The Story of LAPD Reform Is Never-Ending

The season finale of Los Angeles’ eternal soap opera about its unruly police department left us with a cliffhanger: In the wake of legion lawlessness (Rampart scandal), knights from afar (the Justice Department) swept into town, decreed that the LAPD obey the law of the realm and put the force under royal watch. Will the LAPD flout the feudal decree? Will the LAPD’s sovereign command finally yield in the epic struggle for civilian control? Or will the LAPD renegades repel reform yet again? Stay tuned for another action-packed season of “As the Badge Turns.”

What will it really take to turn this department around? The Rampart scandal triggered several investigations and a consent decree that create the latest framework for LAPD reform. Forty years of local efforts to reform the LAPD made the consent decree necessary. Any back-pedaling from it, as some may be trying to do with an incoming Republican administration in Washington, would be indefensible. And reformers beware: Key gaps in that reform framework need closing to avoid Rampart II 10 years from now.

* Internal affairs is not a solution. The Drooyan Commission report, the LAPD Board of Inquiry report and the federal consent decree share a common and perhaps fatal flaw. All three fail to document the serious problems with the LAPD’s internal affairs department yet recommend that a beefed-up, expanded internal affairs play a central role in curbing police corruption and abuse.

What were they thinking? Internal affairs is one of the epicenters of the LAPD’s problems. Assigning reform leadership to an unreformed internal affairs is like putting the Tailhook squad in charge of Navy sex harassment training or Charlton Heston in charge of gun control. The bottom line is that cops cannot investigate other cops. As USC professor Erwin Chemerinsky recently documented in his probing analysis of the LAPD, until internal affairs is placed under civilian control and insulated from the police culture of silence and retaliation, it cannot be the designated hitter of police reform.

* It’s the culture, stupid. The LAPD command concluded in its Board of Inquiry report that Rampart resulted from a few bad apples. Wrong; we’re talking the barrel, the tree and the whole orchard. We’re talking about the LAPD’s culture, a culture that retaliates against the majority of good cops who dare not report abuse--a culture that shields Dirty Harry and that stun-guns Serpico. Both the Drooyan and Chemerinsky reports concluded that the LAPD’s problems stem from its culture. The current LAPD command, nonetheless, rejects any notion of a systemic problem. This view is a major barrier to changing the LAPD.

* Vision of policing. The Christopher Commission mandated that the LAPD move from hyper-aggressive, militaristic policing to community-based, problem-solving policing. The LAPD just said no. Ten years later, we have Rampart, still no consensus on what police should be accountable for and no comprehensive community policing model.

The public holds police responsible for winning unwinnable wars on drugs, crime and gangs. These expectations produce brutality and public cynicism. Under the current framework, reform is being relaunched amid the failure of not defining and reconfirming the mandate for community policing. The city first needs to agree on a reasonable vision of community policing and then demand that the LAPD do it.

* Civilian control. LAPD resistance to “outside” civilian control is deep and long-standing. When the LAPD command presented a draft of the consent decree to top officers this summer, it was with the prediction that the department would be able “get around this one, too.” Until the LAPD leadership drops its view of constitutionally mandated civilian control and the inspector general as dangerous “outside interference,” we should expect the LAPD’s tradition of vigorous resistance to continue.

* Patrol cops rule. There will be no change in police culture or street behavior if patrol officers can’t see how reform improves their working conditions and results in safer communities. This decree must be enforced in a way that convinces the rank-and-file patrol officers that they will have the tools, training, standards and respect they need to do their jobs without retaliation, relentless microinvestigation from headquarters or unreasonable expectations from the public. Without this, there will be no change in the LAPD.