A Street View of the Parks Battle

It wasn’t the nastiest response I’ve ever gotten from a reader. Not by a longshot. But a South-Central Los Angeles man did not take kindly to my questioning of Police Chief Bernie Parks’ leadership skills last week after Mayor Jim Hahn said he wants a new top cop. I also said we shouldn’t pick, or keep, a police chief on the basis of his color.

“I bet you’ve never been pulled over and told to lay on the ground at gunpoint,” Derrick Evans wrote.

Evans said I have no idea what it means to be black in L.A., and offered to show me around. But he suspected I was some yuppie who never leaves my “gated community” to visit the real world, and he was certain I’d kill his e-mail message as soon as I got it.

Instead I dialed his number.

“Derrick? Steve Lopez.”

Long pause.

“Hey, man,” he said.

“I’m taking you up on your offer.”

Evans, married with two daughters, is a senior account executive for a company that does background checks and locates deadbeats. As he drove us through his neighborhood, he told me he’s been stopped by police dozens of times in his 41 years in Compton, Lynwood and Los Angeles.

Five times, he said, he’s been ordered out of his car at gunpoint. But he claimed that except for a two-hour lockup 20 years ago on a traffic warrant, he’s always been clean.

I obviously wasn’t there for all this, but it rings true.

“It’s DWBs,” he said, meaning that he was pulled over for Driving While Black. “When I was younger, we always avoided driving three and four deep. If you were rolling with friends, you knew you would get pulled over.”

Evans turned off Slauson and onto a nice street, where he pointed to a big, peach-colored house.

“That’s where Chief Parks lives,” he said. “I can’t go knock on his door in the middle of the night if I need something, but he’s not in some gated community. He’s right here in the ‘hood, and you see him at the 7-Eleven and he says hello.”

Evans drove me past his own house, a sweet little beige job with orange trim. He cruised sun-washed streets with lollipop palms, tidy yards and fussed-over Spanish and Craftsman houses. Along the way, he described the neighborhood with great pride and pointed out some of his haunts. Woody’s Bar-B-Que, Chambers Shine Parlor, the Slauson and Crenshaw intersection known as The Strip.

On Mullen near Slauson, he stopped the car. Right here, about seven years ago, he was pulled over with his wife, daughter and niece while driving to his mother-in-law’s.

“Two cars were behind me, starting back before Crenshaw. They hit the lights, and I turned right here. They got on the loudspeaker. “‘Get out of the car!’”

Evans says he knew the drill. Do as you’re told, and don’t get smart or you’ll get your head bashed in, if not worse. Four white cops were crouched behind their car doors, guns trained on him.

“‘Drop to your knees! Put your hands behind your head!’ They laid me out right here in the street and handcuffed me with a knee in my back. It was 85 degrees and this asphalt was hot. They got my wife and the kids out of the car, went all up through the car, looked in the trunk. Now my wife is boo-hooin’ and of course the kids are boo-hooin’.

“I was hot now, and I ran my mouth a little bit. I said, ‘I’m a law-abiding citizen, why don’t you go bother some real criminals?’ They didn’t find anything, and when they let me go they just said I looked like someone they were looking for. That’s what they always say. My daughter remembers everything from that day. It’s seven years later and she’s still afraid of the police.”

Evans said there was no change on the streets under Chief Willie Williams, the African American who preceded Parks, because cops neither feared nor respected Williams. But since Parks took over, he says he gets pulled over less often, and cops are more civil.

But couldn’t a chief who’s not black accomplish the same thing? I asked.

“Yes,” Evans said. “If he was blue with green stripes, I wouldn’t care.” But he thinks Parks is the best thing that’s happened to the LAPD in his lifetime. The fact that he’s black is a bonus to a man of color who fears the police are out to get him. “A white cop won’t take me to the limit with roughhouse now, because he’s going to be held accountable.”

Here’s where we see it differently.

Parks was no friend of the man on the street when he dismissed the Rampart scandal as a tempest blown up by the press, or when he resisted collecting data on racial profiling, of all things. He sounded like those who came before him when he said the gunning down of a feeble black woman living on the streets was not a bad shooting. He’s instituted some reforms but resisted others, running the department like a military general who refuses to answer to the commander in chief. And worst of all, he’s barricaded the doors against any review by citizens or outside investigators.

Jim Hahn should be able to second-guess Parks without being called a traitor to the black community.

“Hahn hasn’t explained what’s wrong, or how he’s going to find anyone better,” argued Evans, who thinks Hahn has personal rather than professional differences with Parks. He kicks himself because he voted for Hahn on the record of his father, L.A. County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn. “His father put his ear to the ground and heard the cry of the city, and I thought his son would continue the dream.”

The dream, it seems to me, is to move beyond race. But if Parks gets dumped, Evans predicts a long, hot summer after April’s 10-year anniversary of the riots that followed the Rodney King beating verdict. “There’s lots of knuckleheads in the neighborhood, and the trouble-makers could go crazy. LAPD has got to watch their backs.”

Evans hopes it doesn’t come to that, and I second the motion. From across the divide, an understanding.

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