David Hepburn

There is Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, and then there is Lt. David A. Hepburn--the anti-Parks.

As president of the police-officers union since January 1997, Hepburn has found himself in a pitched battle with the chief on matters of discipline, benefits and public safety. While far less known than the chief, Hepburn, a 26-year veteran of the force, is still an influential figure in city-government circles. For many, he is a barometer of the rank and file’s mood.

Over the course of two interviews in the union’s downtown headquarters, Hepburn, 48, warned that departmental morale was at an all-time low, worse than after the 1992 riots. He said a climate of fear permeates the department under Parks, who has fired a record number of officers. While the public embraces Parks’ tough stand on discipline, union members complain the chief has overzealously enforced it.

In recent months the relationship between the chief and union has become so bad they have stopped talking to each other. The union’s monthly newspaper routinely slams Parks for being a dictator. In one recent edition, the paper likened the chief to Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Khomeini. In this sort of bare-knuckle atmosphere, Hepburn is considered a moderate. Yet, his views hardly fit the civic mainstream: He says the Christopher Commission report, which proposed LAPD reforms in the wake of the 1991 Rodney G. King beating, was a sham. He also contends that accounts of the LAPD’s notorious antifemale organization, Men Against Women, which came to light during a department investigation into former Det. Mark E. Fuhrman, were largely fictional.

Hepburn, a native Californian, graduated from Cal State L.A. with a business degree. Married, with two adult children, Hepburn, like many LAPD officers, is an outdoor enthusiast and enjoys surfing, skiing and boating.

Hepburn’s views may be deemed marginal by some, but he is the elected voice for some 9,500 officers in the Los Angeles Police Protective League. Union leaders, like Hepburn, learned long ago the power their organization’s endorsement has on politicians, clamoring to be seen as law-and-order candidates. Recently, some City Hall leaders have started lending a sympathetic ear to union complaints about the department’s plummeting morale and widening rift with the chief. The public should be concerned, too, Hepburn says, because angry cops may render poor police service.

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Question: Police unions and police chiefs have traditionally been at odds. What makes this situation different?

Answer: Unlike previous chiefs, this one has a remarkable lack of compassion and empathy for the rank and file.

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Q: The chief has called the union directors “tired old men” who are “out of touch” with their membership. He has criticized the union for not reflecting the diversity of the rank and file. How do you respond?

A: We are elected by our membership, and the membership elects whoever they see fit to elect. There has been diversity on the board. We’ve had a woman on the board and quite a few Hispanic members on our board over the years . . . so we have been diverse. But the main thing to keep in mind is that the interests of officers, regardless of their background, are the same. . . . The pay raise is the same for everybody.

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Q: Does morale affect public safety?

A: Cops are going to do the job that they’re paid to do, regardless. But certainly, I don’t think it’s in the public’s interest to have cops who are unhappy coming to work, who are more likely to have poorer attitudes toward the public because they feel the organization they work for is treating them poorly.

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Q: The police contract expires next year, and negotiations with the city will start soon on a new agreement. In the past the union has sanctioned a “blue flu,” or sickout, during negotiations. In a recent newsletter you said the coming Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles could be used as “leverage.” What do you have in mind?

A: I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to negotiate a new contract without taking any job action, but I’m not going to eliminate any options that the union might need to use as leverage. . . . We will press at the bargaining table to make sure we have an agreement before [the convention] takes place, and I’m sure that the City Council will want to feel comfortable that that agreement is signed before that event takes place, which is going to have the attention of the entire country and most of the world on Los Angeles during that period.

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Q: The chief has fired a record number of officers. Do you quarrel with the reasons these officers were terminated?

A: I quarrel with the degree of the discipline in some situations. Discipline has been kicked up several notches by this chief, and it’s been a shock to the system for officers. Where previously an officer would have been suspended for something and still be able to salvage his career, now he gets fired. It’s not like getting fired if you’re a carpenter or bricklayer, or something where you can be a bricklayer somewhere else. An officer’s career is over as a police officer when you get fired, ‘cause your reputation has been damaged. . . . What gets forgotten in this frenzy of disciplining police officers are the families of police officers. There ought to be a little compassion about the financial impact.

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Q: The union calls the chief’s discipline system unfair and oppressive. How so?

A: The command staff is climbing all over each other to outdo each other to prove to the chief that they are strong disciplinarians. . . . We see commanding officers finding officers guilty of acts of misconduct based on nonexistent evidence because they are afraid of what the chief is going to say if they don’t. . . . Discipline is the one overriding issue of the department right now with most of the members.

