Police Chief Parks: a Man on the Spot

In his office hangs the serene portrait of a black woman, her right hand cradling her head.

It took pride and perseverance to put that painting in that spot. It took an unbending African American who always knows where he is and never forgets where he came from.

It took Bernard C. Parks.

He has a long, unforgiving memory, and one of the things Parks has never forgotten is how the Police Department he now leads once confiscated his painting.

In 1978, when the LAPD’s chief and all his immediate subordinates were white men, a deputy chief touring the 77th Street Division saw the painting on the young captain’s wall and concluded that it was racially inflammatory. He ordered it removed and shipped to South Bureau, where it was sheathed in butcher paper and hidden from view.

Returning from vacation to find his painting gone, an indignant Parks demanded it back. After a long standoff, he prevailed. The portrait, which Parks’ cousin had painted and given to him as a gift, was returned, still wrapped in paper.

Parks hung it that way, an advertisement of his defiance.

Today that portrait--now triumphantly unwrapped--occupies a sunny nook in the office of the Los Angeles Police Department’s 52nd chief.

Over the years, Parks’ pride and sense of purpose have created an unyielding persona that has seen him through a storied career. He will be tested again this week, when the protests surrounding the Democratic National Convention challenge Parks and his department on a scale unmatched since the 1992 riots, which found the LAPD so sorely wanting.

For the department, this could be a time to make the city forget, or at least forgive, 1992 and to demonstrate that the corruption scandal of the last 11 months has not sapped its performance or resolve. The scandal--which began with revelations of corruption in the Rampart Division and has spread to other stations--has taken its toll on the LAPD and its chief.

Parks has responded aggressively. Internally, he convened a departmental board of inquiry to recommend reforms and he has cracked down on wayward police officers. Since becoming chief, he has enraged rank-and-file police officers and their union by disciplining hundreds of officers. More than 300 have either been forced out of the LAPD or resigned with complaints against them pending.

Externally, he has lashed out at those he sees as adversaries--including Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, Police Commission Inspector General Jeffrey Eglash, members of the City Council and the Los Angeles Times. He has chafed at Eglash’s attempts to investigate wrongdoing by officers and attempted to undermine his civilian boss, Police Commission President Gerald L. Chaleff, by encouraging critical coverage in the alternative press--to no avail.

The results have been mixed. The department under Parks is more crisply organized and more obviously responsive to leadership. But he’s losing the outside fight, the one to keep the federal government out of what he sees as his business. City officials are negotiating with the U.S. Department of Justice in pursuit of an agreement that would forestall a lawsuit against the department. Such an agreement would almost inevitably install a federal monitor to oversee many aspects of the LAPD’s conduct, a prospect Parks vigorously opposes.

This week, he confronts a more familiar foe, protesters, some of whom are committed to engaging in civil disobedience to make their point, some of whom may be willing to resort to property damage or violence.

History suggests that the careers of Los Angeles police chiefs rarely recover from serious civil unrest. The Watts riots of 1965 deepened the failure of William Parker’s health. The riots after the acquittal of LAPD officers who beat Rodney G. King in 1992 ended the career of Daryl F. Gates. Now it is Parks’ turn--either to rise to the occasion or to go into eclipse like his predecessors.

Meet the man in the bull’s-eye.

Rising by Will and Diligence

Parks’ 35-year career has been described, mostly by people who don’t know him, as an unimpeded walk up the LAPD ladder. “A seemingly uninterrupted climb toward the stars,” one recent article called it.

In fact, he came to the job by chance and drove himself up the ranks by will and diligence. He was resented along the way, nearly toppled once, passed over for chief, humiliatingly demoted and then, only then, tapped for the job he coveted.

Growing up in Los Angeles, where his family moved from Texas when he was a baby, Parks was a decent but unspectacular student. His grades, he says, were good but he worked to keep them that way mainly so he could qualify for the football team. Grades or no grades, he clearly was popular: Although he was one of a handful of black students, Parks was elected senior class president of his Catholic high school, Daniel Murphy.

His father was a Harbor police officer, but Parks initially was not drawn to a profession that favors the kind of person who, when he hears a gunshot, runs toward it.

Parks joined the LAPD because General Motors was paying him $3.08 an hour to attach fenders to Chevys. Driving to work one day, he heard a radio ad with a better offer: The LAPD was offering $608 a month.

