Parks Shifts on LAPD Shootings

As residents gathered at a South Los Angeles street corner and in church forums this week to protest the police shooting of 13-year-old Devin Brown, only one of the top five mayoral candidates was there to listen to their concerns.

Councilman Bernard C. Parks, the former police chief, has urged city leaders to heed the ire sparked by the death of the African American boy, warning that tensions are near a boiling point.

Parks’ response to the incident stands in counterpoint not only to the approach of Mayor James K. Hahn -- who waited two days after the teenager’s death before calling a news conference to address it -- but also to his own response to some high-profile police shootings during his tenure as chief.

As head of the Los Angeles Police Department, Parks angered many civil rights activists by defending officers involved in controversial shootings and accusing protesters of inflaming passions.

“He was very authoritarian and very hard-nosed,” said author Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who writes frequently about African American issues and was an outspoken critic of Parks when he was chief. “You’ve seen him now make a 180-degree turn. He’s definitely increased his sensitivity level and softened his image.”

Parks’ approach speaks to how he has adapted to his new role as an elected official. That he has been the most vocal mayoral candidate on the issue also highlights the limited influence that African American voters -- about 16% of the electorate in the last mayor’s race -- now wield in city politics.

Most of the mayoral candidates have addressed Devin’s shooting gingerly, wary of plunging into the debate over the LAPD’s use of force -- a potentially incendiary topic fueled by past controversies such as the Rodney G. King beating. But most are not counting on significant African American support in the election; Hahn and Parks are viewed as the main contenders for black votes.

Bob Hertzberg did not address the shooting until he was asked about it on a radio talk show Thursday. “I just don’t want to politicize this thing,” the former Assembly speaker said.

At a mayoral forum in the West Adams district Thursday night, Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa called Devin’s killing “an absolute tragedy” and said it exemplified the need for the LAPD to renew its focus on community policing.

“This is a department that has had a checkered and dark history with its relations with the African American community and minority communities overall,” he said.

At the same event, state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley) called on the public to keep an open mind about the shooting, “including the possibility that the Police Department made an error.”

Hahn, who was not at the debate, said earlier this week that he had talked to community leaders privately about the matter but was wary of playing a more visible role. He has not visited Devin’s family, although an aide said Hahn had repeatedly tried to reach the boy’s mother by phone.

“Somebody’s always going to say, ‘Well, you’re doing this for some political reason,’ ” the mayor said at a news conference Wednesday, explaining his low profile.

The shooting has placed Hahn in a political dilemma.

On the one hand, he does not want to anger African American voters, many of whom felt betrayed when -- shortly after winning office with their support -- he opposed Parks’ reappointment as chief. While Hahn won with 80% of the black vote in 2001, a recent Times poll showed that less than a quarter of likely black voters supported his reelection. More than four in 10 backed Parks.

But trying to shore up that support by denouncing police actions could also distract voters from Hahn’s central theme: His contention that the city is safer under his watch.

“Something like this does not exactly lend credibility to the argument that you are making this the safest big city in America,” said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State L.A.

Meanwhile, Parks -- as the councilman who represents the area where Devin was killed -- has been a visible presence in the neighborhood. In his official role, he appears to have recast himself as a populist since the killing, positioning himself as a spokesman for the black community.

He has been careful not to judge whether the shooting was unjustified, instead accusing city leaders of being indifferent to the community’s anger.

On Tuesday night, he visited a makeshift memorial at Western Avenue and 83rd Street, where Devin was killed early Sunday morning when an officer fired 10 rounds at him after a brief high-speed pursuit. There, an agitated crowd of about 150 people chanted, “No justice, no peace!” and “Baby killers!”

When Parks arrived, people swarmed around him, quizzing him about what had happened and what he intended to do. The councilman spoke with many of the protesters individually, promising to investigate the incident and urging calm.

Devin’s death came less than a week after prosecutors decided not to file criminal charges against an LAPD officer who was captured on videotape in June as he hit a black man, Stanley Miller, with a heavy aluminum flashlight.

“The community, unlike the police, view these incidents collectively,” Parks said Tuesday night. “They remember them and connect them. They view that nothing has changed -- that’s why you get the anger. At some point it boils. If you’re not there now, you’re getting close.”

On Thursday, he introduced a council motion requesting that the LAPD provide a report about all police-involved shootings within the last five to 10 years, a period including his tenure as chief.

“I am concerned for our community, and I am concerned for the relationship that the community has with the police officers who are sworn to protect them,” he said in a statement.

His stance is in stark contrast to the posture he took as chief after the 1999 shooting of Margaret Mitchell. A homeless, mentally ill woman armed with a screwdriver, Mitchell was shot and killed by a police officer after he stopped to see if she was pushing a stolen shopping cart.

Parks, who concluded that the shooting followed departmental policy, accused demonstrators of using the incident to further their own political agendas and criticized them for linking Mitchell’s death to controversial police shootings in Riverside and New York.

“It almost appears as if some people have great glee that we have this Mitchell incident so that they now can tie these three incidents together,” he said then.

His defense of both the officer in that case and the one who killed an actor who was holding a rubber handgun at a Halloween costume party in Benedict Canyon in 2001 riled civil rights activists.

“These were very bad shootings, and he was not only not empathetic, he was downright cold,” said Joe Domanick, a senior fellow at USC’s Institute for Justice and Journalism who has written extensively about the LAPD.

At a panel discussion at USC while he was chief, Parks described why police so often clashed with black and Latino youth in purely statistical terms. “Sixty percent of the people who kill people in the city are 14 to 24, and happen to be black and brown males,” he said. “That’s not the fault of the police.”

On Thursday, Parks insisted that he was empathetic as chief. “People out there know how sensitive I was as police chief to what officers did in the community,” he said, stressing the importance of being aware of the community’s emotions.

“You have to be able to talk to them, understand their hurt, because they are hurt,” he said. “They are connecting things that may not make sense to other people, but it’s their reality that is important. It’s their perception that has to be dealt with.”

Hutchinson said Parks’ new tone had startled -- and pleased -- many longtime African American activists.

“It’s commented on all the time, ‘Can you believe this guy?’ ” he said, adding that he believes Parks has more latitude in the public comments he can make now that he’s not chief.

“He’s also thinking like an elected official and someone who wants to be mayor,” Hutchinson said.

But some analysts said the perception among many South Los Angeles residents that Parks was a “pro-police candidate” could limit his ability to gain political traction in the wake of the shooting.

“It would be a hard sell,” said UCLA political science professor Frank Gilliam, who has studied ethnic politics in Los Angeles. “Parks doesn’t have natural credibility on the issue.”

Times staff writers Jessica Garrison, Jeffrey L. Rabin and Nora Zamichow contributed to this report.