Are L.A.'s minorities doomed to a lifetime of arrests for "driving while brown?"
Most urbanites - particularly Angelenos - are prone to the deepest, dankest cynicism whenever a "proven reformer" steps onto the scene promising he's the one who'll finally take out the LAPD's trash. I have just two words for chief William Bratton as he floats through his "honeymoon" ...
"WILLIE WILLIAMS"
Williams was hailed (initially) as a "proven reformer" when he took over the exceedingly corrupt and out-of-control Philadelphia P.D. in the late 1980s.
The burghers anointed him to mop up the mess and deliver a departmentwide enema after the Philly cops' paramilitary assault on the fortified rowhouse headquarters of the back-to-earth uber-squatter commune MOVE compound.
A police bomb ("incendiary device" in their press releases) blew up MOVE's rooftop bunker, but also started a hellacious fire that killed 6 MOVErs, flattened 50 homes and essentially damned PPD for what it was - an inbred pack of racist thugs. The MOVE fire proved the Philly cops hadn't changed much from the days of Chief Frank Rizzo, whose legendary jackbooted stance might best be summed up in the single image of him arriving at a society ball from the scene of a disturbance in a tuxedo, his iron-weighted nightstick jammed into his cummerbund. It was Rizzo who made the famous promise to "make Attila the Hun look like a faggot." And it was he who solidified Philadelphia Police Department's attitude - and reputation as a hardnosed goon squad that would never let evidence get in the way of a good collar.
Understanding both the department and the culture of the city, Willie Williams made some positive changes. He reorganized the mid-level brass like a kid shaking up a boxful of scorpions to disorient them for easier manipulation. He reassigned captains and lieutenants away from their old stomping grounds, put more foot cops on the street and generally earned himself enough praise as a reformer to be tapped to step into the ashes of LA's 1992 riots in place of Daryl Gates - and get completely eaten alive.
Clueless to the intricacies of L.A. politics and impolitic (or perhaps just home-grown stupid) enough to get dinged for spending city money on personal entertainment in Vegas, Williams' greatest failing was his thorough and abiding ignorance of Los Angeles.
A desk-driver for much of his career in Philly (he wasn't even certified to California's POST standards for firearm proficiency) Williams made halfhearted attempts at changing LAPD's institutions without trying to break its arrogance on the street.
Sure, Williams supported the senior lead officer program, and putting more cops out on foot, horseback and bikes. But he never addressed the systemic permissiveness that let Rampart's anything-for-a-conviction detective squad devolve into an irredeemable band of thieving, lying brutes who sent hundreds of people to prison on bogus evidence.
Nor did Williams - or the seemingly invisible 5-year tenure of Chief Bernard Parks - do a lick of meaningful work on fine-tuning the average LAPD patrol officer's fuck-you swagger.
People of color still get dragged from their cars with disproportionate frequency during traffic stops.
Kids with combs and old ladies with letter openers still get perforated with department-issue 9mm slugs by slim-witted patrolmen later found to have murdered them "within department policy."
The notorious Special Investigations squad - unless they are stopped by the barrage of wrongful-death lawsuits filed by numerous suspects' widows and orphans - will keep shadowing suspected felons until they can "legally" slaughter them in "self-defense" gun battles.
And Bill Bratton - god bless his street-level success with NYPD (I've visited the new Times Square and the new Village, and they're sterile, quiet and creepily safe) and his good intentions reflected in the latest round of "how's-he-doing" profiles in the established L.A. press - is going to have just as much trouble as his forebears did with ripping the spurs and Stetsons off the heels and heads of LAPD's street-level cowboys.
Unless his approach is drastically different, Bratton will have about as much luck as either Williams and Parks did in smacking the barricade mentality out of the LAPD by retooling policy and holding press conferences. It's not about changing tactics; it's about changing the culture.
So far, Bratton's taken a good tack in gladhanding street-level community leaders, bringing an open ear and responsive words, and leaving the platitudes at home. And the "broken windows" theory of responding to every little infraction might have an effect in L.A. - provided it's coupled with a substantial change in patrol officers' curbside manners.
But declaring L.A.'s decades-old gangs "terrorists" was the sort of thoughtless misstep any junior public-information clerk would make in editing his first press release, and doesn't augur well.
Gang culture is as hard-wired into L.A.'s streets as planting evidence and racial profiling are endemic in its police department's rank and file. If Bratton wants to make any meaningful dent in gang crime, he'd better get creative, perhaps by crafting a meaningful, community-wide sociological strategy that addresses the real roots of gang life and pays more than lip service to the neighborhood councils, church groups and school districts.
Bratton must also work more intelligently to bolster the shaky respect granted his patrol officers. That wave-and-smile campaign is admirable and might even mollify some of the department's more simple-minded critics.
But he needs to get every single officer from cadets on up comfy with the rich and ever-darkening racial makeup of this town, to the point where they'll stop applying hardass reactionary Central Park West/Simi Valley attitude to routine traffic stops and do some colorblind policing for a change.
Police work is a noble, if ugly, boring, terrifying and occasionally lethal (or rewarding) profession that tapers officers' responses and patience to katana sharpness. But like good cops everywhere, LAPD officers must be trained to tune their reactions to address the broad gulf of their ignorance about the other 3.2 million of us who live between the few law-abiding angels and stone killers.
That U.S. District Court consent decree was not just a suggestion - it was a mandate. Until every badge in the department shields only a smart, humanistic cop who is willing to meet its requirements for a deep change in LAPD culture, it's just another law to be flouted.
Let's hope Bratton's not just another "proven reformer" but a smart, adaptable surgeon who can earn the obedience of his strong-willed troops, learn on his feet and quickly understand the delicate tissue of L.A.'s communities while hacking away at the tumors. Otherwise, he's just the latest dude with a title and a six-figure salary doomed in five years to be suddenly baffled as to why he's getting gigged and gutted by the police commission and the city council.
We've seen it twice now. We don't need another half-decade of well-meaning bullshit and systemic inertia.
Posted by: factoid on Monday, January 20, 2003 - 04:41 PM