“I had just turned 20,” Parks recalled recently. “I heard that ad, and I thought that sounded like good money. At the plant, we were off for three months a year while they retooled for the new models, so there was a lot of time with nothing to do. I went and signed up, took a year to do the testing and, in February ‘65, the very first class I was eligible, I went in.”

His mother, Gertrude Parks, fretted. “I was frightened all the time,” said Gertrude Parks, who, like Parks’ grandmother and most of his children and grandchildren, still lives in Los Angeles. “I’m still frightened.”

Nevertheless, from that moment on, Parks was a cop--not part of the first wave of black LAPD officers, but not far behind. Some of his predecessors, people like Joe Rouzan and Homer Broome, told Parks early on that a black officer hoping for promotion had to ace every written test. The oral exam, where supervisors could take note of the applicant’s skin color, was always risky.

A year before he set his sights on any rank, Parks would start studying. He would go to great lengths to get privacy and quiet. Bobbie Parks, his wife, remembers him holing up in vacant apartments, where she would bring him food and then leave again for hours. “It was like he was in prison,” she laughed.

During one set of exams, he parked a pickup truck in front of the house, covered it with a camper shell and studied there night after night, surrounded by papers, hunched over in the dark, reading by flashlight or street lamps. To this day, his back occasionally gives him trouble. When it does, he rests his hands and wrists on his police belt to ease the strain. Bobbie Parks attributes that pain to those study sessions.

It was painful in a number of ways, but it worked. By 1980, Parks had risen to sergeant, then lieutenant, captain and commander. While on that breakneck promotional pace, he picked up a bachelor’s degree from Pepperdine University and a master’s degree in public administration from USC. He also helped raise five children.

That rapid ascent was not always welcomed by colleagues.

“There was some resentment,” Parks said. “Too young, too black. . . . A white lieutenant once asked me what my career ambition was. I didn’t want to sound too ambitious so I said I’d like to make captain. He said if I made sergeant, maybe I should be happy with my career.”

When Parks did make captain and got his own command, he nearly lost it all.

Parks’ first assignment in charge of an LAPD division was 77th Street, one of the city’s toughest, known in the old days as one of the “ghetto divisions.” Beneath him in the station management were a black lieutenant and a black sergeant--highly unusual in those days.

Barely had they settled in when the LAPD dropped a bomb. Officers in the 77th Division and neighboring stations were accused of running a scam with local bookmakers. It boiled down to an arrangement: Officers needed to make arrests to impress their bosses, bookmakers needed to stay in business. So the police would call ahead, warn bookmakers that they would be making arrests that day. The bookmakers would hand over low-level workers, preferably ones with no records. The workers would get busted, get bailed out and go back to work.

This had been going on for some time at 77th when Parks got there. But investigators waited to lower the boom until the new black captain was in place. His subordinates were charged with failing to supervise their officers; he came under the same microscope. Parks’ predecessor, who was white, was never investigated. Captains of the neighboring divisions, also white, were never questioned.

Parks’ diligence with paperwork and his meticulous records helped establish that he had done everything he could in his short time to root out the problem.

Parks, whose career would have essentially come to an end if the outcome had been different, today will not blame racism for his brush with the disciplinary system--at least not explicitly.

Asked whether racism was at work in that case, Parks responded: “People have said that.”

Asked whether he agreed, Parks laughed, a little bitterly. “People have said that,” he repeated.

His wife, Bobbie, is more outspoken.

“Come on,” she said. “They couldn’t stand it that he came out clean.”

Personal Side of the Chief

Parks often is described as aloof, but in company he regards as friendly, he laughs loudly, sometimes fights back tears and occasionally can be coaxed into reminiscing. He loves sports and theater, though not movies, which he regards as contrived. He is a Christmas fanatic: Last year, the Parks home had six trees inside and thousands of lights outside. He has been to the NBA finals, the World Series, the Super Bowl and the Indy 500. He can be witheringly insulting--ask any lawyer or journalist who has been on the receiving end of his distaste. But he also pokes light fun at himself. One night recently, over dinner, he turned down dessert rather than spoil his “girlish figure.”

