

He accused the critics of glossing over significant achievements over the past several years, including dramatic drops in crime and sharp declines in the number of use-of-force incidents, as well as fewer officer-involved shootings and vehicle pursuits. At the same time, he said, arrests have gone up, public confidence in the department is high and the LAPD work force is becoming increasingly diverse, employing a higher percentage of women than any other large police agency in the state.

Several police activists and Parks were invited to address the commission as the final part of a four-day series of hearings examining the state of current race, ethnic and human relations in the city.

Joe R. Hicks, the executive director of the Human Relations Commission, said the testimony Thursday is “an indication of the gulf” between the LAPD and police reformers.

Although reformers applauded the LAPD’s accomplishments, they insisted that more work needs to be done to carry out police reforms detailed in the 1991 Christopher Commission report, which proposed a host of sweeping recommendations after the beating of Rodney G. King. Parks said the LAPD will never stop evolving and striving to improve.

“The organization is more coherently and capably directed than in years past,” said attorney Merrick Bobb, a police consultant who testified at the hearing. “At times, the LAPD still seems insular and smug--acting as if it has thought of everything first and never needs outside input.”

Bobb also said the civilian Police Commission, which oversees the department and the chief, “must step up to the role that the Christopher Commission outlined for it . . . [and] show convincingly it and the LAPD are performing as the community expects.”

Ramona Ripston, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, agreed that the LAPD is “a better department than it was before the Rodney King beating” and said Parks deserves credit. But, she added, the LAPD under Parks’ leadership “consistently turns a deaf ear to the community input, a lack of responsiveness that has proved a recipe for disaster in the past and could well spell disaster in the future.”

Some of the sharpest criticism of Parks centered on his changes to popular community policing programs, in which he sent some 170 community liaison officers back to patrol duties. Ripston said Parks failed to consult with residents before he made the move and continues to disregard their concerns.

She said the LAPD’s relations with the public “were harmed just as much by the department’s refusal to seriously consider community members’ opposition to the decision as they were by the decision itself.”

Parks said he is trying to broaden the concept of community policing to include every officer in the department instead of having it be the responsibility of a select few--some of whom, he added, just sat at a desk waiting for residents to call in complaints. For months, however, some residents have showed up at Police Commission and City Council meetings and bitterly complained that their crime and quality of life problems, which used to be handled by the so-called senior lead officers--now are being ignored.

Earlier this week, City Council members, apparently feeling the pressure from their constituents, also questioned Parks’ decision to reassign the senior lead officers, ordering him to review the effects of his change.

“We’re trying to move to a new generation of how we do policing and people still want police officers in a trailer so they can talk to them at their own devices and I think that’s ridiculous,” Parks said.

Ripston, Bobb and civil rights attorney Constance Rice said the LAPD, like other law enforcement agencies throughout the nation, still needs to address concerns about racial profiling, a police practice in which officers stop minorities solely because of the color of their skin.

To determine whether the problem exists in Los Angeles--and, if so, what its scope may be--they said the LAPD should start collecting data on the race, gender and ethnicity of any citizen it stops.

After the hearing, Parks rejected the criticisms about racial profiling and community policing problems. He said people should “stop paying attention to those who get invited to committee meetings. . . . Have you ever seen them out in the community?”

Parks said he is opposed to collecting data on racial profiling because such information could be misconstrued and put a chill on good police work. He said drivers are pulled over for legitimate traffic violations or other law enforcement reasons. He said he does not believe the LAPD has a systemic problem of racial profiling.

“If it is going on we should investigate it and people should report it and we should deal with it as that incident,” Parks said in the hallway after the hearing. “We should not create statistics.”

Rice, who heard some of the chief’s hallway comments, said he “shouldn’t be afraid of the statistics. You’ve got to have the data. The chief uses data every day. He just doesn’t want data that will raise a question and I think it will raise a serious question.”