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Parks’ Certainty Is His Best, Worst Trait

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com

If I had to base my vote for mayor on restaurant selections by the candidates, Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks is in the lead after taking me to breakfast at Mama’s House, a soul food joint in the Crenshaw district.

I ordered the catfish and eggs, and Parks, the last guy in L.A. you would expect to order off the menu, ordered off the menu. His grandmother, who turns 102 in April, used to clear out the refrigerator on Saturday morning, throw everything into the frying pan and call it a rice omelet.

That’s what Parks always gets at Mama’s. Doesn’t even look at the menu. He knows what he wants and he’s sticking with it, and you don’t tell a man like that how to run the Police Department or a mayoral campaign.

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The former LAPD chief also knows what he thinks about the Feb. 6 police shooting of 13-year-old Devin Brown after a short car chase in South Los Angeles. The stolen Toyota Camry that Brown was driving came to a stop, then backed up and sideswiped the LAPD patrol car. One of the officers emptied his weapon into the vehicle, killing the African American teen.

“There are so many unanswered questions,” Parks said over breakfast.

That was Parks, the ex-cop, talking. But he’s not running for police chief, a job he lost in a move engineered by Mayor Jim Hahn. He’s running for mayor and gunning to pay Hahn back.

Parks, an African American who overcame racism in his climb to the top of the LAPD, is challenging the white mayor who needs the black vote to win reelection.

So he fired a shot of his own.

Parks told me that as far as he knew, there were no skid marks to suggest the Camry was speeding backward toward the officers.

He said police are trained to hold fire unless they believe they, or anyone else, are in immediate danger of being killed. Nobody could make that judgment, Parks said, except the officers involved, who first assumed they had a drunk driver on their hands.

Then he asked the question nobody has answered yet: Where was the officer when he started shooting?

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“If the officer wasn’t in the path of the vehicle, where was the danger?”

Parks said he understood that at least one bullet fired by the officer struck his own patrol car.

“Was his partner in danger?” he asked.

And he wondered why 10 shots were fired.

“You’re supposed to evaluate after every shot.... What changed this from a drunk-driving stop to an officer-in-danger stop? The movement of the car was not unlike what drunk drivers do.”

Some critics think they’ve seen a politically convenient flip-flop by Parks. As chief of the LAPD, he often defended cops in controversial shootings, including the case of a mentally ill homeless woman shot dead after brandishing a screwdriver. Then, after Feb. 6, he turned community activist.

As hundreds assembled in protest following the Super Bowl Sunday shooting, Parks was fielding complaints from those with deep resentment and suspicion of police.

“You’ve seen him now make a 180-degree turn,” commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson told The Times.

So what about it?

Nonsense, says Parks. He oversaw a decline in LAPD shootings, by his count, and ruled against officers more than anyone in department history.

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As for the latest shooting, Parks said it’s fair to ask where the parents are when a child is on the street in the middle of the night.

But many parents are juggling low-paying jobs after decades of economic decline in South Los Angeles, he said, trying their best to survive. It isn’t always easy to save children from the violent forces that rule the streets, as Parks found out when his own granddaughter was killed several years ago.

For all his talk about the shortcomings of Hahn and Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton, who was called Wyatt Earp during Tuesday’s funeral for Devin Brown, Parks is too much of a long shot to give either of them much of a scare. But I have to admit that he’s making a better showing than many people expected, myself included.

“You going to eat crow?” Parks’ son and wife asked me when I arranged my meal with the candidate. Son and wife double as campaign staff, by the way, after several seasoned pros gave up trying to steer the operation.

As he devoured the rice omelet, Parks reminded me that The Times’ poll showed there’s no clear front-runner, with Parks trailing Hahn and City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa. But Parks topped all candidates, including Hahn, when voters were asked who had the most honesty and integrity.

This thrilled the dapper Parks, from his polished shoes up to his starched collar. He had been kicked aside as police chief when Hahn gave the word, and now voters were saying they trusted Parks more than Hahn.

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For the record, rank-and-file morale was in the cellar when Parks ruled the LAPD, and he was notorious for his bullheaded resistance to having anyone tell him what to do. As I said then and I’ll say again now, Hahn did the right thing.

Bernie Parks wakes up in his own world, goes to work in his own world, lays himself down to sleep in his own world. Moral certainty is his best quality and his worst.

Yes, the Parks campaign is a revenge play, no matter what he says. Nothing wrong with that.

He also believes, however delusionally, that he can win, and that no one can run the city as well as he can. He wouldn’t be Bernie Parks otherwise.

I was going to suggest he try the catfish, but I knew better.

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