Unless prompted, Parks rarely talks about his family. But when he does, his cadence and vocabulary shift. Parks--who has the oddly imperial habit of referring to himself as “we,” and of beginning almost every sentence with the phrase “the issue is”--does neither when talking about Bobbie and his family. His devotion to them is evident.

Policing is not a profession that favors long and stable marriages. The hours are excruciatingly hard on family life, as is the stress and the level of commitment required to do the job well. Many police officers’ marriages end badly.

Not that of Bernard and Bobbie Parks.

Bobbie was a receptionist for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in late 1966, when Bernard was a young traffic officer. She and three friends would carpool together to downtown each morning, and it was en route one day that she spotted Bernard. Even today, he cuts quite a figure at 6-foot-2, 210 pounds, with dark eyes, long limbs and a thick chest accentuated by his bulletproof vest. In 1998 at age 54, Parks was named one of People magazine’s 50 most beautiful people on the planet.

Imagine him, 35 years ago, commanding an intersection in full uniform.

“He had those white gloves and the white hat,” Bobbie Parks said recently, smiling widely at the memory. After passing through the intersection one morning and ogling the officer, Bobbie bragged that if he was there again the next day, she was going to talk to him. Her friends laughed but did not believe her.

The next morning, there he was. With her friends teasing her on, Bobbie pulled into the intersection and up to the officer.

“What’s a girl have to do to get arrested?” she asked. Her friends erupted with delight, Bernard laughed and waved her over. They traded numbers, and when he called the next day, he asked her if she would have lunch with him the next week. It was his birthday, he said, and he would like her company. They lunched together, dated for a time and then were married.

Bobbie and Bernard Parks had five children: four girls--Felicia, Lori, Michelle and Trudy--and then, on Bernard’s 30th birthday, a boy, Bernard Jr. It was a strict household. Discipline, personal and professional, is a constant in Bernard’s life. Bernard Jr. remembers being scolded for forgetting to use a shoehorn and being reminded to wear pressed clothes. His father would drive him and his friends to school in the mornings, and as they drove, would have his son read the paper to him.

“I’d read the headline and the first paragraph, and then he’d tell me whether he wanted to hear more or go to the next story,” Bernard Jr. said. “We’d read the paper that way. When we got to school, we’d get out, and my friends would all laugh at me.”

But Bernard Sr. was more than a taskmaster. Often absent for the daily rituals of family life, he nevertheless was disciplined about seeing the special moments. He attended every one of Bernard Jr.’s football games at Daniel Murphy High School, Bernard Sr.’s alma mater. Unsurprisingly, he found it hard to resist participating--the league practically had to invent a penalty for coaching from the sidelines, Bernard Jr. said.

“One time, I ran for a touchdown and he chased me on the sidelines for 60 yards,” he remembered. “He was the only one in the end zone with me. But I beat him.”

It’s been said that to be a parent is to live with your heart outside your body. For Bobbie and Bernard Parks, their shared heart was broken in 1975.

Their second daughter, Lori, had been complaining of a pain in her right leg, and then it gave out one day in school. Concerned but not overly so, they took her to the doctor, who said it seemed nothing more than growing pains. The pain continued, however, and they returned again and again. Finally, a doctor spotted a growth near her knee. Cancer.

The prognosis for the 15-year-old girl was devastating. Survival was still possible, the doctor said, but only with amputation and aggressive chemotherapy. Hoping for something better, the Parkses took their daughter to two more doctors, then to Mexico to explore experimental treatments. All the doctors agreed, however, and Lori’s leg was amputated.

She returned to school, adjusted to her artificial limb, went to dances, visited the hospital to give hope to other young children facing cancer. Her parents marveled.

“About the only one who dealt with it well was Lori,” Bernard Parks said recently, his voice husky.

Then, more than six months after her amputation, Lori complained of pain in her shoulder. Doctors investigated.

“It was everywhere,” Bobbie Parks said. “They kept trying, and they’d get one tumor and we’d celebrate. But there were always more.”

On May 15, 1975, at noon, Lori Parks died. She was 16.

“Even today,” Bernard Parks said, “I can tell when May gets here. At some point during the month, Bobbie will turn to me and say: ‘Do you know what month it is?’ ”

The family persevered. Bobbie says today that she does not know how she would have made it without her husband. Separately, he says the same of her.

