Traditional Allies Clash Over Parks

The standoff between Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn and Police Chief Bernard C. Parks is causing an unusual rift between traditional allies: civil libertarians and black political and religious leaders.

The split is the more striking because both sides ascribe to the same cause: police reform.

Yet some of Los Angeles’ most prominent civil liberties advocates and black leaders with whom they have long stood side-by-side have come to vastly different conclusions about how the Los Angeles Police Department has progressed under Parks, who faces a key test today as he makes his case to keep his job before the city’s Police Commission.

On one hand, black community leaders say that Parks has made good strides in what they deem key areas of reform: officer accountability and addressing citizen complaints. “There is just no chief who has done as much,” said black City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Parks supporter.

On the other, some civil libertarians insist that Parks epitomizes the LAPD status quo, resisting reform on such measures as civilian oversight at every turn. “It’s like two separate conversations,” said civil rights lawyer Constance Rice, a Parks opponent who is black.

Although some civil liberties advocates have taken a stand against Parks, others are neutral on his reappointment.

Parks, a 37-year LAPD veteran, is nearing the end of his first five-year term as chief. He is opposed by Hahn, and faces an uphill battle for reappointment by the mayoral-appointed Police Commission, which could reach a decision within days. The issue has touched racial nerves and split political constituencies.

“We all want the same thing for the city. So it’s painful for us on the progressive side to see the civil rights and African American leadership at odds over this issue,” said Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance, which is neutral on Parks’ reappointment.

“It’s very regrettable,” said Los Angeles Urban League President John W. Mack, a Parks supporter, “that some of our traditional civil liberties allies are not with us.”

Although the split breaks along racial lines to some extent, there are people of each race on both sides, and they profess a nuanced range of opinions. But vastly different assessments of reform progress under Parks have relegated natural brothers-in-arms to different sides.

At the same time, the realignment has resulted in what Sokatch calls “strange bedfellows,” as civil liberties advocates line up with the city police officers union against the chief’s reappointment.

African American political leaders, meanwhile, have maintained their habitual posture in opposition to the union, which they label reactionary and hostile to black interests.

Some civil liberties advocates such as Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law professor at USC, have taken strong stands against the chief. Others, such as Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, a former police commissioner, have remained silent on Parks, confining their comments to concern over what they see as the slow progress on reform.

For their part, groups such as the Progressive Jewish Alliance and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California have opted not to take a stand on the reappointment of Parks. But leaders of both organizations question whether reform under Parks has been adequate. For the ACLU, it is “a very difficult situation,” said Ramona Ripston, the group’s executive director.

Such ambivalent or critical positions contrast sharply with those held by an array of black clergy and traditionally black civil-rights groups. Leaders of the Urban League and the local chapter of the Southern Leadership Conference strongly back the chief on the same grounds on which his critics oppose him: reform.

On both sides of the divide, advocates question the others’ motives. Civil liberties advocates accuse black supporters of Parks of acting out of racial solidarity, or out of a sense that Hahn, whose campaign for mayor they vigorously supported, betrayed them.

Black leaders counter that the civil liberties advocates are so caught up in esoteric conflicts with the chief that they have lost touch with those whom reform is supposed to benefit.

Both sides claim a better perspective from which to evaluate the chief’s performance. And on both sides, people seem unnerved by the split.

It’s one thing to battle routine foes, quite another to take up arms against people “who in any other context I’ve been allies with,” said Chemerinsky.

The dispute may expose deeper divisions between urban blacks and “liberal white groups who feel they know what’s best for the black community ....To be honest, they are not in touch,” said Parks supporter Najee Ali, executive director of Project Islamic HOPE.

For Sokatch, the conflict is simply, “very saddening ... there is a feeling that this issue has created a rift within the alliance,” he said.

Definition of Police Reform Is at Issue

At least part of the disagreement is rooted in how one defines reform.

Black supporters of the chief tend to focus on Parks’ efforts in the areas of police discipline and the investigation of complaints about day-to-day police misconduct--changes they consider key to ensuring better treatment of blacks.

They talk frequently about police discourtesy and brutality, relatively little about preventing the more venal, Rampart-style police corruption.

Civil liberties advocates tend to focus on issues of civilian oversight, and especially the chief’s troubled relationship with the Police Commission’s inspector general, the civilian watchdog charged with auditing internal investigations.

They tend to talk frequently about corruption, protection of whistle-blowers and access to documents, and relatively little about how the police treat people on the street on a daily basis.

“There is an honest disagreement between some of the people who have been involved in the civil-rights struggle,” said Rabbi Harvey J. Fields of Wilshire Boulevard Temple, a Parks supporter.

The reason the split is so troubling to many partisans is that for so long, the notion of reforming the LAPD has been understood to mean, in part, improving its relationship with the city’s minorities--especially with African Americans.

When it comes to the LAPD, black residents of South-Central Los Angeles have been what the Rev. Jesse Jackson calls “the afflicted community”--disproportionately affected by crime, and more likely to complain of humiliating encounters with police.

Parks Toughened Discipline System

One of the most conspicuous changes under Parks is toughening the department’s discipline system, which some African American leaders perceive as going to the heart of the problem they care about most.

Through a combination of stiffer penalties, higher standards and vastly increased efforts to take, track and investigate citizen complaints, Parks is thought to have achieved some measure of behavior modification of LAPD officers on a broad scale. Whether the modification has made police officers less proactive or made them behave better toward the public is a matter of debate within the department.

But to black advocates such as Mack of the Urban League, such changes are “the real deal. That is what impacts real human beings out on the streets,” he said.

Ali, of Project Islamic HOPE and a former gang member, cites the difference through personal experience.

Years ago, he recalls, an LAPD officer “grabbed me and pushed me against a car and handcuffed me, made me sit on the curb,” he said. “I felt violated. I was helpless.”

After being forced to sit in the hot sun and have his clothes ruined from perspiration, he was allowed to leave.

More recently, Ali said, he was stopped because he resembled a suspect, but the officers were “courteous, polite. They said ‘sir.’ After they ran my license, they talked to me. They said I wasn’t the person they were looking for. They let me go. They apologized.”

But Parks draws a sharply different response from civil rights advocates who regard civilian control as paramount.

His troubled relationship with the commission and its inspector general dates to the beginning of his term as chief. He has disagreed with the inspector general on issues including access to internal affairs documents, protecting the identity of whistle-blowers and the initiation of audits.

Strong Disagreement With Civilian Overseers

He has also exercised his authority aggressively under the theory that a chief should be ultimately accountable for the department’s performance.

For the same reason, he has worked to concentrate authority in his own hands. And he has seen fit to disagree strongly with civilian overseers when he deems them in error.

The mere appearance that a chief is less than compliant, flexible and eagerly responsive to civilian bosses is troubling to civil liberties advocates.

Moreover, his stance on civilian oversight suggests little progress will be made on such far-reaching reform proposals as improving internal affairs investigations, they say.

“I just don’t believe a chief should say civilians are not in control,” said Rice, the civil rights lawyer.

Complaints and discipline are “surface, skin-level reforms,” she holds. “I take a more complicated look at things.”

The Rev. Norman Johnson, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had a quick retort. Civil liberties advocates can talk about “systems,” he argued, but what matters is how people are treated. “The lived experience always counts more,” he said.

Yet on both sides, the split with old allies rattles.

Mulling this, Johnson is moved to doubt: “Maybe the civil libertarians have more insider information,” he reflected.

Greenebaum, who questions the pace of reform, echoes that thought. “Maybe,” he said, “[We] are missing something.”