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Q: For the most part, the Police Commission, City Hall leaders and the public think the chief is doing a fine job. They like seeing the leader of this department come down hard on misconduct. Are they wrong to demand accountability of officers?

A: They’re not wrong to demand accountability of the officers. . . . It’s the degree of the discipline that’s harming morale on the department. The officers don’t mind being held accountable, but they feel punishment has gone way out of proportion to the misconduct involved.

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Q: How are officers reacting to the chief’s discipline practices? Have they had an impact on police productivity?

A: Officers are always going to do their jobs, but . . . it’s the little things that don’t get measured. Where an officer says, “Do I stick my neck out that extra distance, do I go that extra mile when the organization doesn’t care about me?”. . . It affects officers in subtle ways.

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Q: Do you think the current Police Commission, which oversees the chief, is effectively exerting civilian control?

A: Chief Parks is such a dominating force that the Police Commission has difficulty opposing anything he wants to do at this point. . . . It’s highly unlikely that this Police Commission will oppose the chief on any serious issue.

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Q: How do you rate the individual commissioners?

A: Other than the president of the commission, I wouldn’t have a comment. [Commission President Edith] Perez seems to be very close to the chief and very influenced by what the chief wants to do on the department. Either they are remarkably parallel in their philosophical outlook on what should be done on the police department, or she just doesn’t want to oppose anything that chief wants to do.

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Q: How has the police force changed since the Rodney King beating?

A: There was this big push after the Rodney King incident and the riots for reform on the police department. Most cops who had been around for a while were pretty insulted by the implication that they needed to be reformed. Not a whole lot has changed in the way police officers do their job in the city. Officers were always held to a very high standard, despite what the public was convinced of. . . .

Not much has changed, and not that much needed to be changed. . . . I think the institutional philosophy of how you treat the public and the philosophy of how we do police work hasn’t changed that much.

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Q: So the Rodney King beating didn’t reflect greater problems of excessive force or police misconduct?

A: I think it was an isolated incident. There weren’t multiple Rodney King incidents going on all around the city. Any time an officer has to use force, somebody standing back, looking at it [can] make the judgment, “that’s too much” or “that’s too little.” I don’t think the degree of force used now is significantly less than it was then. Some of the techniques might be a little different, and certainly there has been different type of training on the department. But I don’t think excessive force was rampant.

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Q: How do you assess the Christopher Commission reforms?

A: I think they were primarily for public consumption, to convince the public that something was being done to change the police department from the way it was before. The fact is very little has changed in how police officers do police work in the city.

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Q: Nothing’s changed?

A: What has changed are the number of interpersonal complaints from within the department. There are more avenues to make complaints now. . . . Probably the biggest problem in the disciplinary system today are not complaints from officers doing police work out in the field, they’re interpersonal relationship problems on the department. We’ve got groups pitted against groups. . . . That seems to dominate the disciplinary system. . . . I don’t know if that’s a result of heightened awareness on the department over the last few years or not.

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Q: What about some of the problems the Christopher Commission uncovered: racist messages sent via the patrol-car computer terminals? Issues of the code of silence?

A: They identified a few isolated MDT [mobile digital terminal] messages. Certainly whoever was responsible should have been disciplined for them. And I think there has been a tightening of discipline on sending those messages. And most of the ones that came to light were social banter over the [computers] that were not business. Those such messages have been cut back because officers know they are going to be severely disciplined if they inappropriately use the MDTs.

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Q: Code of silence?

A: There is a natural tendency to not want to be branded an informer or whatever and a natural tendency to want and protect the people you work with. You could put a label of code of silence on it, but . . . I think police officers are pretty responsible and professional, and I don’t know that it ever permeated the department to the extent the Christopher Commission said it did.

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Q: Certainly, there were, and some say continue to be, problems with the way some male officers treated female colleagues. The department even confirmed as much when it investigated allegations about former Det. Mark Fuhrman and found that he and other male officers were part of a group called Men Against Women. How is the situation today?

A: That whole Men Against Women thing was a fictitious organization to begin with. But to be sure, there were problems with the way some employees were being treated in some of the divisions. And that does cause concern. Those are our members.

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Q: Fictitious? It’s in the department’s own report.

A: If you talk to the people who were involved in it, it was a tongue-and-cheek label put on a group of people who gathered informally. It wasn’t an actual organization. They put a label on it they thought was funny, but others took it seriously as a subversive organization, and that was not its intent.

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Q: Should the residents of the city feel confident about this force and this chief?

A: They should be confident in the rank-and-file cops who are out there, because they are well-trained and good people. . . . They should be concerned about the conflicts between the rank and file and the chief, because that’s not good for morale. After all, it’s the rank and file who represent the department, not the chief.