Don’t Get Mad, Get Even at the Polls

Don’t be surprised if the political furor over Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard Parks plays out the way the Ruben Zacarias controversy did a couple of years ago. After first threatening to break up the L.A. school district, Latino activists retreated. But they did not forget.

You can count on Latino voters being reminded about the unseemly firing of the popular, if flawed, Los Angeles school superintendent when the school board members who voted against Zacarias are up for reelection next year. And Latino Democrats may use former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s role in engineering the coup against Zacarias as fodder if he becomes the Republican nominee against Gov. Gray Davis in November’s election.

Conventional wisdom in Los Angeles politics says Latino power, while clearly emerging, still lags behind the political clout of blacks. But black political leaders scrambling to save Parks’ job can learn something from their Latino counterparts.

Like payback.

The local black community was stunned last week when Mayor James K. Hahn said that he did not favor a second five-year term for Parks. Strong support among African American voters helped Hahn win a tough election last year against several rivals who had pledged to replace Parks when the chief’s term was up. So black leaders had assumed Parks’ job was safe despite the LAPD scandals and controversies that emerged on his watch.

As a longtime Police Department critic, I applaud the mayor’s decision. But I can’t shake a sense of deja vu because I vividly recall the similar outcry among Latino elected officials and political activists when Zacarias was ousted in 1999.

Consider the parallels:

Parks began as a street cop and worked his way up the ranks over a 37-year LAPD career. Zacarias started as an elementary school teacher in Boyle Heights 33 years before he was forced out as head of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Many blacks saw Parks’ ascension as a symbol of change in a police department with which they share a most unhappy history.

Latinos felt the same way when Zacarias was put in charge of a school system notorious for a high Latino dropout rate and other problems with its largest constituency.

Parks cultivated political support in the black community to compensate for his status as an outsider within a mostly white LAPD.

Zacarias also made it a point to be accessible to Latinos, whether members of Congress or barrio PTA moms.

Both men had their careers jolted by profound problems in the institutions they had devoted their lives to--despite the fact neither was personally responsible for the scandals that came to epitomize those problems.

There is no denying that both men were products of and prospered within the insular bureaucracies that spawned the district’s Belmont Learning Complex fiasco and the LAPD’s Rampart Division scandal. So legitimate questions can be raised as to whether they were really the right leaders to shake things up when it became glaringly obvious that change was needed. That’s why one of the first things a new school board majority did to try to reform the school district was to fire Zacarias. And I is why Hahn has concluded that a new chief is needed to reform the LAPD.

So if black activists can’t convince the Police Commission to ignore the mayor’s views and give Bernie Parks another term as chief, it won’t mean they lost the war. They can bide their time, like Latinos are doing, and plan for some political payback at election time.

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Frank del Olmo is associate editor of The Times.