Standing Eye-to-Eye With a Shrinking Giant

So maybe they did do it on tippy-toe.

Maybe they did wait until the crowd was already edging in that direction.

But they did it.

As gingerly as they might cross a minefield, the pack of Los Angeles mayoral candidates, almost to a man, declared in their debate the other evening that the LAPD has got to change, and change big.

Exactly how is one of those details the devil claims as his own: Some candidates think the city should avoid a courtroom showdown with the Justice Department over the LAPD’s civil rights conduct by handing over the keys to Parker Center. Others among them believe the city should agree to the Feds’ terms and keep the keys to the LAPD in the city’s own pocket. Only one, Mayor Riordan’s endorsee, says no to any Justice Department role.

This measured at least 6.6 on the upheaval scale of city politics. For decade upon decade, candidates for mayor in this town criticized the LAPD at their peril. Not only was the LAPD the most recognizable city agency--who made TV series about the public works department, right?--but it had a constituency of satisfied middle-class voters.

Go after the LAPD and you weren’t running against your opponent--you were running against the Department, and its leaders, the J. Edgar Hoovers of California, chiefs-for-life like Daryl F. Gates, kingmakers like Bill Parker. Mayors came and mayors went but the department--that was L.A. Gates flirted with the notion of running for mayor against his nemesis, Tom Bradley, but in the end he also knew where the power lay.

When Norris Poulson ran for mayor in 1953, his token criticism so enraged Chief Parker that he supposedly assigned a detective to monitor Poulson. And when Sam Yorty ran for mayor in 1961 and pledged that he would integrate the LAPD--well, the tale no one ever disproved was that Parker made a visit to Yorty’s office with a briefcase full of stuff that Sam Yorty would just as soon nobody ever saw, and thereafter the two got along like a house afire.

Even into the 1970s, the department kept dossiers on tens of thousands of ordinary Angelenos and their innocuous organizations. Just knowing these dossiers were there in some file cabinet was enough to put a frost on the warmest political ambitions.

So the department whose name never appeared on a ballot was the 800-pound gorilla of local politics. In 1992 that changed; 15 months after the Rodney King beating, voters passed Proposition F, taking the Kevlar vest of Civil Service protection away from the police chief and limiting him--or her, at the rate things were going--to two five-year terms. And now the Rampart crisis has brought the federal government knocking at the city’s gates, demanding that the LAPD drop the drawbridge and let the Feds keep an eye on how the department goes about its business. And the LAPD monolith, the fortress of fear, is suddenly no longer so fearsome.

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The mutt-eat-mutt Reform Party Convention in Long Beach last month was a day-care center compared to the schisms and chasms cracking over the city just now.

The L.A. police chief and his supporters, the Justice Department, and the police officers’ union, the Police Protective League, are in a three-way tug-of-war over the soul of the department, and the City Council and mayoral candidates all have to decide just where it is on the rope they want to grab hold and pull.

The quarrels between Chief Bernard C. Parks and the PPL, made public in a hefty study by Erwin Chemerinsky, a legal thinker of independent stripe, show tellingly how the LAPD, while still a hefty player, is not the giant it once was.

Rafael Sonenshein is a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton who has studied the dynamics of L.A. power. The police union, he says, “is still extremely important in council races”--everybody wants the cops’ endorsement--but the quirkiness of a police union at odds with its chief adds a complicating element to elections that are too soon upon us: Imagine a candidate endorsed by the police chief, but not the police union.

With charter reforms, “it’s difficult,” says Sonenshein, “for a chief to do the things previous chiefs did. That being said, the chief is still a formidable political force. In these negotiations with the Justice Department, he’s more than just a general manager of a department. Even with his troubles, he has a very big recognition level and approval level in this city.”

Hmmm: high TVQ, high approval ratings, termed out of the job in six years . . .

Suddenly I’m thinking Philadelphia. I’m thinking of a police chief named Rizzo who became a mayor named Rizzo.

I’m thinking that as power shifts, the powerful learn to shift along with it.

I’m thinking of a campaign button we could be seeing in a half-dozen years: Parks for Mayor.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com