They had no more children after Lori’s death, but they did have grandchildren. One, in fact, was named for the sister who never made it to adulthood. And then, 25 years, almost to the week, after her namesake’s death, Lori Gonzalez was shot and killed while leaving a fast-food restaurant with a friend.

The Parks family was vacationing in North Carolina when the phone rang late in the night. “Do you know a Lori Gonzalez?” the sergeant on the line asked.

“Yes,” Parks answered. “That’s my granddaughter.”

There was a long pause, and then a lieutenant came on the line. “She’s been the victim of a homicide,” the lieutenant said.

“That takes a minute to sink in,” Bernard Parks recalled. That night, sitting up next to him in bed, Bobbie was the one who cut through the confusion: “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Far away from home, Bernard Parks turned to the person he trusted most. He called his son, Bernard Jr., woke him up and bluntly told him what he had to do. Wait for an officer to arrive, go to see Felicia--the Parks’ daughter, Lori’s mother--tell her in person. Stay with her. Care for her. Don’t let her find out from a stranger or from the news.

Bernard Jr. had been planning to take Lori to Las Vegas the next week to celebrate her 21st birthday. Instead, he told his sister that her daughter was dead.

“My father trusted me,” Bernard Jr. said. “That meant a lot to me. I needed anything I could get at that point.”

Bernard Jr., his father said, came through for his family: “He was like a soldier.”

A Bitter Setback With Demotion

In 1997, as Parks stood beside Mayor Richard Riordan and accepted the nomination as chief of police, it was easy to forget that this same chief, one who so looks and sounds the part, reached that office only after deep disappointments.

Five years earlier, Parks was the odds-on favorite for the job. He emerged from the competition as the top internal candidate. That generally meant triumph in a department long committed to finding its chiefs from within its own ranks.

Bernard and Bobbie Parks were so confident that they sneaked away to the police uniform store and bought the silver, four-star band that only the LAPD’s chief is entitled to wear. They took it home, and, alone in their room, pinned the stars to Bernard’s pajamas, laughing.

But the chief selection process that year was haunted by the beating of Rodney G. King in 1991, the riots of 1992, the long struggle to dislodge Daryl Gates from police headquarters. The Police Commission wanted an outsider.

When Willie L. Williams was chosen instead, Bernard swallowed his pride. He accepted the No. 2 job in the department from Williams and, at a ceremony June 30, 1992, welcoming the new chief to town, Parks stood before the city’s black leadership and presented Williams with the little red box containing his uniform stars.

“I couldn’t believe it when I saw him pull out that box,” Bobbie said of her husband. “Those were the same stars we had shined and prayed over.”

Parks and Williams made an effort to work together, and for a time it outwardly seemed to work. Williams was popular with the public, Parks was effective and meticulous internally. But they never liked or really trusted each other. Williams was threatened by Parks, and Parks, though careful never to openly challenge his boss, quietly fumed about Williams’ lack of LAPD knowledge and commitment.

In 1994, without fully explaining why, Williams demoted Parks, announcing it to the press before telling him to his face. It was the most fateful decision of Williams’ tenure--probably the one that most thoroughly sealed him as a one-term chief--and it devastated Parks and his family.

Bernard Jr. was working in San Diego when his father paged him to tell him the news. Bernard Parks said he was being pushed aside and was going to retire.

“He’s your dad, and you look at him as Superman,” Bernard Jr. said. “All of a sudden, he isn’t Superman anymore. He needed our support this time.”

Bernard flirted with retirement and probably would have done it. But Bobbie Parks weighed in.

“I said: ‘There is no way I will allow you to even entertain that idea,’ ” she said. “No, no, no, no, no. We’re not going to do this. . . . We’re going to ride this one out.”

Reflecting, Bobbie Parks added: “I sacrificed a lot of time with my husband, all the years of studying for exams, being there for the Police Department. . . . In the bottom of my heart, I knew the right thing would happen in the end.”

Parks stayed, endured his exile, openly contemptuous of Williams. Today, he avoids criticizing the former chief. Bernard Jr. does not.

“I hate him,” he said.

