When Doing the Right Things Isn’t the Right Thing

There are good reasons why nothing new came out of the Los Angeles mayor’s first public Q&A; on Rampart last week, good reasons why, by the last question, even the heckler from the Brown Berets looked as if he wanted a nap. Over lunch with a ballroom full of civic types, in remarks broadcast live all over Southern California, Richard Riordan, the business mayor, stuck assiduously to the corporatespeak homilies that have become the Muzak of this unspeakable scandal. Blah blah “culture of mediocrity” blah blah “tougher managers” blah blah “learn from adversity” blah blah. Zzzzzzzzz.

But there were reasons. And--though false convictions are being unearthed by the score now--reasons why Riordan made it from salad to cheesecake without apologizing by name to anyone who actually has been wronged by the LAPD. Good, pragmatic reasons. Sound, fiscal reasons. Reasons of liability and municipal exposure. And yet, for all that, there was the sense that the business mayor had just failed at the only item of business that mattered, that he had just talked for an hour without saying the only important thing.

Maybe that sense rose in part from the growing roster of victims, from the stories of people like Julia Chavez and her daughter, Veronica, who threw their outrage onto the pile last week. The Chavez story isn’t the first or the worst to come out of Rampart, but its details, so typical of this scandal, and yet so poignant, seemed to accentuate the city’s loss for words as the last unanswered question-- “How bad was it?”--has been answered again and again.

It was, to recap court declarations, this bad: In 1997, seven Rampart cops are alleged to have burst, guns drawn, into the Chavez home while Julia Chavez, who was ill, was throwing up in the bathroom; to have handcuffed the mother and daughter, tossed the apartment and stolen their meager life savings of $6,800; to have berated and threatened to deport them until they produced citizenship papers; to have strong-armed Veronica Chavez in an attempt to use her in a vendetta against her brother, a reformed gangbanger who had gotten out of prison two years before.

When the daughter refused, the Chavezes say, Rafael Perez, the ex-cop at the hub of Rampart, told his compadres to plant rock cocaine on them. Veronica Chavez pleaded no contest to the trumped-up charge because her public defender told her, accurately, that no jury would buy the word of an ex-con’s sister over that of the LAPD. She was forced to undergo and pay for court-ordered drug treatment that she allegedly didn’t need and was left with a criminal record she allegedly didn’t deserve. Six months later, the city attorney used the drug conviction to force the landlord to evict the family.

That--according to court papers filed by the public defender’s office in a petition to overturn Veronica Chavez’s conviction--is how bad it was for the typical Rampart victim. But almost as bad has been the city’s official reaction, a response that, for so many very good reasons, falls far short of what the Chavezes and so many others deserve.

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People have been terrorized, financially ruined, deported, killed in this matter. Police have been left to drown in a sea of temptation because we, the people, were stoned on the rhetoric of “getting tough.” Rampart was a systemic tragedy of our own making, a matter worthy of the deepest moral and psychological introspection. But--for reasons having to do with municipal finance and potential litigation and, maybe, just the sheer enormity of what happened--L.A.’s leaders have willfully reduced it to a kind of management case study, a public relations problem, a thing for some vice president of human relations. A question of “mediocrity” and “tougher managers” and “learning from adversity.” And blah, blah, blah.

It’s bigger than that, however doggedly the city’s leaders insist upon squeezing this debate into its smallest framework. Los Angeles should be leading a nationwide dialogue about the nature of authority and the temptations of power, should be considering the entire criminal justice system--should, at the very least, be apologizing to victims, publicly and by name. Someone should say to the Chavez women and the many like them: Yes, we understand you’ll sue, because this is America and that’s what people do here. But it is important for you to know we are sorry anyway.

Of course, there are many reasons--good reasons--why this will never, can never, happen. But that doesn’t make the omission any less regrettable. There is more to leading a great city than the tending of its checkbook. There is also the business of a city’s soul.

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