What of Reform Without Parks?

The almost-certain departure of Chief Bernard C. Parks from the helm of the Los Angeles Police Department is unlikely to have a major impact on the extensive package of court-approved reforms set in motion by a federal consent decree during his tenure.

Largely unaffected by any leadership change will be many areas covered by the government order. It contains scores of detailed provisions that guide changes on use-of-force investigations, collection of racial profiling data and taking of complaints. It also lays out elaborate requirements for a system to track problem officers.

But under new leadership, there may well be other challenges to the changes ushered in under Parks--in particular the strong, personal control he has asserted over officer discipline.

Many uncertainties remain, and despite federal pressure, many reforms can be influenced by local leadership. Reform in the LAPD today is partly a matter of closing loopholes--that is, of designing systems to make sure that officers stay within the rules and that individual discretion in applying the rules is carefully defined.

Exactly how such systems are designed, and how effectively they can be made to work in the real world, are looming issues for whoever leads the department in the future.

It may take years, for example, before anyone really knows whether there will be erosion in such areas as Parks’ tough officer discipline system. Also unclear is whether his departure will mean further advances on such reform fronts as civilian oversight, as his key opponent, Mayor James K. Hahn, contends. Parks’ disciplinary system was a particular flash point, fueling the ire of opponents who sought his removal.

Even more uncertain is whether the police reforms undertaken in recent years will achieve the desired effect: preventing riots and Rampart-style corruption scandals.

Questions over the future of LAPD reform hinge partly on what is meant by the term--and who’s asking.

They are further complicated by the fact that the reform banner has been waved by all camps in the recent debate over Parks, whose reappointment request was denied 4 to 1 by the Los Angeles Police Commission on Tuesday.

From the mayor, to the chief, to the commissioners, even to the officers union--each party has claimed to be the bigger reformer. Reform was touted by all, although sometimes to promote quite different agendas.

Parks, who says he will appeal the commission’s rejection to the City Council--but is highly unlikely to prevail--has long insisted that his commitment to new discipline standards is one reason he has taken so much heat.

The revamp, he says, is to blame for low officer morale, an issue that weighed heavily against him in the commission’s deliberations.

Commissioners countered that the chief had failed to “take ownership” of morale problems in the department, and that he could have done more to improve morale without compromising reform.

This week, as union leaders rejoiced at Parks’ defeat, commissioners sought to assuage fears among some of the chief’s supporters that losing him would lead to a rollback on reforms designed to keep officers from impinging on residents’ civil rights.

Sensitive on this point, Police Commissioner Silvia Saucedo took pains to make clear that Parks’ defeat would not set back reforms, many of which are mandated by the 2000 consent decree agreement with the federal government.

“As long as I am a commissioner, we are not going to backslide from reform. We are going to move forward full force,” she said.

Most experts accept a definition for police reform today that is quite different from past reform concepts. Police reform efforts were once intended mostly to counter corruption--officers protecting bookmakers, for example.

In more recent times, the focus has shifted to racial justice issues, particularly racial profiling, police use of force and the protection of civil rights.

In practice, this has come to mean an increasingly standard menu of reforms spreading to police departments across the country, many with roots in Los Angeles’ troubled history.

The menu is reflected to a large extent in the federal consent decree, which LAPD Cmdr. Dan Koe-nig calls “without question the most complex consent decree anywhere.”

The decree followed a federal investigation--launched in 1996--of alleged patterns of civil-rights violations by LAPD officers, according to a high-level U.S. Justice Department official.

In 1994, in a political atmosphere still colored by LAPD officers’ beating of motorist Rodney King, federal legislation was approved to give federal justice officials new powers to sue police departments. The resulting consent decree in Los Angeles was one of the earliest actions initiated.

The federal government has since established a total of four consent decrees, and three similar documents known as memorandums of agreements, with various police agencies around the country.

The LAPD still represents the largest agency the federal government has attempted to reform this way. Few claim that such changes will bring perfectly clean police departments. But the idea is to “create a wide variety of systems to identify police corruption and attempt to manage it,” said Merrick Bobb, a special counsel to the Board of Supervisors who oversees Sheriff’s Department reform.

