Baca and Parks a Study in Contrasts

The jobs of Los Angeles’ two top cops are on the line, with the future of one to be determined by voters in the county and the other by the political machinery of the city.

They are two men who share similar backgrounds but who couldn’t be more different in their styles and approaches to their jobs.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca is up for reelection today, challenged by two sergeants: Patrick Gomez and John Stites. Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks’ bid for another five-year term is under review by the civilian police commission. Baca’s reelection appears likely while Parks’ reappointment--opposed by the mayor--is far from certain.

Both have spent their professional lives in the institutions they now lead, though Baca ended up seeking to revolutionize his department while Parks wants to perfect his.

“If you could put them together in one person, you would have a very powerful chief of police,” said county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who is close to both men.

They grew up in Los Angeles, and have followed similar career paths. Baca, 59, a Latino, has spent 36 years rising through the ranks of the Sheriff’s Department; Parks, also 59, an African American, has spent 35 years in the LAPD. They are deeply loyal to their respective organizations; only Baca is known to have flirted seriously with leaving, twice becoming a finalist to lead the LAPD.

That’s about where the parallels end.

Unlike Parks, Baca was not considered a department insider. He never became a member of the late Sheriff Sherman Block’s inner circle, despite a series of promotions.

When he became sheriff four years ago, Baca arrived with a constant stream of ideas. His top staff has scrambled to keep up, and many deputies have chafed at his unorthodox approach to policing.

He launched a massive internal review of the organization that could cost millions of dollars to implement. He created a civilian board of civil rights attorneys to oversee internal affairs investigations. He opened a jail for drug and domestic violence offenders and, most recently, he has talked about creating a homeless shelter near skid row.

He has been described as a social worker who wears a law enforcement uniform.

The sheriff has become the unlikely darling of the civil rights community--Connie Rice, a noted civil rights attorney, is a campaign advisor--and he has developed strong ties to Democratic as well as Republican legislators.

He turns to outsiders for advice, help, even criticism. He doesn’t seem to have much interest in the nuts and bolts of law enforcement; his eyes appear to glaze when asked about patrol and discipline.

“Baca, I think, is way ahead of his time,” Rice said. “He gets it that police can’t do everything by themselves.”

But many of his deputies say the sheriff has run too far afield. They, like his challengers Gomez and Stites, believe he is spending too much time and money on non-traditional law enforcement programs. They think the sheriff has lost sight of the main duties of the department: arresting criminals and keeping them behind bars.

For his part, Baca says he firmly believes the sheriff’s job is more complicated than that. His department, which oversees the largest jail system in the country, has more than 6,500 deputies. Forty-one cities contract for its services.

Change is imperative, Baca said, because the Sheriff’s Department needs to keep up with a changing society.

“Innovation needs to be fostered so people are not afraid to make the right changes,” Baca said. “I’m fairly aggressive in making sure the bureaucracy doesn’t inhibit solutions.”

Baca talks about “harmony” in the department, but he admits that he is an idealist. Deputies need to embrace new ways of doing things, said the sheriff, who sometimes uses religious terms to talk about the department.

It’s enough to make some deputies--rookie and veteran alike--say he is an embarrassment who is out of sync with the rest of the department.

Baca was not endorsed by either deputies union. The Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs backed Gomez, and the Los Angeles County Peace Officers Assn. supported Stites.

The sheriff has done little political campaigning of his own, airing just one radio ad and sending slate mailers with many other candidates. His political consultant, who typically handles liberal Democrats, says that Baca is surprisingly well known in the county and that there was no need to introduce him to voters.

If Baca’s campaign has been low-key, Parks’ is in high gear. Supporters of the chief came out in force last week denouncing Mayor James K. Hahn’s opposition to a second term for Parks.

The chief said in an interview that he is not conducting any kind of public campaign to keep his position. Rather, he said, community activists are independently taking up his cause while he is just doing his job.

“People say I’m out more, that I’m holding more press conferences,” Parks said. “Only the people who don’t know what I do regularly are saying that.... I have the same pace I’ve had for the last five years. The only difference is that the media seem to want to find me more than they did three or four years ago.”

Where Baca is seen as being open to outside opinions, Parks is viewed by some observers as rigid and closed to other viewpoints. He rose through the LAPD ranks as the consummate insider.

He was ambitious and eager to lead. Parks has an intense grasp on the details of his department, the nation’s second-largest.

Though he refuses to use the word “reform,” he is in fact remaking the department. He is a strong believer in the complaint process, and as a result, he is disciplining scores of officers. There are nearly 6,000 complaints filed a year against the department’s 9,000-member force.

“I have seen how internally that word is offensive,” Parks said. “You’re saying what you stood for in the past is now no good.... Don’t use the terminology that makes the activists happy.”

Under Parks, the LAPD has dealt with a corruption scandal, a court-ordered list of reforms and recruitment troubles. But the department also was widely praised for its handling of the Democratic National Convention in 2000, and Parks instituted a crime-fighting program that relies on statistics similar to a groundbreaking model used in New York.

The chief, who faces strong opposition from the police union, loves the nuts and bolts of police work. He talks about operational efficiency, how the mechanism works, charter provisions. By his own admission, he doesn’t always appear warm and cuddly.

Supervisor Yaroslavsky suggested that some of the differences between Baca and Parks stem from the fact that one is elected and one is appointed. Parks is a product of the civil service system, where public relations is much less important than mastering the internal details of the organization, Yaroslavsky said.

Yet, he said, “Parks has done quite a bit to reform [the LAPD], but he gets tagged with the image of being intransigent and stubborn.”

Yaroslavsky and other observers of both agencies say Parks is an intelligent leader who has a strong vision for his department. The two lawmen, those people say, are vastly different in style.

“In a way, Lee has adapted to what he needed to do: to get into office and stay in office,” Yaroslavsky said. “They’re both good men; they’re two totally different people.”