Riordan Revives Reform Debate --and Ensures Its Irrelevance

Last Monday, Mayor Richard Riordan did the city of Los Angeles an enormous favor by firing Police Commission President Gerald Chaleff. For just as hopes for a top-to-bottom transformation of the Los Angeles Police Department were fading, the mayor stepped up and reignited a debate that was fast heading to the burial ground of past reform efforts. It was none too soon. Reform was already on life support.

From the start, public concern over Officer Rafael Perez’s transcribed confessions of widespread police abuse have never inflamed the public as did the Rodney G. King-beating video. Even at the height of the Rampart scandal, the public seemed to feel that violating the civil liberties of gangsters and immigrants, in a neighborhood as poor and politically marginal as Pico-Union, was a necessary part of a dirty job. The longer the scandal dragged on, the less it seemed to care.

There was little that followed Perez’s initial revelations to bolster the story’s momentum. The LAPD’s self-serving report on the scandal limited itself to the Rampart Division’s anti-gang CRASH unit. The Police Commission’s inquiry, though candid and more substantive, was also not the in-depth, wide-ranging probe of other CRASH officers that was needed.

Similarly, the absence of police reform as a contentious issue in the mayoral campaign, the lack of a vocal coalition of citizens to hold the candidates’ feet to the fire on the issue, the election of a new president who believes the federal government should not intervene in local police affairs and a City Council committee’s foot-dragging on placing LAPD-reform initiatives on the ballot--all contributed to serious reform of the Police Department be-ing pushed to the sidelines. But by firing Chaleff, Riordan not only revived the debate, he also greatly clarified it. The question used to be: Will we have reform? Last week, Riordan inadvertently raised two others: Who will define reform, and what kind of reform will we have?

Riordan’s answers can be gleaned from his dismissal of Chaleff, a respected defense attorney with a sterling record in support of civil liberties.

The city’s liberals expected big things from Chaleff, but relatively little was delivered. He refused, for example, to publicly defend the department’s first inspector general, Katherine Mader, when Riordan and Police Chief Bernard C. Parks used the Police Commission to force her out of office for committing the sin of independently doing her job of monitoring the LAPD. Then, at a critical juncture, Chaleff opposed a full-fledged outside investigation of the department that would have challenged Parks’ oft-repeated contention that the Rampart scandal was nothing more than an isolated incident that should not reflect on the department’s overall behavior.

But Chaleff also stood up to Riordan and Parks when he led the Police Commission in ruling that the fatal shooting, in 1999, of Margaret Mitchell, an elderly homeless woman suspected of stealing a shopping cart, violated department policy. The ruling enraged Riordan and Parks. Chaleff also broke ranks when he unequivocally supported negotiating a federal consent decree, aimed at reforming the LAPD, with the Justice Department. Riordan and Parks had adamantly opposed the idea. In the end, Chaleff proved not to be an obsequious team player, so he had to go.

In firing Chaleff, Riordan blamed him for the department’s low morale, unsuccessful recruitment efforts and failure to implement community-based policing. In so doing, the mayor redefined reform. Making cops happier, the force larger and instituting a community-policing strategy, rather than fixing the LAPD’s broken culture, are now Riordan’s goals of reform.

Riordan’s excuses for firing Chaleff are simply ridiculous. It is Parks’ autocratic, sometimes arbitrary and often inflexible leadership that has largely compelled hundreds of officers to leave the department in the last year, and that has caused the president of the Police Protective League to do the unthinkable and call for the formation of a police review board. If it were Chaleff, not Parks, who was responsible for the department’s recruitment problems, why, then, did the mayor blame former Chief Willie L. Williams, not the Police Commission, for precisely the same problems?

The answer should be more obvious than ever: The mayor does not want real police reform. Throughout his eight-year tenure, Riordan has defined reform as fighting crime, more cops on the street and ever-mounting arrest statistics. While crime fighting must be the primary goal of any police department, and adding more police officers a necessary element in that fight, neither can even remotely be considered police reform. What the mayor has been pushing for is a smoother, well-oiled version of the old hard-charging LAPD, not the democratization of the oversight of the department or getting the troops to respect the public and the Constitution.

Chaleff’s dismissal highlights the mayor’s true reform desires in another way: It seeks to undermine the consent decree. Chaleff would have been a key player in the Police Commission’s selection of the monitor responsible for ensuring that the LAPD fully implements the reforms called for in the decree. By firing Chaleff, Riordan removed one of the strongest voices in favor of a hands-on monitor.

The real future of reform, however, will largely depend on who is elected L.A.’s next mayor and who is selected as its next chief of police. The one and only candidate for chief thus far mentioned is the man who currently holds the post. But if Parks is reappointed next year to a second five-year term, it would be bad news for reformers. He fiercely battled opposed the consent decree, failed to implement key Christopher commission reforms and has ceaselessly undermined two successive inspector generals. Like Riordan, he stands for the old LAPD.

But it would be a serious mistake to underestimate Parks. He is already campaigning hard and building support for his reappointment, particularly in his core constituency, other than the mayor: the city’s African American establishment and middle class. Within the black community, Parks and his wife have been highly accessible and seen at dinners, charities and churches, making clear they are not only active members of the black community, but also of L.A.’s increasingly wealthy and influential African American elite.

Black support for Parks is crucial to the future of reform, for two reasons. The first is the ballot box. In Los Angeles, African American turnout is consistent with black representation in the city’s general population. African Americans constituted 11.5% of the city’s population in 1998, and 13% of the voters who turned out in the last mayoral election. That blacks have tended to vote as a bloc in recent citywide elections, that there is no black candidate for mayor and that two Latino candidates will likely divide the Latino vote--these factors will make black voters a key constituency in the mayoral primary. To oppose Parks could be bad politics because, as chief, he is an extremely important symbol of black success and influence for African Americans.

The two mayoral candidates who have the most at stake in terms of black support are City Attorney James K. Hahn, who counts blacks as a core constituency, and former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa. Hahn has already promised, if elected, to reappoint Parks as chief. When asked to comment on Chaleff’s firing, he said “the mayor has every right to do what he thinks best.” On the other hand, Villaraigosa, who has been relatively mute about Parks, this time put the chief on notice that if he did not seriously implement key reforms, his job would be in jeopardy.

The second reason the black community is important to LAPD reform is its historic leadership on the issue. It was the black community that first brought the issue of police abuse to the forefront, and arose in rebellion in 1965; the black community that for years led the battle for police accountability and reform; the black community that bore the brunt of the department’s brutal policing under Chief Daryl F. Gates; and the black community whose outrage over the acquittals of four cops in the first King-beating trial sparked the 1992 uprising. Yet, as a community their voice has been eerily silent during the Rampart scandal--and continues to be as the battle for lasting reform plays out.

Perhaps the black leadership is in a quandary over Parks. Most African American leaders have not only been at the forefront of police reform, but they have also been unceasing advocates for blacks in high-profile positions. There is none more high profile in L.A. than the chief of police. Yet, if the African American community continues to remain on the sidelines, the LAPD will likely evade, as it has so often in the past, the pressure to reform.

“There are two major issues facing the Police Department,” the mayor said last week. “The safety of the system and reform.” Until he or his successor understand that the two are interchangeable, nothing will change in L.A., or its Police Department.