Hahn’s Choice Will Affect LAPD and City Profoundly

With 13 candidates vying for the job of running the LAPD, Los Angeles’ political leadership now faces a choice with profound ramifications for the city and its Police Department, as well as for Mayor James K. Hahn’s political future.

The LAPD’s struggles have reverberated throughout the modern history of the city, altering Los Angeles politics and twice precipitating catastrophic riots. Over the last 10 years, the LAPD has had three chiefs, all of whom left under fire.

Now the Police Department is widely viewed as an agency in disarray, the result of controversies from the Rodney G. King beating to the Rampart scandal.

Even after a decade in which crime declined in Los Angeles and across the nation, the LAPD’s work force is hemorrhaging. Department leaders are still trying to adjust to formal oversight by the U.S. Justice Department, imposed by federal officials unconvinced that the LAPD could improve itself.

Moreover, recent reports by federal overseers say the department has failed to pass muster in 29 of 58 categories set forth in a court-approved consent decree. A broad consensus of Police Department observers--from lawyers who have sued it to Hahn himself--holds that profound change is needed to restore the LAPD’s competence and reputation.

“My sense from talking to a number of people in and around the LAPD and reading reports by [the federal monitor] is that the LAPD is a dispirited and troubled institution,” said Merrick Bobb, a consultant who monitors the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and has provided advice to troubled law enforcement agencies across the country. The LAPD, he added, is “not very actively policing the city.”

Former Mayor Richard Riordan was elected in 1993 largely on the strength of his promise to rebuild the LAPD. He too believes the agency is facing a crisis.

The selection of the new chief “is the most important decision Hahn will ever have to make as mayor,” Riordan said. “As the department goes, so goes the health of the city.”

Interviews with many civic leaders suggest that picking a new chief thrusts Hahn and the rest of the city leadership into cross-currents of competing interests on other points. Some argue that radical change is required and that only an outsider can deliver it. Others see a narrower need for leadership of a proud institution, which they see as battered over the years but still basically sound.

Race, once a bellwether concern in the search for an LAPD chief, appears to have receded in the current debate. But other factors have replaced it, in some ways complicating the hunt.

In the selections of both of the last two chiefs, many outsiders saw the choices in symbolic terms as much as practical ones, said Raphael J. Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political scientist and author of “Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles.”

Willie L. Williams, tapped for the job in 1992, was the first African American to head the LAPD and the first outsider to become chief in many years. Bernard C. Parks, who succeeded Williams in 1997, was seen as an antidote to Williams’ widely faulted management style. And many city leaders said they thought it was important to return to an in-house candidate after Williams’ failings were partly attributed to his unfamiliarity with the LAPD.

This time, Sonenshein said: “The city has to sit down and think about what it wants the chief to actually do, rather than thinking about the chief as a symbol of the racial and ideological battles of the city.

“How do you find someone who can earn the confidence of the troops without being a captive of the troops, challenge the department to reform, lower the crime rate, recruit and retain officers and gain the confidence of the community the department serves?” Sonenshein asked. “In the past, we have been able to get one piece at the expense of another. Ultimately, what is at play now is finding a package.”

Even those who see the LAPD as fundamentally sound stress the importance of finding the right candidate this time. Carol Schatz, president and chief executive officer of the Central City Assn., said she believes the Police Department is “well run ... essentially very effective,” and the subject of “a lot of unfair shots.”

But she said the selection would send an important signal about Los Angeles’ commitment to public safety.

“What I have come to understand as a business leader is that, without public safety, you have nothing,” Schatz said. “Because of the ups and downs this department has had over the past 10 years, who is selected ... is critical. It’s not only what the chief is doing on a daily basis, but it’s the perception of leadership that is so important.”

Among those most anxiously “waiting in anticipation” are the LAPD’s 9,020 officers, said Mitzi Grasso, president of the Police Protective League. “The department is improving, but it still has a long way to go,” Grasso said.

Those officers need a charismatic leader because “their self esteem is down the toilet” after years of being vilified, said Bill Berger, president of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police.

James Q. Wilson, a recently retired UCLA professor who is considered the philosophical godfather of community policing, agreed. Hahn needs “to pick a chief around whom members of the LAPD can rally. Morale is terrible, and the crime rate is going up.”

With so much at stake, the selection process also has acquired political implications. The choice principally rests with Hahn, but the Police Commission, whose members he appointed, is expected to submit three finalists for his consideration. If Hahn rejects all three, he can ask the commission for another slate.

After the mayor makes his choice, the votes of a majority of the City Council will be needed to confirm the nominee. Hahn has indicated that he hopes to announce his choice by the end of September.

As a result, the selection will involve much of Los Angeles’ elected leadership and will become public just as two sections of the city--the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood--are poised to decide whether to break away from the rest of the city.

“With secession in the air, it is especially important that the new chief understand the diversity of the city and recognize the need to serve the many communities of Los Angeles,” said former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, the Los Angeles attorney who headed a commission that urged major reforms in the LAPD after the 1991 King beating.

