Villaraigosa Faces a Triple Challenge

By Jim Newton

June 26, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Over the past four decades, Los Angeles has grown from a sprawling suburb into a major center of political, economic and cultural activity under the leadership of just four mayors. Of them, two are widely regarded as successes.

If Antonio Villaraigosa, who publicly takes the oath of office Friday as the city’s 41st mayor, is to join that list, he faces three tasks above all, according to veterans of the city’s political life: embracing the national stature of the office, solidifying the city’s political coalitions around him and maintaining control over the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Big-city mayors need to embody their city,” said Bob Hertzberg, a former Assembly speaker who was a political rival of Villaraigosa but now acts as an advisor. “You have to manage the details and use the bully pulpit. You have to personify the city.”

Mayor James K. Hahn, whom Villaraigosa defeated last month, was widely criticized for failing in that task. Some of Hahn’s advisors urged him to raise his profile and claim a national stage, noting that Los Angeles voters have warmed to mayors they perceived as capturing the city’s charm and energy.

But Hahn rejected that advice, relying instead on the example set by his father, Kenneth Hahn, whose long tenure as a county supervisor was marked by attention to the tiniest details of constituent service.

On a political level, Hahn also proved unable to sustain the coalition that elected him.

As for the LAPD, all mayors soon learn that the department can make life easy -- or very, very hard.

Even Tom Bradley, the five-term mayor widely regarded as the city’s most effective modern leader, discovered the hard way what happens when the LAPD gets away from a mayor.

In the aftermath of the 1991 beating of Rodney G. King and the trial of the LAPD officers responsible, Bradley and then-Chief Daryl F. Gates stopped speaking.

The following year, when the acquittals of those officers precipitated riots, Los Angeles’ mayor and chief were busy fighting over reform of the Police Department and avoiding each other. The resulting catastrophe brought both their careers to unhappy conclusions.

In an interview last week, Villaraigosa was cautious about predicting success early but said he was listening to experienced city leaders and attempting to learn the lessons of those who have gone before him.

“A job like this,” Villaraigosa said, “gives you the opportunity to have a transformative administration.”

The two mayors who are most widely seen as having mastered the office are Bradley, who was elected in 1973, becoming the first African American to serve as Los Angeles mayor, and his successor, Richard Riordan.

Although Bradley finished his tenure in the bitter aftermath of the 1992 riots, his early victories remain widely admired. He ranks as the “most important mayor of the century,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a political scientist at Cal State Fullerton who wrote the definitive book on the Bradley years.

Riordan took office on the promise to “turn L.A. around” after the riots and the economic recession of the early 1990s.

The tenure of Riordan, a Republican businessman in a largely Democratic city, is less unanimously praised than Bradley’s. Yet when he ran for reelection in 1997, he carried every significant demographic group in Los Angeles except African Americans. Many political professionals in both parties believe he could have won yet again had term limits not barred another run.

Their reigns were bracketed by two less successful figures: Hahn and Sam Yorty, who held the office from 1961 until Bradley beat him.

Yorty can be thought of as the first modern mayor of Los Angeles. Before him, Sonenshein noted, mayors were largely controlled figures, extensions of the city’s business oligarchy. Most had little impact of their own. Yorty, however, was a forceful, colorful figure who shook off that control and established a more public and independent mayor’s office. His antics infuriated critics but captured some of the zaniness of Los Angeles in the 1960s.

Yorty began his career as a liberal activist but broke sharply to the right. He ran for president once, for governor twice and for senator four times -- and lost every time. As mayor, his accomplishments were strictly local. Yorty helped build the Los Angeles Zoo and the city’s convention center and is perhaps best known for his campaigns to defeat a recycling measure that would have required residents to separate their trash.

In 1969, Bradley, a former Los Angeles police officer and then City Council member, challenged Yorty, who beat him with an overtly racist campaign. In their rematch four years later, Yorty tried again. By then, voters were familiar with the stoic Bradley and did not bite at Yorty’s bait.

In contrast with Yorty’s provincialism, Bradley was a recognized national figure from his first day in office. On that clear, warm July morning 32 years ago, the oath was administered to Bradley by retired U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who was accustomed to swearing in presidents but rarely deigned to administer the oath to a mayor.

If Yorty was the mayor who established the independence of the office, Bradley gave it national panache as he opened his term by calling on Los Angeles to “turn to tomorrow.”

As mayor, Bradley headed the National League of Cities and used that post, along with his position as mayor, to attract state and national attention to the problems of Los Angeles.

