When Antonio Villaraigosa’s Chief of Staff, Jeff Carr, resigned unexpectedly on Wednesday, “to return to the non-profit world” there was much speculation about whether or not the resignation was entirely voluntary.

Dennis Romero of LA Weekly wrote:

Interestingly, he said he didn’t have another job lined up, but that he wanted to return to the nonprofit world. (No “more-time-with-the-family” for this guy, apparently).

Carr, if you remember, was the city’s first Gang Czar before being elevated to be the mayor’s top guy.

The LA Times’ David Zahniser reported Carr’s upcoming exit with more detailed speculation:

Villaraigosa supporters offered differing accounts as to whether Carr had been encouraged to leave. Carr himself denied receiving any pressure. But others in the mayor’s orbit said Villaraigosa, who will be forced out by term limits in June 2013, wanted a change in management that would allow him to complete key goals.

“The mayor’s got two years left. He’s got a lot of stuff he wants to do,” said one source close to the mayor who would only comment if not identified because Villaraigosa did not grant permission to speak. “It just felt like there’s enough time left to get the house in working order better, to finish strong.”

{SNIP]

Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., said Carr “did his best” in a city suffering from a bruising recession, a string of budget shortfalls and a badly decaying infrastructure, particularly streets and highways.

“The chief of staff is supposed to keep the trains running on time. And I don’t believe there’s anyone in the city who would say the trains in L.A. are running on time,” he said.

Discord over Carr’s leadership also could be found within the mayor’s office.

One person familiar with Carr’s departure said members of Villaraigosa’s staff went to Carr last week to express concerns about his management style. That person also would not speak if identified, saying the mayor had not given authorization to discuss the staffing changes.

Based on what my sources have told me, David Z. has it right- about a group going at first to Jeff Carr but then, feeling unsatisfied with the outcome of the meeting, to the mayor. This was reportedly combined with the fact that Villaraisgosa has the intention to do a reboot of his administration and his political trajectory—a process into which presumably Jeff Carr was no longer seen to fit.

NEW TOP MAYOR’S GUY (OR GIRL)?

Joseph Mailander of Mulholland Terrace is having a good time speculating. Check out his List of Six.

HEADED OUT FOR A TWO-WEEK ROAD TRIP THIS (THURSDAY) MORNING….

For the next few days, keep an eye on the WLA Twitter feed, on the right of the page here. ——>

And, yes, I did see the story about the guy in Yellowstone who was attacked an killed by a griz on Wednesday.

The announcement went out Monday morning that the head of the Department of Children and Family Services, Trish Ploehn, has been removed as the head of DCFS.

The LA Times predicted her ouster over a month ago.

Axing Ploehn may or may not be the right thing to do. The opinions around town (and beyond) on the matter are all over the place.

Some feel she was simply not up to the job, and that a recent string of child deaths proved it. Others suggest that, in a long troubled and secretive department that has been chronically plagued by child deaths and other horrors, she was simply the nearest and most obvious person to blame.

(The LA Weekly reported in November that as early September, Ploehn’s attorney wrote the County CEO about a “smear campaign” against her allegedly coming from a couple of the supervisors.)

She will be replaced on a purely interim basis by Antonia Jimenez, a top aide to county Chief Executive William T Fujioka, while a nationwide search for a permanent director takes place.

In a story for the LA times, Garrett Therolf writes that it is hoped that Jimenez will begin whipping the department into shape even during her temporary tenure.

Jimenez will not have the benefit of significant child welfare experience. She came to Los Angeles County government only months ago after working as a senior manager at Deloitte, the management consulting firm, and in Massachusetts state government, including the governor’s office, focusing mostly on healthcare issues.

Since arriving in L.A., however, she has gained officials’ confidence for her management expertise and has been admired for her reputation as a turnaround expert. Behind the scenes, she has asked supervisors’ aides to pull back from their involvement in the department’s affairs to give her and the chief executive’s staff the opportunity to take nearly singular ownership of the day-to-day efforts to correct the agency.

Looking in from the outside, the disheartening part of this whole thing is that Ploehn is just the latest in a string of DCFS directors who have gone from being the the possible saviors of the LA County foster care system.

