Parks Flap Ushers in Hahn’s Political Puberty

Eleven o’clock at City Hall, and Mayor Jim Hahn has just walked into a crowded press room to show whether he’s got any business being in the building.

I didn’t expect much. The last time I saw Hahn work under pressure, in a melee over a proposed bus route, he was so painfully unprepared for the big time, he gave me chest pains.

This time, the heat was hotter. Hahn was about to explain why a white mayor, elected to office with nearly unanimous support from black voters, had sided with a mostly white police union in an effort to run a black police chief out of office.

As for my question--does Hahn have any business being in the building?--it’s way too soon to know. But I got no chest pains this time, and in his midlife journey to political manhood, Hahn appears to have hit puberty.

The mayor said his decision not to support LAPD Chief Bernard Parks--whose fate is in the hands of the Police Commission Hahn appointed-- had nothing to do with politics, or with the foaming hotheads in the police union. He simply disagreed with Parks on how to go after bad cops, police the city, and keep officers from jumping ship.

Asked about the racial implications of his decision, Hahn had a quick reply. He said he hoped the city had grown beyond those kinds of divisions.

It’s a smart answer. But it would carry more weight if Hahn hadn’t done everything but call Antonio Villaraigosa the Frito Bandito in the mayoral campaign. You could also argue that Hahn has done a number on the black community, having traded on his father’s good name during the campaign while giving no clue that he’d cut Parks loose.

“He implied real support for the police chief,” says Kevin Hooks, a Los Angeles businessman and national trustee with the Urban League. Hooks, like many others in the African American community, feels betrayed.

The problem with Hahn, we must remember, is that puberty is a time of clumsiness. Last week, on the subject of his appointments to commissions, an awkward Hahn tried to explain how he managed to ignore South Los Angeles after passing himself off as the best friend of the black man since Abe Lincoln. And now, before those wounds have been licked, he dumps Parks without first building a case for doing it.

But whether Hahn acted for reasons of conviction, politics, or just felt the need to establish that he isn’t a pushover, I’m going to say something in the mayor’s defense. Los Angeles ought not to be choosing or holding onto a police chief on the basis of skin color, simple as that.

Given the LAPD history of brutality, we can all understand why the African American community feels a sense of comfort in seeing a Willie Williams or Bernard Parks at the helm. But if we wanted a top cop who best reflected the new L.A. color-wise, wouldn’t we go brown?

And another thing. Despite a history of men being pulled over for driving while black, the biggest threat in the neighborhood isn’t the Police Department. It’s gangsters with guns cutting down everyone in their sights, including innocent bystanders. And the crime rate, last I checked, is not on Parks’ side.

There’s only one question that matters as the Police Commission figures out whether to send Parks into early retirement, and this is it:

Is he getting the job done?

You could argue all day and night without a consensus, because there is no easy answer. It’s like trying to figure out if the school principal is getting the job done, and you can’t trust everything you hear from teachers or students.

Parks is a reformer who made the LAPD honest and professional in ways it has never been. But morale has sunk because he’s like the overbearing Dad who inspects your plate after dinner and sends you off to your room for not clearing every pea.

“We don’t have a problem with him going after bad cops,” one officer told me. “What bothers us is that we’re trying to do our jobs, and we keep getting called in because we haven’t shined our shoes to his specifications.”

With that same obsessive zeal, Parks has guarded his empire from the highest turret, sniping at critics and heading off every attempt to open the department to outside review by citizens or professionals. We’ll never know how deep and wide the Rampart scandal ran because Bernard Parks, in the moment that sealed his entry into the control freak hall of fame, wouldn’t let anyone in to have a look.

You have to admire the man’s confidence, ego, or whatever it was. But how effective can he be with rock-bottom morale and a mayor he refuses to work with?

At the press conference, Hahn talked about what a tough decision this was. I don’t know. I think Parks made it easy for him.

*

Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@ latimes.com.