LAPD Corruption Probe May Be Test for City Leaders

As the Los Angeles Police Department reels from a corruption scandal of unknown proportions, the city’s top leaders find themselves helpless, vulnerable and painfully aware that past police misconduct has reshaped Los Angeles’ government and politics.

For these key officials--the police chief, council members, the city attorney, police commissioners and especially Mayor Richard Riordan--the new allegations coming from the LAPD’s Rampart Division raise serious questions about the management and oversight of the LAPD. The allegations include at least two bad shootings, one of them fatal, a suspect beaten, stolen drugs, officers lying in sworn statements and covering for each other.

“It’s always easy to stand next to the police and look good,” said Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, who was Riordan’s first Police Commission president. “But if there’s a responsibility that these 15 council members and the mayor have, it’s to protect the civil rights and the human rights of the people who live in this city.”

Greenebaum stressed that he was not interested in criticizing current leaders but rather in using the scandal to advance the argument that civilians need to have strong control over the police. The question for Los Angeles leaders, said Greenebaum, is: “When do you do what’s needed to create a department that’s free of this type of suspicion?”

Paradoxically, facing those questions carries little risk for Chief Bernard C. Parks, who initiated the unfolding investigation: Although he is a longtime departmental veteran who has spent years in the top ranks of the LAPD, the crimes being alleged occurred under his predecessor’s administration, allowing Parks the opportunity to reinforce his image as a hard disciplinarian while cleaning up someone else’s mess.

Sunday, Parks rejected any criticism of the LAPD’s work in this case and argued that activists such as Greenebaum and others who argue for increased civilian oversight are out of touch with the rest of Los Angeles.

“It’s always dangerous to have a belief that self-proclaimed activists have a more important view than the general public,” Parks said.

On his way up the LAPD ladder, Parks for a time ran Central Bureau, which includes the Rampart Division. Later, he was in charge of all LAPD operations, but he was demoted in 1994, before the incidents under investigation occurred.

The mayor enjoys no such luxury. Riordan has been actively involved in the management of the LAPD nearly from the day he took office in 1993, partly because he was frustrated by what he saw as then-Chief Willie L. Williams’ inattention to detail. Having interjected himself in the department’s management, Riordan has a hard time disclaiming any responsibility for that same management’s breakdowns.

These allegations, critics stress, occurred on Riordan’s watch.

“The mayor just turns away from these types of issues,” said Connie Rice, a civil rights lawyer and outspoken LAPD critic. “He just wants an effective law enforcement agency, but he doesn’t want to know the details.”

Riordan disagrees. In an interview Sunday, he stressed that he is monitoring every aspect of the LAPD’s investigation and said he believes that Parks, whom he appointed, is handling it “brilliantly.”

“I think people are going to judge me, the chief and the Police Commission on how we handle this situation,” he said. “Looking backward isn’t going to help anybody.”

Moreover, people close to Riordan respond to those who criticize the mayor on this issue with their own question: What, they ask, could this or any mayor have done to prevent corrupt officers from committing crimes?

The same calculus that clouds perceptions of Riordan’s performance applies to some City Council members as well, and for them it is complicated further by their continuing political aspirations. Councilwoman Laura Chick oversaw the council’s Public Safety Committee, which oversees the LAPD, through the early 1990s and now hopes to run for city controller.

Councilman Mike Feuer sat on that committee and is exploring a run for city attorney.

The committee now chaired by Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski will receive a closed-door briefing on the scandal.

Debate Over Control of Department

While politicians figure out how best to react, the scandal has its potentially most profound implications in the ongoing debate over how to structure civilian oversight over the city’s police force. Parks has resisted efforts to strengthen and expand the office of the inspector general, but now will find it much harder to argue that the department should be protected from public scrutiny by the newly appointed and widely respected Jeff Eglash, a former federal prosecutor.

Last week, Eglash complained that he and LAPD leaders remain at odds over how much power he should have to review department files. The department, Eglash said, has “unilaterally sought to put restrictions on the inspector general’s office.”

Police officials retorted that they see legal and practical problems with giving the inspector general access to certain files, especially those containing information about ongoing criminal cases.

Even before the current investigation came to light, Parks had his hands full with that argument. The new City Charter, most of which will take effect on July 1, 2000, is not vague about the inspector general’s authority. It states that the inspector general has the power to “investigate and oversee the Police Department’s handling of complaints of misconduct by police officers. . . . “

Nothing in the charter gives the chief or the Police Department the authority to limit the inspector general in any way, reserving that power for the commission alone.

And though Parks has maintained that Eglash does not have much power to launch investigations beyond the LAPD’s disciplinary system, that too is at odds with the new charter, which specifically gives the inspector general the power to “initiate any investigation or audit of the Police Department without prior authorization” by the Police Commission. The commission has the power to order a halt to any audit, but only if a majority of its members vote to block such an inquiry.