I don’t know Ploehn, but I did talk at length, on several occasions with her predecessor’s predecessor, Anita Bock.

Bock was a rising star in the foster care world, recruited in 1999 to come to Los Angeles after she had a dramatic success in overhauling Miami’s smaller but similarly ailing foster-care system.

When we talked a decade ago, in the spring of 2000, Bock was still viewed as the new DCFS savior, but I found her to be very down to earth and passionate about the work. This is a little of what she said about what needed fixing at DCFS:

“Most of our social workers have 50 or 60 cases, which is quadruple the nationally recommended number of 15. That’s clearly unworkable. We also have a bureaucracy that actively prevents people on the frontlines from making decisions that are in the best interests of the child, and tends to meet its own needs first.” She smiled wryly. “Which means it’s doing whatever it can to avoid liability. We can’t afford to operate like that anymore. We have to put the needs of the kids first, the needs of everybody else second.”

Bock also described the required training for foster parents as woefully inadequate. “And we should do a complex psychological and social evaluation before we place a child, in order to determine their specific needs and match them with an appropriate family,” she said. “Instead, we thrust children into care without any kind of effective assessment. That’s just a recipe for problems.”

So what to do?

Bock sighed. “We have to gently and humanely unravel the mess that is L.A. County foster care,” she said. “And the community needs to step up to the plate as well. There’s a good reason that all these kids are flooding into the system. American children are in deep trouble. That’s obvious everywhere you look.” Still she insisted that she is optimistic. “I think in six months or a year, this agency is going to really surprise everybody — not just the state but the whole country.”

As I said, that was ten years ago.

Unfortunately, instead of gobs of progress, there were some incremental moves forward. The bureaucracy and the resistance was formidable. Yet, while Bock made visible improvements. The troubled department didn’t move fast enough and, after three years, Bock’s contract wasn’t renewed.

Following Bock, there was David Sanders, another purported savior. Sanders wasn’t tossed out, but got so fed up that he quit DCFS to go work elsewhere.

Enter Trish Ploehn, the first director promoted from within the organization and someone on whom many hopes were pinned. And now exit Trish Ploehn.

That’s three directors in 10 years— soon to be four.

It makes one wonder if perhaps the problems are not just with the directors. Perhaps there is something deeper and more systemic that continues not to be addressed.

Still, as foster care activist/journalist Daniel Heimpel points out, under Ploehn there were some substantive changes.

He writes:

Not knowing the full circumstance of Ploehn’s removal, I can only offer what I do know. Under her watch the number of children in care was dramatically reduced, sparing thousands of children from the trauma of removal. She was the architect of a culture shift that compelled social workers to toe the scary line between the safety of foster care versus the value of leaving that child in a family home.

“This is not the easy route,” Ploehn wrote in a letter to her workers announcing the end of her tenure. “But it is what we know to be best for the children and families we serve. And this is the work that needs to be done moving forward – ensuring that each and every child in our County truly enjoys a sense of wholeness, of the security that comes with being a member of a safe, strong, loving family.”

From the outside things seem black and white. But we as a culture left those hard decisions to the workers under Ploehn’s watch. They were the ones who had to decide whether a child was safer in his or her family home or in a foster care system known to be imperfect. As one worker told me “the only way they [the children] would be safer is if we slept in the homes with them.”

But the workers don’t sleep in broken homes and humans have the capacity to act horribly. Whenever that happened, we looked for someone to blame. Too often that was the Department and its head. Now she is gone. Without someone to blame, maybe it is time we all ask what we can do to help our collective children.

Yes. What he said.

UPDATE: in January 2003, the wonderful writer Ed Hume wrote an article for LA Magazine called “The Unwanted. It was about DCFS in general, and the infamous and now-closed MacLaren Hall, in particular. I was rereading the story this morning and was struck by this paragraph:

Bold pronouncements from county officials that a solution is at hand have become an annual ritual, followed by another ritual: rounds of finger-pointing and firings when little is solved. (Anita Bock, ousted last July as director of the Department of Children and Family Services is only the latest casualty….)