But Christopher quickly cautioned that it would be unwise for the Police Commission or Hahn or the City Council to make its decision solely with an eye to affecting the secession vote.

Among the 13 finalists who emerged from an original field of 51, there are 11 men and two women. Four of the finalists are Latino and one is black. Joe Sanchez, a Latino businessman who served on the Fire Commission during the administration of Mayor Tom Bradley, said he thought it was important that a Latino be chosen for the position. But a vast majority of those interviewed said competence, not ethnicity, should be the primary consideration in the decision.

In contrast to that general point of consensus, opinions diverged sharply on whether an outsider is needed to implement the sort of fundamental change that most say is needed in the department.

Of the finalists, eight either work at the LAPD or have spent much of their careers there, while five come from other departments. Two, William Bratton, who headed the New York Police Department under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and John Timoney, who worked under Bratton in New York and then became the head of Philadelphia’s Police Department, are considered strong candidates.

“The problem with the LAPD always has been with its culture,” said Venice attorney Stephen Yagman, who has sued the department for excessive force dozens of times in the last 20 years. “Cultural problems always require comprehensive and deep changes, and only an outsider who is both dedicated to reform and stubborn enough to achieve it will bring change.”

Jaime Regalado, director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State Los Angeles, agreed. “Breaking out of the box is what’s needed,” Regalado said. “It would not be best to pick someone who has been trained by the culture of resistance [to change] that we’ve had at the LAPD.”

But a Los Angeles civil rights lawyer, Connie Rice, who also has been a critic of the department’s culture of “blind loyalty,” said an outsider would have a more difficult time because “the LAPD is aggressively xenophobic.”

In an interview last week, Hahn did not disclose whether he is predisposed to an insider or an outsider. But he said he wants a break from the past, and he reiterated the four goals he has set for the LAPD’s next chief: lowering the crime rate, reforming the department, increasing officer morale and strengthening community policing efforts.

“Doing more of the same is not what I’m interested in,” Hahn said. “We want some creative, innovative approaches. For too many years, the LAPD has not encouraged innovation. In fact, it has discouraged it. We have to have someone who is committed to this consent decree and to police reform.”

For the new chief, then, one of the principal challenges will be to improve the department’s crime-fighting abilities, even as it tightens rules to prevent officer misconduct.

Over the years, that tension has been highlighted by the 1991 Christopher Commission--which concluded that racism and brutality were stubbornly persistent within the department--and by the revelations associated with the Rampart scandal, which resulted in the resignation or firing of more than a dozen officers, nine criminal prosecutions so far and more than $100 million in taxpayer payouts in civil cases.

The next chief will approach those and other issues under the eye of a federal judge. Los Angeles was forced last year to enter into a federal consent decree, overseen by a judge, after the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that the LAPD had been engaging for years in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations.

The Justice Department has pursued similar cases at other agencies, but none as big as the LAPD. Under the decree, the department is obligated to make dozens of reforms aimed at rooting out corruption and other problems.

In addition to determining the extent of racial profiling by LAPD officers, the department must also install a computerized system to track performance evaluations, complaints, disciplinary actions and other data on officers.

In a just-completed report, Michael Cherkasky, the LAPD’s independent monitor, said the department continues to struggle. Department efforts to identify problem officers are missing “significant red flags” because of understaffing and a serious backlog of uncompleted audits. The report also concluded that:

* The department is failing to analyze data collected on pedestrian and motor vehicle stops to determine whether the LAPD engages in “racial profiling.”

* Bureaucratic indecision is hampering the department’s efforts to develop a computerized “early warning” system to help track potential at-risk officers.

* The confidential-informant database contains critical errors that make it difficult to identify unreliable informants.

Cherkasky, of New York’s Kroll Associates, pointedly linked these problems to a lack of commitment to change in the department.

In an interview, Cherkasky, a former New York City prosecutor, said the issues confronting the LAPD make the decision over its chief a crucial one: “The person who is brought in is going to be asked to completely change the management of the department, and that is always a difficult job.”

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The Process and the 13 Candidates

The city began seeking a new chief after the Police Commission voted in April to deny Bernard C. Parks a second five-year term.

Former Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy is heading the department temporarily. Pomeroy, who had retired, has said he plans to return to his home in Montana, once a new chief is selected.

Under the City Charter, the commission will select its three top choices and forward the names to Mayor James K. Hahn, who will make the final decision--subject to City Council approval.

The candidates are: Portland, Ore., Chief Mark Kroeker and Oxnard Chief Art Lopez, both former LAPD deputy chiefs; LAPD Assistant Chief David Gascon; LAPD Deputy Chiefs David Kalish and Margaret A. York; LAPD Cmdrs. George Gascon, James McDonnell and Sharon Papa; Santa Ana Chief Paul Walters; Sacramento Chief Arturo Venegas; Cambridge, Mass., Chief Ronnie Watson; former Philadelphia Chief John Timoney; and former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton.

Hahn has said he is looking for someone who can lower the crime rate, reform the department, motivate the rank and file and strengthen community-policing efforts.