Under the charter, the chief and the Police Department itself have no power to dictate the inspector general’s work.

George Kieffer, who headed one of two charter reform commissions that wrote the document, stressed that any interpretation of the charter was the job of the city attorney’s office. He added, however, that “my own view would be that the plain reading of [the charter] is that it allows the inspector general to open ‘any investigation or audit.’ ”

Parks could ask the council to intervene. That body can recommend charter amendments or could otherwise attempt to put its own stamp on the charter through its enabling legislation. But Parks’ stock with the council is not particularly high.

Although respected for his tough leadership and encyclopedic knowledge of the department, Parks has irritated many council members with what they see as his imperiousness.

In an interview earlier this year, Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg said, “He believes in civilian oversight in theory but not in practice.”

That sentiment is widely echoed by council members and others, including some strong supporters of the chief who worry that he has damaged his credibility by his position in the debate over the inspector general.

Still, for all its grim allegations and potential implications, there are some signs that this case may not exact the same political toll as earlier crises, most notably the 1991 beating of Rodney G. King and its riotous aftermath, which helped cost the city’s mayor, police chief, police commissioners and several council members their jobs.

This time, the allegations strike different and less attenuated racial chords, and, most importantly, the current case has not produced the same shocking evidence of endemic misconduct within the department.

That message--first illustrated by the videotaped image of 17 officers witnessing King’s beating and failing, to a person, to report anything wrong; then reinforced by the Christopher Commission’s discovery of widespread LAPD racism and institutional tolerance for brutality--helped persuade the public that the LAPD was a troubled institution.

In the current case, that threat still looms as investigators try to determine how many officers erred and how many others covered for them. But so far at least, the alleged Rampart crimes appear not to have cast the same pall across the institution.

What’s more, public outrage after the King beating was immediate and huge. The videotaped images of the incident were broadcast worldwide, and the sight of a black man being beaten into submission by Los Angeles police crystallized the long-standing grievances that many Los Angeles African Americans had toward the LAPD. This time, the former LAPD officers at the center of the scandal--Rafael A. Perez and David A. Mack--are minorities and the chief leading the investigation of their misconduct is black.

And the victims who have surfaced so far are Latino, a community that has its own historic beefs with the Police Department but one that, as a whole, has a less tense relationship with the LAPD.

Comparisons to Past Problems

Among the city’s persistent band of police reform advocates, many see the latest scandal as an opportunity to press the cause of strengthening civilian oversight of the LAPD by reminding the public that police in this city have stood at the center of one civic breakdown after another, from the 1965 riots to the 1992 riots, from the excessive force used against Rodney King to the failure to use enough force to save Reginald O. Denny during the 1992 riots, from police who spied on political leaders to Det. Mark Fuhrman lying on the witness stand in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson.

Parks, however, said reform advocates have become so bent on revamping the LAPD that they have lost sight of their mission. He argued that no level of civilian oversight would have brought the allegations of misconduct at Rampart to light more quickly. That, he said, is because civilian review of police reports depends on the accuracy of those reports--just as the department’s own investigators do.

“It makes no difference who looks at material if it’s fraudulent on its face and all the witnesses are part of the fraud,” he said. “These people are the only witnesses.”

In addition to Parks’ resistance, reform proponents face the problem that the city’s elected and appointed officials have shown little willingness to lead their fight.

Riordan has never demonstrated much interest in oversight debates such as the inspector general controversy. The current system, he said Sunday, places responsibility for discipline in the chief’s office, precisely where it belongs.

Various council members have sounded off at one time or another on police issues, but rarely have stuck with the subject for long. Occasionally, the council has championed civilian oversight while undermining it, as in the lawmakers’ decision to overturn the Police Commission’s 1995 reprimand of Williams.

Commission President Gerald L. Chaleff, whose election to that job heartened many who seek changes in LAPD oversight, has been notably quiet in the days since the scandal broke. Chaleff’s low profile on this and other issues has disappointed many of his supporters.

City Atty. James Hahn, meanwhile, has his hands full with another problem: One of his most significant claims to fame is his successful pursuit of gang injunctions to combat street violence. The breakthrough injunction in that effort, however, no longer is being enforced because some of the facts supporting it have been cast into doubt by the admission of one officer that he lied about a 1996 shooting.

That leaves supporters of a stronger civilian presence in the LAPD frustrated by what they see as shortsighted, fearful leadership. The problem, Rice said, is that too many officials are afraid to take on the LAPD and its tough, charismatic chief.

The current scandal, she said, “raises the curtain again on an institution that we don’t have a handle on and that we don’t have civilian control over.

“There’s plenty of responsibility for that to go around.”