A Chance to Do It Right

There are several ways to view a Los Angeles City Council vote today on a federal consent decree outlining broad reforms of the city’s Police Department. The worst would be to see it as a defeat, as an unavoidable capitulation to overwhelming federal authority, or as a dark day in which the city of Los Angeles was finally forced to admit that it cannot adequately operate or control its own police force.

Rather, this day should be seen as a positive turning point in which the mayor, the City Council, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, federal civil rights officials, the department’s local civilian overseers and others came to agreement on a prescription to fix the LAPD’s ills, restore its professionalism and set it on the road to being a department that serves all citizens with equal rigor and respect.

While Parks, Mayor Richard Riordan and some members of the council may not be happy, only the Police Protective League, the union of rank-and-file officers, stands legally in the way of reform now. It’s expected to seek a temporary restraining order to bar the consent decree from going into effect. The union would better serve its members by dropping the court action and working with the consent decree’s participants to ensure that officers are treated fairly.

The Rampart scandal, put in motion by the confessions of one corrupt former officer, involves allegations that police shot or beat and framed innocent people. So far more than 100 criminal convictions have been overturned, dozens of officers remain under investigation and four are already on trial, charged with planting weapons and framing suspects. The city faces untold millions in legal costs in settling lawsuits filed by the wrongly accused and convicted.

There’s a lot that the city needs to get past. The LAPD needs to regain its self-respect, and honest officers need to be able to hold their heads high. The consent decree, if implemented willingly, fully and without foot-dragging, should help. It calls for a sophisticated computerized system for tracking problem police officers; data collection to determine whether the LAPD is racially biased in deciding whom to question or arrest; new rules to prevent the fabrication of information or abuse of information from confidential sources, and additional authority for the city’s civilian Police Commission and its inspector general. All of this would be overseen by a federal monitor with broad access to the LAPD’s inner workings.

The hard part is not over, by a long shot. City taxpayers and the innocent have already paid dearly for past failures of reform, including the ignored recommendations of the 1991 Christopher Commission. This is the city’s chance to do it right, once and for all.