Traits Are a Source of Strengths, Weaknesses

The department Parks took over in 1997 had been badly neglected. It took the city’s leaders a long time to come to grips with Williams’ failings, but eventually they did. And by the time Parks took over, most officials in Los Angeles were ready for a new kind of leader. In many respects, Parks delivered. The LAPD today no longer drifts in search of direction.

But if it’s true that every life has its ironies, here is the one now at the center of Parks’: The same qualities that helped make him chief now are undermining his ability to manage his department through a crisis.

Stubbornness helped him weather racism and his chief’s displeasure; now it alienates him from council members and police commissioners. Pride helped him build a reputation as a loyal and dedicated police officer; now it strikes some critics as arrogance. Aggressiveness helped him command police officers across the city; now, as he turns it against the federal government and local reformers in delicate negotiations over the LAPD’s future, it angers his opponents and strengthens their resolve.

Even Parks’ loyalty to Riordan is double-edged. Riordan has protected and complimented Parks at every turn. But their unwavering mutual admiration has helped erode the chief’s support among council members, who agree on few things but who, almost unanimously, dislike the way Riordan operates as mayor.

These conflicts are writ large in the Rampart police scandal and a related federal investigation into misconduct by LAPD officers. Federal authorities have put the city on notice that they will sue Los Angeles for allowing police to engage in a “pattern or practice” of misconduct and civil rights violations unless the city enters into an agreement to reform the LAPD.

To Parks, that threat is insult and injury. He sees federal authorities as attempting to wrest from him control of his department; he believes the Justice Department is basing its case principally on the LAPD’s own self-examination of the Rampart police scandal. He argues that federal intervention will hurt the LAPD’s ability to fight crime.

But Parks has not done much to help his own case. He traveled to Washington to meet with top Justice Department officials. Afterward, a person familiar with that meeting said federal authorities were struck by what they perceived as Parks’ vehement resistance to reform and came away even more convinced of the need to press for sweeping change at the Police Department.

Closer to home, Parks has tried to stir influential opposition to the federal actions. Again, however, he has found it rough going.

He has reached out to business community leaders, arguing that the imposition of a consent decree that would give a federal judge the power to oversee change would be bad for the LAPD--and bad for business. Some who have heard his pitch left thinking it was dubious.

He has defended himself with intense vigor against every press report he views as negative--which is most of them--primarily in The Times. The LAPD Web site https://www.lapdonline.org is a running screed against the paper and its reporters and editors, marked by flights of hyperbole directed against what Parks sees as unfair coverage of the LAPD. In one recent commentary, Parks denounced what he sees as the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the paper, which he accused of waging a “holy jihad against this department.”

He has asked for political support, but he telegraphs his low regard for most politicians, making it hard for them to support him. Many council members privately complain at what they see as Parks’ unwillingness to respond to their suggestions. Their unhappiness with him is all the more striking because, during the flap over his demotion, it was council members who came to his rescue, securing his pension and a pay raise, even in the face of Williams’ action against him.

“Unlike politicians, I don’t have the ability to make myself over every day,” Parks said. “People will say I’m rigid. They like flexibility, give and take. I don’t wake up every day and decide to try a new thing.”

And he has urged the city government to take a hard legal position against the federal government, citing Torrance’s victory over the Justice Department in a case involving its Police Department’s hiring and promotion practices. That tack has baffled lawyers close to the talks, who say there is virtually no legal or factual precedent in the Torrance case that would apply to the decisions faced by Los Angeles.

The chief, said one of his many longtime admirers, “has his toughest time when it comes to this kind of outside game. He’s at his best inside the department, where he knows every detail. But sometimes he handles politics poorly.”

With Rampart hovering around the LAPD and the federal government determined to implement the reforms that the city has failed to adopt, there is no way that even a dazzling police performance in the days ahead will lift Parks and his department out of controversy.

What is clear, however, is that a police overreaction that provokes violence or a lethargic response that encourages it to spread would vastly deepen the crisis afflicting the chief and the department. Parks recognizes that, and has closely supervised the convention planning. He will not be a fixture at the parties around town this week. Rather, Parks, gun strapped to his thigh, will haunt more familiar locales--the police command post, Parker Center and the passenger seat of a police helicopter.

Parks is, his admirer said, smart and dedicated, qualities he will bring to the job this week. He’s also, that person added, “just a stubborn son of a bitch.”