The Sounds of Silence at City Hall

In a Los Angeles City Council chamber populated by people who looked as if they wished desperately to be anywhere else, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks sat looking as he always does, the LAPD recruiting poster in all his stars and bars, his face, adjudged world-class handsome by “People” magazine, projected on screens four feet high.

In his public report Wednesday on the Rampart mess, he laid much of the fault to structural failures, like a building inadequate to the stresses of a 6-point quake:

* Rampart’s CRASH was headquartered away from the Rampart station. (What, they can’t be trusted to behave out of sight of Lt. Nanny?)

* LAPD doesn’t have the staff to do thorough background checks on every candidate. (Yet the city of Chino reportedly deduced that applicant Rafael Perez was unfit for its force?)

* Measures like Prop. 13 cut severely into command staff. (Only the popular Parks could ask for millions to hire more bureaucrats, uniformed or not, and get it.)

The culture of the LAPD got only this comment from the chief: The code of silence is no worse among the LAPD than in the general population. (The LAPD finds only about one applicant in 25 to be good enough for the force, but that one’s ethics are no better than those of the other 24 average Joes?)

In contrast to Parks, the council members seemed to squirm. It’s hard to tell which they liked less--the answers they got, or having to ask the questions in the first place.

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Ever since LAPD gang cop Rafael Perez first cracked like the rotten egg he is, spilling his guts about such lawless and clueless stunts as evidence-planting and perjury, awarding plaques for shooting people and splattering ketchup like blood to cover up a rookie’s bad shoot, the Rampart scandal has been the talk of the town.

Most of the town. Where others have been mouthing off, official L.A. has been silent.

Silent? Group coma is more like it.

If this had happened on Congress’ watch, committees would have been convened, gavels pounded. But the mayor and the City Council? From September until this week, we heard almost nothing. City Hall mouths were as closed as Ziploc bags.

The mayor is a man accustomed to getting things done on the phone and on the QT, not on camera. He constitutionally wields limited power, but nonetheless has something more influential at his disposal--the bully pulpit. But to paraphrase the “Where was George” chant that went up at the 1988 Democratic Convention about Vice President George Bush. . . . Where was Dick?

Of course the law should take its course. Of course internal affairs has to pursue its inquiries, and the Police Commission and inspector general theirs.

But Angelenos don’t need to hear legalisms now, they need to hear leaderisms. The public purse, their purse, will be plundered for years to pay for this bad-cop carnival. Morale has been savaged, justice has been breached, confidence has been corroded.

To Angelenos who want assurance that this is an aberration, and to Angelenos who are convinced it’s more police business as usual, some reassurance, even some outrage would not have been amiss. No wonder civic life leaves people cold, if “political leadership” begins to sound as contradictory as the old joke about “military intelligence.”

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A block from City Hall, in an austere courtroom ornamented with federal eagles, the LAPD is being sued by the children of Emil Matasareanu, one of two men who used North Hollywood for target practice in 1997. The suit says the LAPD let him bleed to death instead of getting him to a hospital.

You don’t have to give a tinker’s damn about the person of Emil Matasareanu to deplore letting him die, if such is true. Letting him die is destroying evidence, and destroying evidence is bad police work. But you’d be hard-pressed to find many officials eager to make a case of it. And there may be a key to the Rampart silence thundering from City Hall.

Many of the people set up or done in at Rampart were already caught up in drugs and gangs. Politicians do not generally like sticking up for a criminal, however wronged, against a cop, however wrong. Rampart is not the Rodney King video, one black guy beaten by four white cops.

My father liked to say that one big difference between good guys and bad guys is that good guys must play by the rules. If Perez is telling the truth, Rampart cops operated in lawless parody of the gangs they hunted. And they evidently believed--as a onetime Rampart CRASH cop told The Times--that this was war, not “being a park ranger in Yosemite” the implication being that that may have excused almost anything.

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com