Set the LAPD free

It is time to end the 8-year-old federal consent decree that already has spurred the Los Angeles Police Department’s remarkable transformation from an institution essentially at war with much of the city into one that -- on most days, in most places -- does its best “to protect and to serve.”

The qualifiers in that sentence are employed only because there is no perfection this side of the grave, in policing or any other human activity. That is one of the things U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess needs to take into account as he weighs whether to lift the decree, which both the city and the U.S. Department of Justice asked him to do this week. Other parties with serious and long-term interests in the proceedings, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, are encouraging him to extend his oversight of the LAPD. These are people with moral as well as legal standing on this issue, and their intentions are the best. But they’re wrong in this case.

Here are five reasons why Feess should end the consent decree now:

* This process was supposed to take five years. When that turned out not to be long enough, Feess extended the decree for another three years, which should have ended Tuesday. All but three of dozens of reforms deemed essential are complete, and their implementation is within clear sight. This agreement was supposed to encourage a process of change; it was not envisioned as a kind of permanent federal receivership for the LAPD. Another extension would implicitly impugn the good faith of the department and of the city government, both of which have amply demonstrated that quality.

* As the Justice Department’s representatives argued to Feess on Tuesday, failure to terminate the consent decree will encourage other cities to resist federal interventions to force reform of their police. If Los Angeles can’t get out from under federal supervision after all it’s done, why would any city do anything but fight tooth and nail to keep the feds out of its business?

* One of the most salutary changes in the LAPD is its new relationship with the civilian Police Commission. Chief William J. Bratton has proved himself a believer in the substance and not simply the appearance of civilian oversight. The Department of Justice and the city have proposed to Feess that he cede to the commission oversight of the remaining three reforms: additional safeguards against racial profiling, confidential financial disclosure for officers in specialized gang units, and completion of a computer system to track complaints against problem cops. There is no reason to believe that the commission is not up to the job, or that Bratton or his command staff would be anything but cooperative.

* Fully 43% of the women and men who now wear the department’s badge have never known anything but life under the consent decree’s reforms. Bratton has utterly transformed both the composition and the culture of the department’s command staff. The proof of that comes when the police screw up, as they inevitably do. What’s important is not the failure but what follows. For instance, when a collapse of supervision resulted in a police riot in MacArthur Park on May Day in 2007, the department disciplined those responsible, investigated the incident fully and issued a full report for everyone to read. More important, it altered its approach to volatile crowd-control situations, and the city saw the result this week in the LAPD’s handling of the street violence that followed the Lakers’ NBA championship.

* Finally, the most troubling of the ACLU’s arguments for continuing the decree -- the statistics on police stops and arrests that seem to suggest continued racial profiling -- are problematic. It’s possible to derive another meaning entirely from those same numbers. One of the reforms that Bratton has implemented involves a continuous redeployment of the department’s resources to where serious crime is most severe. It’s an unfortunate fact that 43% of the city’s homicides and 38% of its violent crimes occur in just four of the LAPD’s South Los Angeles divisions, whose people are overwhelmingly African American and Latino. Seen in that light, what may look like racial profiling is, in fact, the department’s attempt to ensure that black and Latino Angelenos have equal access to public safety.

Los Angeles owes the Justice Department’s civil rights division and the federal court a debt of gratitude for recalling the city to its duty to do equal justice to all its citizens. That’s an ideal that will remain forever beyond reach, but the fact is that we can take the struggle from here.

--

timothy.rutten@latimes.com