9/11/00 11:00 a.m.
Declawing the Cops
How much law, how much order?

By Jack Dunphy*, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department.

he headline over a front-page, above-the-fold story in Friday's Los Angeles Times reads: "Poor Morale Rife in LAPD, Survey Finds." Soon we should expect to read, in a similarly prominent space, "Sun Rises on Schedule."

The Los Angeles Times building sits just down First Street from Parker Center, headquarters of the LAPD. Like Athens and Sparta in ancient times, the two citadels of power are locked in a state of perpetual conflict. (The sophisticates at the Times would no doubt fancy themselves as the Athenians, and we know how things ended for them.)

The Times seems to take inordinate glee in trumpeting bad news about the LAPD, of which lately there has been much. Negative stories about the department are often splashed on the front page, usually above the fold. (By contrast, a story on the department's Medal of Valor awards was given about three hundred words on page 9 of Thursday's Metro section.) Before retiring several years ago, Lieutenant Dan Cooke was the LAPD's media spokesman, and he summed up the department's attitude toward the Times perfectly. When asked about allowing reporters access to disaster scenes, Cooke deadpanned, "A properly credentialed reporter has the right to get himself killed while covering a story. And it's about time it happened."

So the Times must have been well pleased to report on this latest news out of Parker Center. Retained by the civilian police commission, the management consulting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted a survey of opinions within the department, sending lengthy questionnaires to 9,300 LAPD officers, of whom about 2,500 responded. I don't know how badly the city's taxpayers were soaked for this survey, but I happily would have provided the same information in exchange for some Mrs. Fields cookies and a cold glass of milk.

That a bunch of suits from some consulting firm were required to discover that the cops are unhappy is illustrative of the straits in which the LAPD finds itself. Even a cursory examination of available statistics would have painted the picture vividly enough. To wit: Crime is up in L.A., even as it continues to decline elsewhere; arrests per officer are down; and, most tellingly, the department is losing officers much more quickly than it can hire recruits to replace them.

In the glory days of past years, the LAPD was thought to be the major league of law enforcement, with officers from throughout Southern California and beyond aspiring to come over in large numbers. The exact opposite is true today; the department is about 700 officers below its authorized strength, with no reversal in sight. In fact, police chief Bernard Parks could have saved the city the expense of the survey simply by walking down one flight of stairs from his Parker Center office to the Personnel Division, where he might have had a chat with any of the several officers who come in each week to resign before moving on to other departments.

I'm sure the good people of PricewaterhouseCoopers have done a bang-up job with their survey, and when their report is officially presented to the police commission next month it will no doubt be a work of the highest quality and well worth the cost. But here, for the price of a mouse click or two, is one officer's speculation on what the report will say: The troops don't like Bernard Parks, and things will begin to improve the very day he is shown the door.

Promoted to chief in 1997, Parks replaced the affable but inept Willie Williams, who himself was hired away from the top job in the Philadelphia Police Department to replace the embattled Daryl Gates. (Even the Times, which applauded Williams's appointment, eventually had to concede that the man was a dolt.) It appeared that Parks's first priority on assuming command was to crush any saplings of resurgent morale in a department that had been cuffed around through the Rodney King and O. J. Simpson crucibles. A deployment system that allowed officers to work longer hours on fewer days was ended, this despite its popularity within the department and the success other departments have had with similar systems.

Worse, Parks instituted a disciplinary system that Draco himself might have envied. For perceived offenses as trivial as rolling one's eyes at the wrong moment, an officer can have a promotion or transfer stalled for months while an overburdened internal-affairs apparatus completes its investigation. What it has nearly come to is this: On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, half the department investigates the other half; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, we switch roles. On Sundays, we get down on our knees and pray for a new chief.

All of this takes place against a backdrop of genuine scandal: One former LAPD officer is serving time for bank robbery, another for stealing eight pounds of cocaine from an evidence-storage facility. The cocaine thief, Rafael Perez, has in turn informed on other officers, who — he claims — have committed crimes ranging from unlawful shootings and beatings to evidence planting. Four officers are currently awaiting trial on a variety of charges relating to the alleged framing of gang members in the Rampart Division, one of the LAPD's eighteen patrol stations. About 70 other officers remain under suspicion of similar misconduct, though additional criminal prosecutions appear unlikely.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department, under the direction of Civil Rights Division chief Bill Lann Lee, is threatening to sue the department for engaging in "patterns and practices" inimical to the civil rights of citizens. Mr. Lee, appointed by President Clinton to his post on an "acting" basis after his confirmation was denied in the Senate, holds the lawsuit over the city like a Damoclean sword, though neither he nor any of his subordinates have publicly stated what these patterns and practices might be.

A cynic might be forgiven if he sees this action as part of an effort to secure California for Al Gore. Some in the left-leaning L.A. city government are ready to throw in the towel and succumb to this threat, thereby relieving themselves of responsibility and placing authority over the LAPD in the hands of a federal judge. Others are content to drag things out until the new year, when, they hope, Lee will join Janet Reno on the express train back to oblivion.

Interestingly, it was that same Justice Department that years ago forced the LAPD to adopt hiring quotas, one unintended but predictable consequence of which was a widening of the gauge of the filter through which applicants passed. The department once again finds itself in Justice's crosshairs after the criminals it was mandated to hire continued to be criminals after becoming police officers.

Paying the price for all of this are those crime victims in Los Angeles who might have been spared their misfortune had LAPD morale not declined so precipitously. At its core, police work is about dealing with that small, malicious segment of society that preys on the weak and unwary. The LAPD has in effect been declawed, and the criminal element is only too happy to take advantage of its timidity.

This same dynamic was demonstrated last June in New York's Central Park, where, during the Puerto Rican Day Parade, drunken bands of young men robbed and terrorized defenseless women, stripping some of them of their clothing. The NYPD, buffeted by criticism in the wake of the Amadou Diallo shooting and other controversies, was said to have been slow to act, and the wilding was captured on several disturbing videos shot by amateur cameramen.

But imagine the outcome if those same cameras had instead captured the image of some duty-bound NYPD officer delivering a well-deserved nightstick across the chops to one of those hoodlums. Today that officer would be sitting in the defendant's chair in some Manhattan courtroom, Al Sharpton and his flock of professionally and perennially aggrieved would be making a ruckus on the streets outside the courthouse, and the battered thug and his lawyer would be chatting it up with Bryant Gumbel before going house hunting on Park Avenue. Predictably, the crime rate in New York is edging back upward.

It is safe to speculate that the streets of Berlin were fairly free of crime in 1939, as the authorities were unconstrained by such legal niceties as probable cause and search warrants. Justice was sacrificed to crisp, Teutonic order. It is just as easy to observe that Monrovia, Liberia, with its complete lack of legitimate law enforcement, is as close to Thunderdome as can be found in the world today. The question for the moment is: Can't we avoid the first fate — without having to tilt toward the second?

(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber.)