View From Parker Center

Photo by Sobodan Dimitrov

Meeting with the LAPD’s new chief, Bill Bratton, for the first time, one hardly knows what to expect. Is he the enlightened police reformer the city has desperately been searching for over the last decade? Or just one more stop-’em-and-frisk-’em cowboy, clueless in confronting the city’s myriad problems?

There was good reason to be uncertain. On the one hand, Bratton has already demonstrated a way of shooting from the lip, particularly when it comes to the city’s street gangs. From his first day in office forward, he began spouting battle metaphors, calling for an “all-out assault” on gang crime, which he described as “homeland terrorism.” He vowed to use RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) to go after L.A.’s gangs, a questionable strategy, since, with few exceptions, the Southland’s gangs fall firmly into the category of disorganized crime. And, when eight officer-involved shootings occurred in a single week, it prompted a protest in front of Parker Center, where demonstrators carried placards that read, “Control your cops.” The chief, told of the signs, was quick to snap back, “Control your kids!”

On the other hand, intermittent war rhetoric notwithstanding, most of the time Bratton sounded distinctly liberal on social issues. And while Bernard Parks was notorious for surrounding himself with deputy chiefs who wouldn’t dream of crossing him, Bratton demonstrated that he wanted talent, not mirrors, by immediately promoting the department’s strongest progressive voices to fill the top three positions on his command staff.

Moreover, Bratton’s arrival has brought a kind of instant glasnost to the usually icy confines of Parker Center — a new openness in the department’s relations with the civilian world outside. Under previous chiefs, the LAPD barricaded itself inside a fortress mentality that viewed even the most benign approaches from the press with suspicion and, often, outright hostility. Officers were forbidden to talk to the media without a stamp of approval from Press Relations, and that stamp was rarely given. As a consequence, the department inevitably looked like it was hiding something — whether it was or not.

Yet within days of Bratton’s swearing-in ceremony, the moat was drained, the castle doors unbolted. Commanders and deputy chiefs suddenly returned calls promptly. Even lower-echelon blue-
suiters gave opinions without frantically stipulating that they were not to be quoted. Of course, some of this had to do with the fact that Bratton, unlike his predecessors, understood the value of courting the media. That’s what his previous boss, former N.Y. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, couldn’t stand about him.

Some high-profile critics of the police, like former state Senator Tom Hayden and Nation of Islam Western regional director Minister Tony Muhammed, remained underwhelmed. “He’s an Irishman with a gift for B.S.,” is the way Hayden put it. “In New York, Bratton reduced petty crime but created a whole other set of problems that will continue to be felt for years to come,” said Hayden. “We don’t appreciate a chief of police who equates our children with al Qaeda,” echoed Muhammed.

However, other unsparing police critics, like Father Greg Boyle, who runs the Eastside Homeboy Industries, were won over. In December, Boyle took Bratton to task on the cover of the L.A. Times Sunday Opinion section for basing his gang strategy on myths rather than reality. The following week, Bratton invited the priest to Parker Center for a private talk, and Boyle — normally pessimistic on the subject of law enforcement — came away unusually impressed. “He’s a very quick study,” said Boyle. “And very astute in terms of the political lay of the land. And I think he wants to do the right thing. I’m so alert to every possible negative nuance. But I think he gets it. Bratton really seems to genuinely want a revolution in the department.”

The necessity for a revolution within and without the LAPD seems to be the one point on which everyone agrees. Chief Daryl Gates’ jackbooted tactics brought the city to that understanding in the early ’90s. Perhaps former Chief Bernard Parks’ most lasting contribution will be the fact that his unerring penchant for alienating the rank and file pushed them to a similar understanding, albeit via a very different route.

But is Bill Bratton the right person to escort the department and the city through this rare window of opportunity? Can he confront the real plague of deadly violence in L.A.’s most desperate neighborhoods while simultaneously reforming a department notorious for its misdeeds? When he is faced with complex and troubling issues, like the newly released police traffic stop data indicating that blacks and Latinos are required to exit their cars after routine traffic stops three times as often as whites, will he approach such issues with defensiveness or real insight? These were among the key questions that came up when I met with Bratton in his Parker Center office on Monday.