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.

Photo by Anne Cusack, Los Angeles Times

JIM NEWTON LAUNCHES A WEEKLY LAT COLUMN AND FINDS WIDESPREAD DISAPPOINTMENT IN VILLAGRAIGOSA

It’s good. Read it.

Here’s how it opens:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s inauguration, on a sunny Los Angeles morning 5 1/2 years ago, was a moment of celebration and promise. Villaraigosa’s personal future appeared limitless; the city seemed poised to reap great things. “We need,” he said that day to 3,000 adoring supporters, “to start thinking big again.”

That feels like a long time ago.

THE COST OF MONDAY’S HEALTH CARE RULING

The NY Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg analyzes what Monday’s ruling on the health care bill really means in a practical sense. (Hint. It’s not good.)

The Daily Beast has a brand new profile of soon to be California First Lady, Anne Gust Brown, and her affect on the life and work of the governor elect. But before we get to the DB story, a few personal recollections on the same topic:

MY FIRST VERY BIG STORY AS A YOUNG AND NOT AT ALL EXPERIENCED JOURNALIST was a nationally syndicated interview/profile I managed to wrangle with then California Governor Jerry Brown in 1976 when he was running for president as a dark horse candidate. For a few months of that year, and a few amazing primaries, it looked like he might very well have a shot at being the nominee. But it was not to be. The Democratic party leadership preferred someone a bit more…um….controllable and Jerry’s style campaign played better in the east and the west than it did in the deep south.

During my reporting for that story, I followed Brown around through a variety of circumstances and I remember in particular one late night in the governor’s office when staff and legislators were trying to get Jerry through the process of signing or not signing a large stack of bills, which was a maddeningly slow affair because Brown’s instinctive intellectual curiosity, combined with with his notoriously whimsical attention span, caused him to question things that were often really not worth questioning, given the circumstances.

As the process dragged on and on into the wee hours, I remember one politico—either a staffer or a state senator, I can’t remember now— expelling himself from EGB Jr’s office, flushed and steaming. “We gotta get this guy a wife,” growled the man for the benefit of anyone who happened to be within earshot. “We got to get this guy a wife who will kick his ass!”

In the intervening years I’ve interviewed and/or reported on, or simply chatted with Jerry Brown many, many times, and have often thought back on the rightness of that remark. Not about the ass-kicking part, but the fact that, like certain kinds of very bright people, he needed some sort of grounding person in his life, somebody who would hold on to his kite string, a counterweight to bring him to balance.

Enter Anne Gust in 1990. After first dating, and then living together, she and Brown married in 2005.

I met Anne only once, when the three of us sat together during lunch at a benefit for the California relief organization, Operation USA, and the rightness of their pairing struck me immediately.

The impression was reinforced a couple of times when I was interviewing Jerry on the phone at his home office, and he needed to pause several times to interact with his wife and the interplay spoke volumes.

One of the most charming things about his election night speech, for those of us who have watched Jerry Brown for a very long time, was the way he credited Anne for his victory and nattered on happily about how she would be California’s first lady. He gushed really. Jerry forgot to be cautious, or hyper intellectual. He was instead publicly adoring. And it was great.

I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: for better and occasionally for worse, Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, Jr. was and still is one of the brightest people in American public life. He is also one of the canniest, politically speaking.

But common sense? In the past, sometimes not so much.

As a consequence, both as a governor and also as a presidential candidate, and even during his time in Oakland, he would occasionally give rein to creative but poorly thought out actions on a whim (more often then not with the encouragement of his longtime Pre-Gust “closest adviser,” the interesting but decidedly peculiar, Jacques Barzaghi). Some of those actions were to Brown’s—and/or our—detriment.

That’s where Anne Gust Brown comes in. She is not only extremely bright herself, she is a very savvy professional—a lawyer and businesswoman—who worked for 14 years for The Gap, first as general counsel and then Chief Administrative Officer.

She clearly gets him and in no way tries to keep Jerry from being Jerry. But, when need be, she sits down firmly on the other side of his teeter-totter. To his credit, he is grateful for it.

