Opinion: The LAPD has breakfast -- for the first time. Same time, same place next year?

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The ‘’first annual’’ anything is always a sign of optimism -- sometimes justified, sometimes not.

Implicit in the LAPD’s First Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Breakfast Celebration was a hope for something more than just a tribute to a man. It was also for healing wounds between a police department and a minority community that have spent decades at cross purposes, mired in misunderstanding and suspicion.

The ranks of guests at this morning’s breakfast, beneath the crystal chandeliers at Town and Gown at USC, were thinned by the inauguration, which has drawn many civic leaders to D.C. But longtime First AME pastor Chip Murray was there, as were U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O’Brien, author and commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson, and Los Angeles’ deputy mayor and gang program ‘’czar,’’ the Rev. Jeff Carr, who sat next to me.

The breakfast was the idea of police chief Bill Bratton, who was welcomed by the highest-ranking African-American in the department, assistant chief Earl C. Paysinger....

Paysinger spoke briefly about the long friction between blacks and cops, and said that in years past, ‘’some of the hurt was inflicted by the very police department (Bratton) now leads.’’ Relations between the black community and the LAPD, Paysinger believes, are now ‘’better than they’ve been for generations.’’

For his part, Bratton acknowledged that that history ‘’is not a pretty history, but the future is one of promise,’’ and that police ‘’can be at the forefront of the solution and the resolution ... of so many of the wounds we have participated in.’’ Restoring public confidence in the department, he wrote in his message in the program, has been ‘’my top priority.’’

The significance of the King federal holiday today, and the Barack Obama inauguration tomorrow, said Bratton, is that ‘’today we celebrate the dream; tomorrow, we celebrate the hope.’’

With so much hope in the air, from LA to D.C. and around the world, it must just have been wishful thinking that the breakfast program listed tomorrow’s event erroneously as the inauguration of ‘’the 43rd President of the United States.’’ That would be George W. Bush. The 44th president will be Obama.

Guests watched a documentary by filmmaker Pierre Bagley about the history of LAPD-African-American relations, and a DVD of it turned up in gift bags. It was nestled amid LAPD-blue tissue paper, along with a card advertising the department’s Latino recruiting and hiring seminar in five days’ time, and an even bigger card with a picture of the King family encircled by the phrase ‘’I Have a Dream,’’ alongside a picture of the Obama family framed in the Presidential seal.

Oh, and there was a nifty gold medallion in a black velveteen case. On the ‘’heads’’ side, a bas-relief of Martin Luther King Jr., with, in raised letters, ‘’1st Annual MLK Breakfast’’ and ‘’USC’’ and ‘’LAPF,’’ for the Los Angeles Police Foundation, the chief financial angel for the event. On the ‘’tails’’ side, another bas-relief, this one with City Hall smack in the middle, the new LAPD headquarters, Dodger Stadium and the Coliseum, the theme building at LAX, the Watts Towers, and hovering over it all, the Hollywood sign.

A couple of LAPD folks and I were talking before the breakfast about what we’d be doing tomorrow morning when Obama is sworn in. Short answer: working. One of them was puzzled that the country that talks a good game about democracy and voting doesn’t back it up much. Election Day should be a holiday, so people have no excuse not to vote. And Inauguration Day, the event that Election Day makes possible? That too should be a national holiday -- after all, it’s just once every four years.