Good Cop, Bad Cop--and Those on the Cusp

As a law enforcement officer, my fundamental duty is to serve mankind--to safeguard lives and property, to protect the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation and the peaceful against violence or disorder, and to respect the Constitutional rights of all men to liberty, equality and justice. I will keep my private life unsullied as an example to all . . .

--Los Angeles Police Department manual,

Section 210.10, Volume I.

*

It had rained the day before, and the world seemed so clean. The pines were dripping beside the old stone pillars that mark the entrance to the Los Angeles Police Academy. Aspiring recruits warmed up in running shorts and set off into the eucalyptus. Over the distant crackle of the firing range, birds were twittering.

A young, buff applicant hoisted a gym bag. The sleeves of his knit sport shirt were cuffed twice above biceps the size of tanned softballs. People are polite at the academy, even in the throes of the most depressing scandal in the history of their department. Asked about Rampart, the young man smiled ruefully that its main impact had been to lengthen the background check that was all that stood between him and official recruit status. “I have wanted to be a police officer,” he offered, suddenly flushing intensely, “since I was a little boy.”

News scandals tend to acquire story lines that, even when wrong, aren’t easily shaken. The Rampart narrative, police fear, has been seen by the public as the story of a desperate rogue cop coughing up the ugly “truth” about them all: that they’re all predators and bullies--that police see themselves as soldiers in a war civilians don’t want to know about, and that can’t be won unless they fight dirty.

The likelihood that Rampart will turn out to be more the story of some weak people who were thrust into temptation by a crime-paranoid public has yet to reassure them, though time, I suspect, will bear this out.

Last week, though, LAPD’s venerable training campus seemed, for all the current angst, hopeful. The place bustled with people who yearned to be good cops. Or perhaps just to be good, though it was hard to define that. “I just want to help people,” the applicant said, trying to be understood.

*

Being “good,” of course, is tougher for some than for others, as the Rampart allegations seem to illustrate. The law enforcement code of ethics--a boilerplate creed written into the LAPD manual--appears, in Rampart, to have been violated almost sentence for sentence. Not that the brass looking into it are necessarily without their own sins.

But, experts say, ethics generally are a sometime passion in police agencies, which are rife with big crackdowns at the bottom and willful blindness to broader problems higher up. “Many departments have formal ethics training, but few take it seriously,” says Joseph McNamara, a former San Jose police chief and current research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “The subtle message even most recruits get is that these are the rules, but the reality is something else.”

LAPD has been no exception. The focus on ethics seems to zigzag between punitive obsession and neglect. Both miss the mark, and the result has been demoralizing inconsistency. Rigid rules are just, well, boilerplate if their meaning isn’t somehow infused into the culture with consistent, real-world training and adult discussion about temptation. The Ethics Resource Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that focuses on corporations, has found, interestingly, that when private companies don’t back ethical codes with meaningful reinforcement, employees are even less likely to report misconduct than if the company has no ethical guidelines. On the other hand, a recent study on academic dishonesty showed a drop of 10 percentage points in cheating on college campuses that made a big deal of it.

Not that ethics aren’t cloying. McNamara laughs that the law enforcement code “is sort of written for a saintly clergyman.” And yet, to read it is not to envision the tiny percentage who are bad cops (and will cheat regardless), or the majority who are good cops (and won’t, regardless.) What it conjures is that vast, weak middle, which--in any culture--needs reinforcement to be what it yearns to be.

Which may be worth noting in this painful saga, as the decent and indecent alike get tarred, and creeps and innocents alike get out of jail in droves and the city gets stuck with the breathtaking tab. Ethics have to be front and center--and alive--to matter. Noble words can’t just be for manuals.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.