Note to Parks and Garcetti: Get Over It; Get On With It

The mayor was talking last week about this nun he knew when he was a schoolboy--Sister Carmelita.

Sister Carmelita could lift a kid clear up to the ceiling by his chin and drop him, and before he hit the ground she could get in a half-dozen good slaps. Sister Carmelita once broke a boy’s finger with a ruler, and then a week later gave him an F in penmanship.

She was a zero-tolerance enforcer, and as I listened to the mayor reminiscing, I thought: Where is Sister Carmelita when we need her?

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If politics in Los Angeles is anything--and there is some debate about that--it is polite. No name-calling. No finger-pointing. In other cities, the politicians slam dance; here, they minuet.

So when the unsavory Rampart matter broke into brass-knuckles hostilities between Police Chief Bernard C. Parks and Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti--well, it was as if we’d found out that Tom Bradley, the incarnation of stolid dignity, used to leave City Hall every night to wash his socks in the Mulholland Fountain.

Garcetti said Parks was deliberately obstructing his investigators, withholding information on Rampart. Parks returned the volley and then some, saying that he wasn’t holding back anything and that Garcetti was a foot-dragging, lying, on-the-ropes political opportunist.

To the Garcetti camp, Parks appeared to want the Rampart prosecutions limited in number and over with fast, sealed up like toxic waste instead of tracked into the ground water of the LAPD.

From the Parks corner, it looked as if Garcetti was moving too slowly, fearful of political repercussions from putting cops in prison. And Parks’ folks suspected that Rampart leaks were coming from the D.A.’s office. Walking right past the D.A.’s office and into the federal investigators’ offices, as Parks first indicated the LAPD wanted, would take care of that.

It was a glowering standoff--Chief Rock vs. D.A. Hardplace. The state attorney general and the city attorney sided with Garcetti. The Police Commission ordered Parks to cooperate, and the City Council backed that up unanimously. Even the mayor--who might as well wear a P on his sweater, he’s such a Parks supporter--admonished both men to stop behaving like children.

The upshot has been as curious as California’s open primary. People who don’t much like Garcetti have found themselves siding with him on principle, and people who very much like Parks have been whispering, “Psst, chief--this is one fight you don’t want to pick.”

The real fight has almost nothing to do with Rampart, but a great deal to do with the eternal question--at least it’s eternal here in L.A.--of who polices the police?

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I poked my head out the window at the Civic Center on Saturday morning; the flak looked to be easing up. Garcetti seems to be letting the commission’s order speak for him. But at a Skirball Cultural Center gathering of African American professionals Saturday afternoon, Parks obdurately kept up the barrage against Garcetti: “Unfortunately, what we have here is a district attorney who has chosen not to prosecute police officers.”

Well, that floored me. Parks’ desire to purge the rotten apples from the barrel would be more impressive if it weren’t set against a backdrop of three sometimes acrimonious decades when the last thing the LAPD wanted the D.A. to do was prosecute police officers.

In his fine history of the LAPD, writer Joe Domanick details how in the 1980s, a D.A. unit newly charged with investigating police shootings got stonewalled. It was kept from shooting scenes, its witnesses were allowed to walk out of police stations, it didn’t get the LAPD’s final reports for months.

In fact, an up-and-coming young deputy D.A. named Gil Garcetti said something then that he recycled almost word for word last week: The LAPD’s head of inquiries into officer-involved shootings “is playing games with us. . . . If he withholds information for hours, days or weeks, he is impeding our investigation.”

To this day, the LAPD insists to the city, the mayor and its own commission that it doesn’t need civilian investigators, that because only the police really understand the police, only they can effectively police themselves.

Both men have vulnerabilities. By losing “big cases,” Garcetti has upped the stakes on every subsequent case; anything he does from here until November will be spun as political, whether it is or not. And Parks eroded some of his support by cutting out popular community-based policing, and by his stubbornness in this matter.

Guys, get over it. The city expects and deserves justice that is swift (point to Parks) but complete (point to Garcetti). Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll have to call in Sister Carmelita.

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