Chief: Walk Away Proud

We’ve criticized Mayor James K. Hahn for failures in leadership. After his decision to drop Los Angeles Chief of Police Bernard C. Parks, no one can say Hahn is afraid to lead. Exactly where he is leading this sensitive metropolis--with its persistent racial and regional calculations over debts paid and debts owed--is another matter.

But the mayor is the city’s chief executive. He has to have managers who he believes will work well with him to serve Los Angeles. Hahn has declared that he doesn’t want Parks to continue for a second five-year term. Parks has insisted he’ll press his case. He should not. This part of the political tango is over; Hahn has abruptly left Parks on the dance floor, music blaring, and the crowd is now heading for the exits. Even if Parks were to win approval from the Hahn-appointed Police Commission, he loses, and more important, the city loses.

Parks is a no-nonsense professional, of solid character and with many traits we admire. He holds one of the toughest jobs in the nation. But no one can run Los Angeles’ police force effectively if the top man in City Hall doesn’t support him. The mayor and the chief don’t see eye to eye. They have not even met on a regularly scheduled basis since Hahn took office in July.

Now the political family feud is out in the open, with Hahn and Parks’ most vocal supporters in the African American community taking sides and others in the city becoming uncomfortable onlookers. The city cannot afford for this struggle, with its obvious racial overtones, to continue. Nor can it afford for its police force to be hobbled while the chief and mayor butt heads--Hahn each day explaining his decision, Parks pressing a counteroffensive, insisting he should be retained.

All of this needs to stop.

Hahn says that he based his decision on serious differences with Parks on three issues: the implementation of police reform, LAPD morale problems, and community policing. The key problem is that Hahn and Parks have different ideas of what constitutes true reform, what drives recruitment and retention of good officers and how community policing should be defined.

Even during the peak of the Rampart police corruption scandal, in which officers were found to have beaten, shot and framed suspects, Parks took a position that reflected his 37 years in the LAPD: The department should control the information and the punishment for misconduct. But the Rampart scandal was proof, as then-City Atty. Hahn and others pointed out, that the department’s internal commands and controls had broken down. That’s why the federal consent decree, which calls for stronger civilian oversight, was and continues to be critical to true reform of a long-troubled department. But Parks, even as he has done what he must to comply with the decree, has consistently resisted it.

Parks believes that reform can be achieved through greater discipline within the rank and file. Indeed, he has excelled in restoring discipline in a department that had forgotten it works for the people of Los Angeles. The chief has ingrained in the LAPD a seriousness about citizen complaints that was sorely lacking, as pointed out by the 1991 Christopher Commission. He has no tolerance for officers who show discourtesy or disrespect for the public they serve. But even in this worthy pursuit Parks has shown crippling rigidity. Under Parks, no complaint is minor. About 6,000 complaint investigations are initiated each year against a force of nearly 9,000 officers. Some are allegations of major officer misconduct; others are as trivial as a complaint about an officer who failed to remove his sunglasses. In all this, a sense of proportion is missing, and that hurts officer morale.

Even on the apple-pie issue of community policing, Parks and Hahn disagree. Hahn favors the retention and expansion of the popular senior lead officer program, in which officers actually get to know and work closely with neighborhood groups. Parks essentially sees the program as a misuse of the time of scarce officers who are more needed on patrol.

A thousand town hall or Police Commission meetings would not make these fundamental differences go away.

What is most alarming about Parks’ political fall is the implication that it signals the political rise of the Police Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers. The union’s leadership has attacked Parks with an unseemly zeal that even tops the fervor with which it went after the previous police chief, Willie L. Williams. While Williams and Parks could not be more different, they are both African Americans. That fact is relevant, considering the union’s odious history of racial relations. This is a union that in its 80-year history has never had an African American on its board and a union that was happy to stand up for four officers after their indefensible beating of Rodney King.

(Ironically, on the biggest police shooting controversies, Parks supported the restive rank and file. The chief staunchly defended officers involved in the dubious shootings of two African Americans: Margaret Mitchell, a mentally ill homeless woman armed with only a screwdriver, and Anthony Dwain Lee, a man at a residential Halloween costume party armed with a fake gun.)

Hahn, desperately wanting the union’s endorsement during his bid for mayor, promised the “flexible” workweek the union sought for officers, over Parks’ objection that it didn’t make sense. It didn’t then and it didn’t when the new mayor delivered it during the nation’s biggest terrorism scare.

This brings us to Hahn. The mayor was willing to say no to some black community leaders; he must also assert his independence from the police union. Hahn’s call for the union to cease its relentless campaign against Parks is a start. But Hahn now has to do a lot more than issue a plaintive call for civility. He has major fences to mend because of the months he spent clumsily hemming and hawing about his decision on Parks. How much better it would have been for Hahn to make a public case, over time and in subtle ways, that would have suggested to his loyal African American supporters and everyone else why he felt it was time to step away from Parks, who had been championed by former Mayor Richard Riordan.

That said, Parks knew Hahn would not support him when he announced he was seeking a second term. African American leaders who continue to frame Parks’ retention as the litmus test of political power are playing a risky game that could undermine their citywide influence.

This episode should serve as a constructive reminder to all of a brutal reality of politics: There are no permanent friends, only permanent interests. It is in the interest of Los Angeles that this battle between the mayor and the chief end. Mayor: Start mending fences and separate yourself from lock-step support of the narrow police union agenda. Chief: Celebrate a long record of service and integrity and walk away proud.