He united business and labor in pursuit of money to build the Red Line subway and also put the city’s support behind the effort to win the Summer Olympic Games. He was an avid builder responsible for the reconstruction of downtown, and he brought hundreds of new people -- including many blacks shut out in the Yorty years -- into city government.

“From his first days as mayor, Tom Bradley enlarged the office rather than diminished it,” said former Secretary of State Warren Christopher. “He elevated every gathering he attended by his dignity and eloquence, and he did it not once but several times a day, every day.”

In his appeals for money from Washington and Sacramento, Bradley was aided by the fact that he had come to office backed by a coalition that combined the city’s heavily Jewish, liberal Westside with its politically energized black population.

Both groups had felt excluded by the city’s previous political and financial power brokers and saw the mayor as a champion.

The 1992 riots changed that dynamic, helping to ensure that even Westside liberals were in a mood to listen to a candidate who argued that the city needed a new direction.

The candidate making that appeal was Riordan, a successful lawyer and venture capitalist. As Bradley had done, he rearranged the city’s ruling political coalition around his own strengths.

Riordan’s Republicanism and emphasis on public safety gave him credibility in the San Fernando Valley. And his devotion to city schools along with his Catholicism helped him gain entree on the heavily Latino Eastside.

Also like Bradley, Riordan energized his constituents and reinvigorated participation at City Hall.

In Riordan’s case, those who came to leadership often were drawn from the city’s elite: wealthy business friends and associates who had drifted away from city involvement came back during the Riordan years.

With him, they overhauled the leadership of the Los Angeles Unified School District, found the money to build Disney Hall, rewrote the City Charter and retooled the Police Department. Though Riordan never impressed observers with his handling of the City Council, he often succeeded despite its members.

Hahn, who came next, attempted his own political reconfiguration. He brought under his tent the city’s black voters, whose allegiance to Hahn dated to his father’s long-running stewardship over the city’s southern neighborhoods. He also drew support from the more conservative voters of the San Fernando Valley.

But though the Bradley and Riordan coalitions had been held together by common interests, Hahn’s base was purely personal, and it fractured.

When he declined to reappoint Police Chief Bernard C. Parks to a second term, African Americans abandoned Hahn in droves. Later, when he successfully beat back Valley secession, Hahn preserved the city but at the expense of angering the other half of his base.

Villaraigosa now has shifted the winning political geography again. The Eastside and Westside form the two biggest bulwarks of his coalition -- with liberals and Latinos both demonstrating strong support for him.

Unlike Riordan or even Bradley, however, Villaraigosa’s core constituency -- Latinos -- represents a growing and potentially dominant base for years to come.

“Antonio is riding a growth curve of a political base that seemingly has no end in sight,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a county supervisor and formerly a longtime leader of the Los Angeles City Council. “It’s only going to get bigger.”

A mayor is a political leader, and Villaraigosa already has demonstrated that he has command of his base and can win big citywide. His early moves in the run-up to his inauguration have drawn national attention and considerable praise at home.

Richard Alatorre, a former councilman and now an advisor to Villaraigosa, credits the mayor-elect with the instinct to solicit the council’s help in leading as well as the energy and ability to persuade even critics to join him. Yaroslavsky agreed. “Antonio,” he said, “has the capacity to persuade me that eggplant tastes good.”

But a mayor also is an administrator, head of a multibillion-dollar municipal corporation that requires deft management. It is there that some suggest Villaraigosa might struggle -- and where even he admits to being untested. “It’s a legitimate question,” he said of those who wonder about his managerial abilities. “Time will tell.”

One of Villaraigosa’s early moves helped answer those skeptics when he tapped a veteran City Hall insider, Robin M. Kramer, to head his staff.

Kramer, who served as Riordan’s chief of staff as well, is considered a solid, thoughtful and capable manager, a good foil for Villaraigosa. She complements his public presence with a deep knowledge of City Hall’s nuances and supplements his easygoing agreeability with a warm exterior that belies a tough core.

Villaraigosa’s “vengeance meter,” Kramer said, “registers but does not tilt.” As for herself, Kramer said she keeps track of enemies. “I’m Hungarian,” she noted archly.

Still, Villaraigosa has never managed an organization in the traditional sense.

“He’s never been in ... an executive job,” said Yaroslavsky, acknowledging his own difficulties years ago when he moved from the City Council and had to adjust to the executive duties of a county supervisor. “One of his big challenges is going to be whether he can say no.” Madeline Janis-Aparicio, executive director of the labor-backed Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, agreed that becoming an executive would be an adjustment for Villaraigosa but said she sees the challenge differently.

“I think Antonio is very capable of saying no,” she said. “It’s following through on the yes that’s difficult for him -- putting together complicated policy, working things out over a long period of time.”

