Wrestling With the Dilemma of Deep Badge

Call him . . . Deep Badge.

The cop with the secrets. The Serpico of Parker Center. The hideaway hero, the secret snitch.

One police officer, untainted by criminality who could be the linchpin to Rampart and beyond. The decoder, the unscrambler, the key to the door of dysfunction in the LAPD. Get him talking--or her--and the door swings open on the whole ugly edifice. The dream informant, the wet-dream witness of every prosecutor.

No such Los Angeles cop has come forth, as far as I know. But so anxious are local prosecutors to get the goods on Rampart miscreants that Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti has promised confidentiality to any police officer willing to tell all about colleagues’ high crimes or misconduct--just so long as the officer didn’t have a hand in it.

The Police Protective League, the cops’ union, has sided with Garcetti as a way to yank out “another brick in the so-called blue wall of silence,” it declares. The PPL asks the city’s Police Commission to let its inspector general take officers’ testimony without subjecting them to internal LAPD punishment for waiting too long to report the offenses of fellow cops.

Who are these officers? Conscience-stricken whistle-blowers who deserve all the blue-dot protections the law can give, or opportunists who, while not lawbreakers themselves, may be scrambling for another kind of shield to avoid punishment for breaking department rules?

For a district attorney’s office laboring under a reputation of losing the big ones, Rampart is the biggest one of all. There may be no more credible informant, no more persuasive witness than a good cop testifying against a bad one. To nail this one, the D.A.’s office is willing to break with decades-old deference to the LAPD, usually leaving police discipline exclusively to the police.

For the Police Protective League--which has likened Police Chief Bernard C. Parks to a power-tripping martinet--confidentiality could shield its officers from LAPD punishment which it considers heavy-handed and capricious.

Siding with Garcetti makes the PPL look serious about plumbing the depths of Rampart--and gives it the fringe benefit of cutting the hated Parks out of the Rampart process.

And what of the No. 1 client, the city of Los Angeles? Does it benefit more from suspending the LAPD’s internal rules to encourage informants, in the interest of cleaning up these cases? Or does no confidentiality mean no case?

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A classic moment in constitutional history came nearly 20 years ago, when a would-be assassin shot and wounded President Ronald Reagan, and the secretary of state, Alexander Haig, stood in the White House and declared, “I’m in charge here.” He was wrong. There was a small matter of legal succession and two other people between him and the Oval Office.

Who, then, is in charge here? For a while, the LAPD insisted it could handle this matter internally. Then it played ball with the Feds and tried to cut the D.A. out of the game. Now the PPL has sided with the D.A. in the confidentiality matter, crowding out the LAPD.

The D.A. and the PPL would prefer to sidestep a private procedure in order to enforce a public law. But “bending the rules,” argues LAPD spokesman Cmdr. Dave Kalish, “is what got us into this mess in the first place. What message does this send to our employees: ‘I’m not going to report misconduct; I’m going to wait until there’s an opportunity for me to get anonymity or amnesty.’ . . . We could end up with a number of officers we determine are corrupt and could not discipline because the statute has run” out.

Confidentiality, says Kalish, “is simply not a legitimate path to justice. First of all, it’s unnecessary”--cops already risk discipline by coming forward. “Second, it sends the wrong message. With a police officer, there’s nothing more important than integrity. Officers have a duty to report misconduct, and in a timely manner . . . third, if information was provided to the district attorney and not to us, it could actually hamper the investigation.”

Prosecutors’ credibility rests on how they pursue cop lawbreaking, after decades of being trial-shy about doing so. For the LAPD to salvage a reputation for punishing small shoeshine-scale offenses while winking at larger, abuse-of-power ones, it must not only haul its bad cops into the dock, but demonstrate both internally and publicly that “abuse enablers” are just as unwelcome.

The D.A. must prosecute the county’s lawbreakers, and the LAPD must discipline its own rule-breakers. Angelenos pay for both, they deserve both, and they shouldn’t have to choose between truth and consequences, Garcetti’s way or Parks’. Who will be to blame if Angelenos come up empty-handed on both counts?

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com