Parks Hires Lawyers to Fight Panelists’ ‘Smear Campaign’

Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, lawyers in tow, lashed back Friday at questions posed about his integrity by members of the Los Angeles Police Commission, who voted 4 to 1 this week not to reappoint him to a second term.

Parks challenged public statements by some commissioners that he had not been forthcoming and honest with them during his reappointment interview on a pair of issues, one involving a performance evaluation.

Parks announced at a news conference outside Parker Center that he has retained two lawyers from the law firm of Allred, Maroko & Goldberg, the firm of Gloria Allred, to help him defend his record to the City Council.

“Whatever faults I might have, one of them is not my integrity,” Parks said.

After Tuesday’s commission vote, Parks is fast coming to the end of his options for seeking a second five-year term. Although council members say they will consider whether to hear from him on Tuesday, the likelihood that they will overturn the commission’s decision is slim.

Asked if Parks intended to take legal action, Parks’ attorney Nathan Goldberg said Friday that none was “contemplated at this time.”

Pressed further, he said: “I’m not going to tell you what we will consider or not consider.”

Goldberg called the commissioners’ allegations against Parks “a vicious smear campaign,” attacking a man with “an unblemished career who has never missed a day of work.”

During his 37 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, including five years at its helm, Parks has sought to carve a reputation built on personal integrity, invoking principle and honesty in defending his policies, and demanding the same of his officers through a strict disciplinary system.

But in the final hours of deliberations on the chief’s reappointment bid, Commission President Rick J. Caruso said, commissioners determined that Parks had tried, in essence, to mislead them by citing an incomplete performance evaluation from 2001. The review had been written by then-Commission President Raquelle de la Rocha and never was approved by the full board.

At the time, Caruso had characterized the situation as a “heartbreaking” turn of events that helped swing the vote against Parks.

Parks has countered that the problem arose from an honest misunderstanding, not a lack of integrity.

Caruso and other commissioners gave the following account of the incident:

Late Monday, in the final hours of what had been days of deliberations, commission member Silvia Saucedo noticed that she didn’t have a copy of a 2001 performance evaluation to which the chief had referred in written submissions.

Commission Executive Director Joe Gunn said he didn’t know anything about it. Gunn then called De la Rocha.

De la Rocha concurred that Gunn called late Monday “with one question, ‘Was [the evaluation] ever approved?’ I said ‘no.’ And [Gunn] said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and hung up.”

Caruso said that he and the other commissioners then concluded that Parks had knowingly used an unapproved evaluation to sway them.

Parks’ account is similar to De la Rocha’s. But he insists the problem arose from an innocent mistake.

Parks’ account is that De la Rocha indeed told him that the document had not been approved by the full commission in a phone conversation about two months ago.

But he claims he thought that she was going to work on it, and that when he received the hand-delivered evaluation several weeks ago, he assumed it was the result of her subsequent efforts and was therefore an official evaluation.

Parks said he had arranged for additional information to be delivered to De la Rocha to aid her work in the interim--in particular, a blank format for evaluations had been sent to her.

He emphasized this point because he said it shows both that he initially understood De la Rocha’s evaluation wasn’t finished, and that he was under a false impression that she was in the process of finishing it.

On Friday, De la Rocha questioned Parks’ version, asking why he would think she was in a position to finalize an evaluation when she was no longer on the commission. She further noted that he had told her the evaluation would be useful to him even if it was not approved, since it represented her thoughts.

However, in Friday’s interview, De la Rocha for the first time also allowed the possibility of a misunderstanding.

‘I am trying to reconstruct in my mind if [Parks] could have been confused,” she said. “I never told him three votes were required [to approve an evaluation]. I assumed he knew that.”

De la Rocha explained that she and Parks talked on two occasions in early February about several topics.

One was a newspaper opinion piece she was writing for which she needed Parks to send her materials. A second was missing pages from a previous, official evaluation. And a third was the disputed evaluation.

De la Rocha said she told the chief that she had written the evaluation but that it had not been approved by the full commission and she wasn’t sure where it was. She found it and sent it later.

In the meantime, though, she was bewildered to receive a blank evaluation format directed to her by the chief. She said she thought, “Isn’t that weird! ... What do I need this for?”

As she looked back Friday, she said, that suggested there may have been some confusion.

But Caruso questioned how Parks, known for his encyclopedic knowledge of the LAPD, could not have realized the evaluation had not been approved, especially given that De la Rocha was no longer on the commission.

“It should be remembered: The chief is a very precise man,” Caruso said. “If anyone understands the rules and regulations and workings of the department, I think it’s the chief.”

De la Rocha said she wouldn’t speculate on whether the chief had lied, but added: “The facts are gray enough, you could go either way.”

Friday’s events were evocative of the imbroglio that followed the end of Chief Willie Williams’ term. Parks’ predecessor threatened to sue the city over his failed reappointment bid. It also harked back to a controversy involving Parks and then-Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, in which the commission’s inspector general produced a finding that Parks had made misleading statements. The commission later disagreed.

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn said he did not have any comment on Parks’ hiring of lawyers, but added that he thought the Police Commission had given the chief a full and fair evaluation. The evaluation, “raised a question in their minds, and I think it was appropriate for them to comment on it,” the mayor said.

Asked Friday why he hired a lawyer, Parks answered: “I did not think there was a need to get an attorney involved until I read the paper the last two days and seeing the attacks on my integrity.”

Goldberg, his lawyer, questioned why commission members had not confronted Parks about their suspicions during nine hours of interviews with him before their vote.

Caruso acknowledged that he confronted the chief about the evaluation only after the vote.

But since Parks had been told by De la Rocha that the evaluation wasn’t approved, “I’m not sure what more we were going to ask the chief about it,” he said.

Caruso said Friday that he stands by his earlier statements in which he questioned the chief’s integrity. “I’d be more than happy to reconsider,” the evaluation incident, he added, “But it’s not going to change the ... vote.”

That’s because other factors weighed against the chief, he said, including his leadership of the department.

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Times staff reporters Tina Daunt, Matea Gold and Scott Glover contributed to this report.