That, she argued, is especially important in contemporary Los Angeles, where the lack of clear rules in areas such as development has encouraged an influence-based culture where lobbyists and campaign contributions substitute for public guidelines.

Janis-Aparicio is among those who cite housing and jobs as the top challenges for the Villaraigosa administration. Others talk of traffic congestion, which the mayor-elect said he hoped to tackle in part by pushing city lobbyists to extract money from Sacramento and Washington.

Education, meanwhile, dominated much of the election debate. There, the mayor’s authority is limited, but Villaraigosa said recent incidents of violence in schools have redoubled his determination to bring city resources to campus safety.

The violence underscored how quickly public safety can overwhelm every other urban issue and, therefore, how central the LAPD is to a successful tenure as mayor.

In the recently completed campaign, Villaraigosa and Hahn both took pains to praise the LAPD under the leadership of Chief William J. Bratton, whom Hahn hired to replace Parks.

When Hahn questioned whether Villaraigosa could be trusted with the police, Villaraigosa responded by pledging not only to be Bratton’s “partner,” but “a better partner” than Hahn was. Villaraigosa’s first act the morning after being elected was to visit the chief at police headquarters.

Andre Birotte, the Police Commission’s inspector general, said he sees improvement at the LAPD and praised Bratton’s leadership, even while acknowledging that keeping the department in check is a challenge for any mayor. The chief’s office, Birotte said, is “almost imperial in nature.”

Bratton and Hahn presided over significant declines in Los Angeles crime during the four years of their “partnership.” In 2002 -- Bratton’s first full year on the job -- there were 647 homicides in Los Angeles; by last year, that number had fallen to 515. Other violent crimes were similarly reduced and continue to decline.

As crime has fallen, however, so has the number of arrests the LAPD makes for serious offenses. Bratton argued that the decrease in arrests for serious offenses was proof that the department was “arresting the right people.”

Others suggest that the change raises questions about how much the police are responsible for the fall in crime, as opposed to shifting demographics or changes in the economy or drug habits.

Other measures of the LAPD’s work suggest areas of potential concern. Complaints from the public against officers have shot up under Bratton, rising from 3,433 in 2002 to 5,200 last year. They are on a pace to exceed even that number this year. Cases involving serious use of force by police officers -- shootings, bites by police dogs, confrontations in which suspects are hospitalized and other such incidents -- also have increased.

Parks said those figures should cause alarm. “Things are going off the map,” he said. “They are not paying attention to the indicators of a bad relationship with the community.”

Bratton disagreed.

“I am very aware of and intimate with those numbers,” he said. “I am not particularly concerned about them.”

To Bratton, the increase in complaints is the inevitable result of police officers going about their jobs aggressively. Bratton said many complaints prove to be frivolous, and he predicted they would continue to rise as the department added officers and increased its contacts with the public.

In last week’s interview, Villaraigosa said he thought the LAPD was in good shape but acknowledged some concern when asked about the complaint numbers, which he had not seen.

“I’d have to examine the underlying reasons for the rise in those complaints,” he said.

Even the progress toward reducing crime may pose another type of challenge to Villaraigosa. Having pledged to outdo Hahn’s relationship with Bratton, the mayor-elect will be under pressure to produce superior results. And after years of declining crime statistics, that might be difficult to do.

“My hope and expectation is that they can go lower,” Villaraigosa said of the crime numbers.

Improving education and the city’s economy, addressing traffic problems and controlling crime pose a challenge “that will require an arsenal of skills,” he added.

Asked whether he was up to it, Villaraigosa paused for a moment, twirling his wedding ring, then nodded: “I believe I am.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

LAPD in the Bratton/Hahn years

Violent crime totals have declined since William J. Bratton became police chief in 2002.

*--* 1992* 1997 2002 2004 Homicides 1,083 568 647 515 Rape 1,770 1,302 1,240 1,081 Robbery 39,004 20,173 17,062 14,009 Aggravated Assaults 46,361 33,927 32,361 26,356

*--*

* The city experienced major riots in 1992, following the acquittal of the police officers accused of beating Rodney King.

Arrests

While overall arrests so far this year are up, arrests for serious offenses, which include violent crimes and property crimes, are down compared with the totals at this point last year.

2004:

All arrests: 70,276

Arrests for serious crimes: 14,281

Arrests for violent crimes: 6,773

2005:

All arrests: 72,700

Arrests for serious crimes: 13,265

Arrests for violent crimes: 6,203

Use of force

The use of serious force by police officers -- such as shootings or force that seriously injures a suspect -- increased in 2004.

2000: 110

2001: 117