Parks Delivers Stern Warning to Police Graduates

Their class motto begins with the phrase “forged in fire.”

These are not empty words for 34 recruits who graduated Thursday from the Los Angeles Police Academy and were dispatched onto the streets with a stern warning from Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, who is faced with the city’s worst police scandal in more than half a century.

“We have great expectations for you,” Parks told the recruits in an outdoor ceremony at the academy in Elysian Park. “We expect leadership, we expect honesty, we expect following the rules, we expect the highest quality of service to this community.”

“But,” he said, “if you fail the first leadership situation because someone can influence you to write a report inappropriately, to testify inappropriately, to move evidence closer to make a stronger case, to take people’s property inappropriately, you have not only failed yourself, you will have failed every one of your classmates, everyone one that has died in this department and those who have retired.”

And, he added, “you will be held accountable for all of your actions.”

The chief’s remarks, and those of Mayor Richard Riordan, who spoke of a “dark shadow cast over the Los Angeles Police Department,” struck an unusually somber note at the commencement, which culminated seven months of grueling training for the recruits. The young officers--a rainbow cast of whites, African Americans, Latinos and Asians--were jubilant over their achievement, but wary about what lies ahead.

“I guess I’m a bit apprehensive about going out in the midst of the whole scandal,” admitted Kristen Koskelin, a 23-year-old recruit from Wisconsin. She is the third member of her immediate family to become a police officer.

The Police Commission is investigating allegations that members of an LAPD anti-gang unit in the Rampart Division engaged in a pattern of gross abuses of authority, including shooting unarmed suspects and filing false reports that claimed the shootings were in self-defense.

“I know that the public is a little disappointed by the whole Rampart incident, as they should be,” Koskelin said. “As officers, it’s disappointing to us, too.”

Like her classmates, however, she insisted that she has the inner strength to resist corruption. She said she still considers the LAPD to be the best police force in the country.

That sense of a great institution in crisis underpinned much of the ceremony, which attracted about 200 friends and relatives of the recruits and ended in the tradition of the graduates throwing their blue police hats “as high as humanly possible,” which turned out to be about 25 feet.

“We still have continued faith in the LAPD,” said the class president, Bennie Williams, a 28-year-old New Yorker. He said he came to Los Angeles because “the LAPD stands out above the rest of the departments in the nation, and I wanted to receive the best training, psychologically and tactically.”

The scandal became public near the end of the recruits’ 1,064 hours of training. Capt. Richard Wemmer, the commanding officer of the LAPD’s Training Division, said the academy had not altered its curriculum or focused specifically on the Rampart allegations in training.

LAPD training already has a heavy emphasis on professional ethics, he said. As for using the Rampart scandal as a teaching tool, he said, “None of us know the facts of the incidents yet, so for us to make a presentation on them now would be premature.”

Still, recruits said, their instructors had discussed the scandal with them and used it to emphasize the need to maintain professional discipline and integrity.

“We had several speakers speak to us on how to avoid and not to become a part of this during our career,” said Walter Jimison, who won the top honor in the class for overall excellence.

Among those attending the commencement was Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), who spoke about the scandal to reporters before the event.

“All of us have to be concerned when rogue officers commit the kind of crimes that have been committed here,” he said. “By the same token, the men and women who are part of this class represent some of the finest people this city has to offer. . . . We need to differentiate between them and the few officers who have been identified as having committed criminal acts.”