By the way, I think if Jerry had been settled down and married to Anne Gust when he was running for president in 1992, the year that William Jefferson Clinton became the nominee, and eventually a two term president, we might very well have had POTUS Brown.

All these years after his first two terms as governor, Jerry Brown is about to embark on his third. It will assuredly be his most difficult, given the state of the state. But with just a little bit of luck—and a lot of Anne Gust Brown—it may possibly be his best.

OKAY, NOW BACK TO THE DAILY BEAST PROFILE OF ANNE GUST BROWN , whom writer Joe Matthews calls The Most Powerful Woman in California.

It’s a definite must read. And he might be right about that most powerful woman thingy.

Here are some clips:

The conventional wisdom has hardened quickly: Californians, in rejecting Silicon Valley CEOs Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, supposedly declared in last week’s elections that they don’t want corporate executives running their government.

Nonsense. California voters may have turned down the applications of Whitman and Fiorina for the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat, respectively. But in the very same election, they voted to put a female corporate executive from the Bay Area in charge of their state’s government.

The name of Anne Gust Brown, a former top lawyer and executive for The Gap, wasn’t on the ballot, but it might as well as have been. She served as de facto campaign manager for the campaign of her husband of five years, the once and now future Gov. Jerry Brown. And by all accounts, she will serve as his top aide (albeit on an unpaid basis) as he runs the government.

That’s why no one batted an eye when Governor-elect Brown suggested this week that he may not bother appointing a chief of staff. The statement only seemed to confirm that Anne Brown will be in charge, even if she doesn’t hold the title. This would be nothing new. She performed a similar role during Brown’s just-completed four-year term as California attorney general.

[SNIP]

Even Brown’s GOP opponent Meg Whitman, when asked during a debate this fall what she admired most about Brown, responded: “I really like his choice of wife. I’m a big fan of Anne Gust.”

Me too.

SPEAKING OF PROFILES….MAYOR’S CHIEF OF STAFF, JEFF CARR

In case you missed it, Tuesday’s LA Times profile of Antonio Villaraigosa’s chief of staff and former LA gang czar, Jeff Carr, by Patrick J. McDonnell is worth reading if particularly you have an interest in the ins and outs of city government.

It’s a fairly friendly profile, written in a fashion that, allows some room for criticism, but will likely alienate no one.

Still, doing the piece was a good idea, as Carr is an interesting person in the city’s landscape, and someone with an ambition to eventually move up the ladder in California’s political world, so best you get to know him.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The article below is Part One of WitnessLA’s two-part investigation into how the city of Los Angeles spends its $26 million per year in gang violence reduction dollars.

This investigation was reported and written by Matt Fleischer (and copy edited by Craig Gaines). It is the first effort to come out of the LA Justice Report, which was created through a partnership between WLA and Spot.Us.

You’ll find that both sections of this series are quite critical of multiple aspects the gang programs that have operated under the umbrella of the mayor’s office for the past two years—and with good reason. We went to great lengths to get documents and information that the mayor’s people made clear they did not want us to have. Much of what Matt found at the conclusion of his digging and reporting is, we believe, cause for concern–and rigorous rethinking.

However, just to be clear: our criticism does not suggest for a minute that the $26 million in gang dollars is not worth spending. All that money and more is needed to address the fact that hundreds of thousands of LA kids feel unsafe walking to school because of gang violence. But it is essential—particularly in these budget strapped times—that those much-needed funds are spent in ways that are measurably effective in addressing the problems for which they were allocated.

To that end, we give you Part One of Follow the Gang Money. We’ll have Part Two in a couple of weeks.

Then in September, we’ll have a wrap-up that looks at where we go from here.

FOLLOW THE GANG MONEY: PART ONE:

Are LA’s Gang Prevention Strategies Excluding the Kids Who Most Need Our Help?
by Matthew Fleischer

On a hot day in early May, nearly 200 gang-reduction experts under the umbrella of the city of Los Angeles’ Gang Reduction and Youth Development program, or GRYD, gathered in the LA City Council chambers to fight for their jobs. There were too many intervention workers, some of them former gang members with extravagant tattoos and shaved heads, to cram into the rows of seats in the City Council chambers, so they spilled into the hallways instead, greeting each other fondly and chatting nervously about their fates. With the city facing a $212 million budget shortfall, the City Council was looking to do some serious fiscal trimming, and GRYD’s $26 million in operating funds were slated for the shears.