The federal government’s decree with Los Angeles reflects one of the twists of new police reform efforts--a trend toward viewing the process in financial terms rather than strictly as a racial-justice issue.

Systems to help police departments identify potential civil liabilities and save costs are becoming more popular as a result.

The idea is to use computer systems to track information on officers and analyze statistical trends that might expose local governments to higher liability costs. For example, such a system might help to zero in on force policies that boost risk of injury.

This federally mandated effort will continue under whoever is chief.

The idea “is to get information to look at and manipulate it . . . rather than hunting down all these paper files spread out all over,” said LAPD Deputy Chief David Doan, who heads the effort.

Right now, the department is in the early stages of setting up prototype computer systems likely to cost the city millions of dollars over several years, he said.

Down the road, Doan said, the LAPD hopes to have the software power to crunch such arcane bits of information as whether officers use twist locks or wrist locks, he said. The LAPD and the city had long been criticized for being slow to develop such a system. Now, partly owing to the pressure from the Justice Department, “we are taking this to a level no one has been at before,” he said.

There still remain lots of potential problems, however.

City and federal officials continue to bicker over some details of the system. And labor issues remain--for example, how to fairly deal with officers who may not be pleased to find themselves flagged as trouble by computer software.

But the federal official, who is closely involved in the issue, said Wednesday that “the L.A. consent decree does hold real promise for bringing about . . . lasting reform for LAPD. We are engaged on our end, and the city officials are engaged on their end.”

Because the reform issue is so complex, the question of whether Hahn or Parks is the greater reformer remains arguable.

Hahn’s reform agenda includes a proposal to replace internal LAPD disciplinary systems with civilian review.

Some insiders say that Parks rammed so many new procedures and organizational changes through the enormous Police Department that it was actually disruptive.

Besides introducing his discipline system, Parks has sought to flatten the command structure and reduce opportunities for defense lawyers to challenge LAPD officers in court by taking those with problems off the streets.

Parks also oversaw production of a 362-page critique of the LAPD in the wake of the Rampart scandal.

The report explores LAPD policies in numbing detail, recommending such technical changes as tighter restrictions on use of confidential informants.

The report did not yield what some critics wanted, however: more punishment for more LAPD brass after Rampart. And Hahn was recently contemptuous of the effort--criticizing the LAPD’s “self-congratulatory euphoria” over it.

Detroit Police Chief Jerry A. Oliver, whose city recently invited the federal government to scrutinize its department, said Wednesday that in policing circles, Parks’ Rampart report has been embraced as a blueprint.

The report, which provides the basis for many changes in the LAPD, also “was used by every progressive police department across the country,” Oliver said. “It was a road map of how to look at this stuff.”

Parks has also been faulted by civilian critics during his term for not applying discipline fairly--an allegation that is hard to prove or disprove. He has also been criticized for not providing information to civilian overseers, and most recently, for not dealing squarely with the Police Commission.

These were not small points, his critics argue. If reform is to work, civilian overseers “cannot be kept in the dark,” Hahn says.

There remains a question over whether a new chief would seek to alter some of Parks’ changes, such as his effort to eliminate the ability of supervisors to ignore citizen complaints.

Parks has argued for all complaints to be investigated. The union has suggested that some don’t warrant it.

For his part, Police Commission President Rick J. Caruso has suggested that the pendulum of reform may have swung too far in this and other areas, and that the complaint system has been too damaging to officer morale, resulting in attrition.

“If crime is going up and the number of officers you have is going down, how long are you going to stand around?” he asked.

For now, there is one area of reform in which the controversy over Parks’ reappointment may have already set the city back:

Federal officials say one of their goals in the consent decree is political accountability. They designed the decrees to make politicians, police and civilian overseers all take part, so they can’t simply blame one another if reforms don’t work.

This point, however, was sometimes lost in the recent debate over Parks, as partisans swapped attacks on one another’s reform credentials.

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