L.A. WEEKLY: What has surprised you the most since you took the position as chief?

BILL BRATTON: I was most surprised to find that the department was in much worse shape than I realized — especially in terms of morale and focus.

It needs to change on several levels. The LAPD became a very reactive police force over the last number of years. And what I’m attempting to do is get it more proactive, so that it’s more focused on the prevention of crime, and reduction of crime, rather than measuring success in terms of the response to crime. That’s a very significant difference.

The L.A. police really created the professional police model that was very much in vogue in the ’70s and ’80s. It came about after the riots of the 1960s when the Kerner reports said that crime is caused by all those societal influences such as racism, poverty and the economy. And since police aren’t responsible for those issues, they should focus their efforts on increasing the professionalization of their response to crime. So the LAPD led the way in this regard with a professional model that emphasized rapid response. You had the black-and-whites here covering a very large area. You had random patrol. The idea of random patrol is that you keep the criminal off guard because he never knew when a police car was coming around the corner. And you had reactive investigation. Joe Friday [of Dragnet] was the epitome of the modern LAPD detective, solving the crime in 24 minutes, leaving six minutes for commercials. As a result, the LAPD became the embodiment of measuring success by number of arrests, by response time, by clearance rates. That’s all after-the-fact policing.

It focuses on the prevention of crime. It measures success by fewer victims. Fewer crimes. Not on numbers of arrests.

But, going back to the LAPD culture, it went through another phenomenal change in the ’90s as a result of the Rodney King situation and Rampart. At that time, the organization became even more reactive, but much less risk-intensive. In fact, it became a risk-averse organization, wanting only to stay out of trouble.

Oh, yeah. One of the difficulties for the LAPD is that it’s an incredibly small department by anybody’s standards. They’ve never had enough officers to do the kind of community policing that the East Coast supports — walking the beats in neighborhoods. That’s why the senior-lead-officer ä program became so critical. There were only a few hundred of them, but they were at least someone that the community could touch and feel as a caring police presence. But then, during Chief Parks’ time, an already over-small department found hundreds of its officers being drained off by various reactions to crises, things like consent-decree compliance, risk management and internal affairs. So it was like you had this lemon that had already been squeezed dry, and then it got squeezed even more by this crisis-driven mentality.

How do we reposition our resources to embrace community policing in a department that doesn’t have enough officers to walk a beat? The answer is partnership. We have to work in partnership with the community in which we agree on common priorities. We can’t do everything all at the same time. We have the consent decree, we have a rise in crime and a rise in gang violence. How do we assign our resources? Hopefully, by getting everybody in partnership and arriving at some consensus. In terms of the gang situation, we’re trying to get the federal government, local government, state government and community groups all working with us.

[

No. In fact, I defy you to point to anything I’ve said in the two months that could be seen as giving officers permission to run roughshod through the community.

What’s wrong with that? Aren’t gang members terrorizing the community?

Well, gang members are criminals, by definition. The nature of the gang is to engage in criminal activity. Many of them are mindless murderers. Since I’ve been here, we’ve had clear examples of these characters opening up on police officers and citizens. So let’s get real about this. Cops have a very dangerous job. There are a lot of disincentives to being a police officer in this city. We’ve got the consent decree. Today we’re having a press conference about racial profiling. That might be seen as a disincentive if police officers are working in an all-minority neighborhood in which most, if not all, of the people they’re going to stop are minorities. Unfortunately right now we only have raw data about the stops that doesn’t allow you to differentiate that particular nuance. So it’s very tricky. Look: It’s a balancing act to have an assertive police force — and make no mistake about it, I want an assertive police force — while at the same time making sure that the policing is done constitutionally and legally. The press might focus on my more controversial statements like equating gangs with the Mafia. Whereas they might not be as interested when I do a roll call, and talk about the constitutional issues. That’s not as sexy.

