Parks Support Backs Blacks Into a Corner

With the cold slap of reality still stinging, black elected officials and some community leaders remain in an uproar over Mayor James K. Hahn’s announcement that he will not support a second term for Police Chief Bernard C. Parks. These are the same leaders who have been in the forefront of the battle for police reform, but they have rallied behind a chief who has resisted reform at every turn. These are the same leaders who have demanded more effective community control of the LAPD, but they are unwavering in their support of a chief who felt the department could best police itself.

As the issue of racial profiling made its way to the national agenda, Parks steadfastly maintained that his officers did not engage in that practice. But he once gave an interviewer what amounted to a textbook definition of racial profiling.

“It’s not the fault of the police when they stop minority males or put them in jail,” he said. “It’s the fault of the minority males for committing the crime. In my mind, it is not a great revelation that, if officers are looking for criminal activity, they’re going to look at the kind of people who are listed on crime reports.”

Imagine, for a moment, what the reaction would have been had former Chief Daryl F. Gates said that. But hardly a peep was heard from the same community leaders who now feel that Hahn betrayed them.

Some black leaders have been and remain willing to give Parks a pass. He is their neighbor. They have his ear. And these are important factors, given the black community’s long, unhappy history with the LAPD. But having Parks’ ear apparently did not help at all in getting the chief to accept civilian control. Nor did it apparently persuade the chief to at least look seriously at racial profiling. Parks only joined the ranks of reformers after a federal consent decree--an order he fought tooth and nail--mandated reform.

His outraged supporters backed the person, not necessarily his policies; the individual, rather than the institution.

That contradiction was evident at First AME Church about a year ago. The issue was racial profiling--DWB, or Driving While Black or Brown--and the restive crowd was eager to tell the assembled law-enforcement representatives and elected officials about how police had stopped them for what appeared to have been no reason other than their color.

Speaker after outraged speaker, nearly all African American and Latino, offered a litany of indignities suffered during these stops as Parks and other officials listened stoically. The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California had organized a town hall meeting to build support for a racial-profiling bill that would have required police agencies to note, among other things, the race of every motorist they stopped--a bill Parks adamantly opposed. During the meeting, the ACLU collected signatures on a letter to California Gov. Gray Davis, urging him to sign the bill rather than veto it as he had an identical piece of legislation the year before.

After the last speaker had vented his anger, Councilman Nate Holden moved to a microphone and began offering a defense of Parks. Before Holden could complete a sentence, the crowd took up a chant: “Sign the letter, Nate! Sign the letter, Nate!” Holden tried again, but the chant only grew louder. After what appeared to be a very long minute or two, Holden returned to his seat.

He didn’t have the finesse that evening to first acknowledge that the crowd’s complaints were serious concerns before launching his defense of the chief. The other two City Council members present, Mark Ridley-Thomas and Rita Walters, did not speak. Ridley-Thomas and Holden are speaking now. So is Najee Ali--executive director of Project Islamic HOPE--one of those who shouted Holden down. He has gone so far as to call for what would doubtless be an unsuccessful effort to recall Hahn.

Everyone in that room knew Parks had steadfastly maintained that the LAPD simply did not engage in racial profiling. And probably each person in that room could have described an incident from personal experience that looked for all the world like racial profiling.

When the bill made its way to the governor’s desk, Davis worked out a compromise that effectively gutted the legislation. It would not require data collection--something the bill’s backers had insisted was crucial. Davis did order the California Highway Patrol to collect such data, and several law-enforcement agencies around the state decided to do so voluntarily. Of the state’s largest police departments, only the LAPD, under Parks’ leadership, refused. In the cold calculus of politics, Davis looked at the bill’s supporters, on one side, and its opponents, chiefly the law-enforcement lobby, on the other. And the governor wasn’t about to take on that lobby.

In the L.A. mayoral race last year, Hahn was faced with a similar choice, but he managed to have his cake and eat it, too. The Police Protective League, the union representing L.A. officers, extracted a signed pledge from Hahn that he would restore their compressed work schedules. Black-community leaders “assumed” that Hahn would support a second term for Parks. The league had its promise in writing. Black leaders based theirs on trust. Rather than demand a guarantee, they looked at Hahn’s pedigree--the legacy of his father, the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn. Those leaders then found themselves in bed with the Protective League and West San Fernando Valley conservatives, backing the same candidate.

“It is an unusual coalition, to say the least,” Ridley-Thomas, who backed Hahn’s opponent, Antonio Villaraigosa, said after the election. “How you govern with that level of polarity has to be figured out.”

He could not have had any idea of how Hahn would figure it out.

Bad blood between the league, long suspect in the black community, and Parks has been festering for some time. Hahn, though, had his own frustrations with the chief’s rigidity. Did Hahn borrow a page from Davis’ political playbook? Did he put the league’s endorsement and the backing of black community leaders on a scale and decide he couldn’t fight that lobby?

It looks that way to some black political activists, who insist that Hahn will be a one-term mayor. That may be true if the mayor finds himself in a race as close as the last one. The black vote will be as critical in such a race as it was in Hahn’s election. But it may not be. What began as rumor in the black community--that Hahn’s new police chief will be Latino--is now almost accepted as fact. Such a move would shore up Hahn’s support among increasingly important Latino voters and isolate even more the black leaders who are so loudly crying foul.

Latino gains do not necessarily mean black losses. Nor is the reverse true. Several prominent Latino politicians learned their earliest political lessons working for or with former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund can trace its roots to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and some of the most important local Latino leaders come out of the Tom Bradley coalition.

Blacks have not been a majority in Los Angeles since 1781, when they made up the majority of pobladores who founded El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula. As the size of the black vote in L.A. continues to shrink, black politicians and community leaders will have to look to new coalitions. And they would do well to look to the growing number of Latino voters. As the racial-profiling issue demonstrated, younger blacks and browns can come together in an effort to bring about change even though their leadership remained largely on the sidelines. The issues confronting those two communities are often identical, but it remains to be seen whether they can make common cause.

If black and brown leaders focus on policies rather than personalities and ethnicity, they will inevitably find themselves working together. But if black community leaders insist on backing the person, as they did with Parks--even when he opposed critical changes in policy--the Los Angeles electorate can look forward to many more years of Balkanization, with the black share of that divided turf being reduced to an ever-more isolated enclave.

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Ed Boyer, a former Times staff writer who frequently covered South-Central L.A., teaches journalism at USC.