Mayor Confirms Choice to Fill Vacancy on Police Commission

Mayor Richard Riordan confirmed at a news conference Monday his appointment of Rebecca Avila to the Los Angeles Police Commission.

Avila, a former director of the city Ethics Commission, will fill the opening created when Riordan fired commission President Gerald Chaleff.

Avila’s term is likely to be a short one: Although the next mayor, who will take office July 1, could keep any or all of the commissioners, he or she is expected to replace them.

Avila is credited with leading the Ethics Commission through politically treacherous waters during her four years as director. She left the commission last year for the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

At the Ethics Commission, she worked for a time for Raquelle de la Rocha, the acting Police Commission president.

Avila was out of town and did not attend Riordan’s news conference. She said by telephone she brings no specific agenda to the commission and has not yet developed positions on specific issues.

De la Rocha said Avila is “a reformer, but she’s cautious and careful.”

Riordan, who confirmed over the weekend that he intended to name Avila to the city’s most visible citizens panel, said he expected De la Rocha to continue as president for the remaining four months of his term.

He said De la Rocha has focused the commission’s efforts on improving morale, increasing recruitment, reinstituting community police programs and enacting reform.

The commission elects its own president, but since its members are appointed--and can be dismissed--by the mayor, it would be unlikely for the five members to select anyone other than the mayor’s choice.

Deputy Mayor Ben Austin said De la Rocha’s “focus and the mayor’s very hands-on approach” to police issues in the weeks since Chaleff’s firing have “shaken up the political landscape.”

Austin declined to say who on that landscape most needed shaking, but the most visible figure is Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, who has been an adamant opponent of many past Police Commission reform initiatives.

In particular, Parks has opposed commission involvement in departmental discipline and has resisted efforts to direct department resources to community policing programs.

Parks gutted the main element of community policing as practiced by prior LAPD administrations, the senior lead officer program, and had resisted efforts to reinstate it. Riordan favors restoring it, and Parks publicly has agreed, but the details of what form the program will take are unresolved.

Parks, at Riordan’s news conference Monday, praised De la Rocha’s “sensitivity to what the Police Department is all about.”