Not at all. The 1995 [Christopher Commission] review indicated clearly that they were not. I think that a lot of progress has been made. But there’s still a lot more to be done. There’s still a great deal of community mistrust of this organization.

And it’s not just L.A. The outside perspective of this department is just horrible. Because I’m an outsider, I’ve seen it.

They think the LAPD is a racist, corrupt police department.

They think of the police officers as uncaring and insensitive. It’s an inappropriate understanding of a lot of the men and women in the department. But this is an organization that has been insensitive. I don’t think it’s a brutal department, it’s not a corrupt department. But does it have that type of activity within it? Yes. Is it condoned? No. Is it systemic? I don’t think it is.

To some degree, I think it was all about control. It was all about controlling the community, not working with the community. And what starts out as the desire to control the criminal component of the community ends up spreading to all the aspects of the community. Unfortunately we don’t know the extent to which the Rampart problems extended to the rest of the department, because Chief Parks quickly disassembled the anti-gang units, so there was no ability to take the lessons learned from Rampart and see if those problems existed in other divisions. As a result, the department will never have the ability to refute the accusation that the problems of Rampart were systemwide. And second, a new set of problems was created. Gang control was totally disassembled. When it was reassembled, it was an ineffective shell of its former self. That’s another part of the problems of this department: With every crisis, you create a new unit.

[

That’s one of the reasons I’ve embraced the consent decree. I believe that, a year from now, with the proper training, the data gathering, the oversight, and the supervision it requires, we’ll be able to say to a doubting community, “Look: To the best of our ability, we’ve done everything possible to reform this department. And based on documented evidence, we can say our officers are not racist, they are not brutal, they are not corrupt.”

Frankly, I’d like to have more monitoring in-house. But I don’t have the resources. So I’d be crazy not to take advantage of the outside entities like the consent-decree monitors and the inspector general that can serve me as independent eyes and ears.

Do you feel you learned, in that regard, from your experience in New York? Everyone agrees that you lowered crime to an impressive degree. But, according to Amnesty International, as crime went down, civilian complaints rose, as did officer-involved deaths.

Amnesty’s statistics were B.S.! They were anecdotal, they weren’t real numbers. We had the real numbers, and the complaints didn’t rise, nor did the number of civilians who died from police shootings. Any rise in complaints had to do with Giuliani, not with us. And I say all that very emphatically, because I mean it very emphatically!

For one thing, the organization became micromanaged. My predecessor had 14 different reports coming to him. Fourteen! Incredible! In the newly organized department, I’ll have seven: the Consent Decree, which, when I came, was a unit deep in the bowels of the organization; Anti-Terrorism, another unit that used to be buried. Then, Internal Affairs, Community Affairs and the three assistant chiefs. That’s it. The rest are delegated.

It was atrocious. It was not quick, it was not fair, and it was having a phenomenally negative effect on our crime-fighting capabilities. Prior to my arrival, Chief Pomeroy put a modified system into place. But there are still many changes needed. That’s one of the things about police work, it’s never done. But that’s what makes it exciting.

I look for ambitious people, people who think outside the box, creative people. I look for assertive people who are team players, but the kind of team players who always feel comfortable speaking their own mind. I also look for people who don’t carry grudges. I don’t carry grudges. I’ll fight with you tooth and nail over an issue. But if I lose, I leave it there. I don’t stop speaking to you.

Well, I don’t know about the past. But it isn’t going to be how it is now.

Lowering crime in partnership with the community.

Yeah, I guess I do. Personally, I’d like to make a difference. Professionally, I’d like to make a difference in relation to the nature of the ethnic tensions that are so prevalent in this country. I think the best way to do that is to professionalize the police and their relationship with the communities. If we could be the catalyst for that change it would be wonderful. We’ve been the catalyst for so much negative — in terms of police relations, and ethnic relations we have in this country. But what if we turned it around and became the catalyst for positive change? I think that could be done. That’s the goal.

Nothing. I sleep right through the night without any problem.

Advertising disclosure: We may receive compensation for some of the links in our stories. Thank you for supporting LA Weekly and our advertisers.