As the council meeting came to order and the public comment period began, these men and women stepped to the microphone at the center front of the chambers and told stories of bullets whizzing, children dying and the great risks they took in their daily lives to keep their communities safe. In between their testimonies, a sprinkling of tweedy academic types from the administrative ranks of these same gang-reduction programs came forward to bolster the street workers’ pleas with facts and figures.

No money should be slashed from GRYD, each of them said, in one impassioned way or another. Despite its budget woes, this is one program cut Los Angeles cannot afford.

“We’re saving lives,” was the common refrain.

Last to speak, and most eloquent, was civil rights attorney and gang intervention expert Connie Rice, whose 2007 Advancement Project report, “A Call to Action,” was part of what triggered the formation of GRYD in the first place. More recently, Rice and her Advancement Project have been tapped to run the city’s Los Angeles Violence Intervention Training Academy (LAVITA)—which is attempting to train and professionalize gang intervention workers. “We are celebrating low crime, but in the hot zones, kids still dodge bullets,” said Rice. “These [gang workers] are the people who keep the kids safe. The GRYD office is absolutely essential. We just spent $7 million for a reptile enclosure. I’m happy for Reggie [the alligator], but we need to save our kids first.”

Although some of the city council members fully intended to snip GRYD’s funds, Rice made her pitch with the knowledge that the program enjoys the unequivocal backing of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Ever since his school reform efforts sputtered and stalled, Villaraigosa has taken to GRYD as his new flagship policy effort. He routinely touts it as “among the most innovative in the U.S.,” and has the habit of making lofty claims about GRYD’s impact: “The program has reclaimed our city for our citizens.”

Within days of the City Council hearing, the mayor, Connie Rice and the rest of the GRYD network got their way: GRYD would receive full funding for another year, which in 2009-10 amounted to $26 million, $18.5 million of which came directly from LA’s general fund. In the following weeks, virtually every other program in the city would be cut amid LA’s budget crunch—the library system, city attorney’s office and even the LAPD’s counterterrorism task force among them. GRYD was among the few allowed to remain intact.

It was a major political victory for Villaraigosa and Gang Reduction and Youth Development.

The mayor reacted to the news with a celebratory tweet: “Our GRYD programs WORK—gang crime is way down and more kids have a way out of the gang life.”

A two-month investigation by the LA Justice Report, however, has revealed that the mayor and the City Council’s confidence in GRYD’s central programs isn’t grounded in quantifiable facts. In truth, no one knows if, how well or how poorly GRYD is working—not the mayor, not the police, not GRYD itself.

Power and accountability have been consolidated in the mayor’s office, but there is still no way of determining whether the program is effective. And there are many indications that methodological errors have been made that have cost—and continue to cost—the city millions of dollars.

A recent audit by LA City Controller Wendy Greuel stated that, after nearly two years, GRYD, much like LA Bridges, still has no adequate evaluation of its effectiveness, or lack thereof—despite the city’s spending $525,000 (with another $375,000 soon to be paid out) for an assessment report from the Urban Institute (UI).

“We had years of a feel-good program under LA Bridges,” Greuel says. “Now we’ve spent more than $500,000 on a tool to see what’s working, but we still don’t have that yet.

“Transparency is the biggest problem we face.”

But while Greuel placed most of the blame on the irritatingly secretive assessment conducted by the UI, the Justice Report found the real failings to be not with the UI researchers’ evaluation of the GRYD programs, but with the programs themselves. Though it took weeks and multiple California Public Records Act requests, we acquired a copy of the UI’s 60-page evaluation and found it most revealing. After speaking with the UI head evaluator and two independent evaluation experts, we have learned that UI had a perfectly acceptable methodology in place. GRYD, however, has been hampered by serious bureaucratic blunders, prime among them poorly negotiated contracts that resulted in the loss of a year of data.

But beyond pure evaluation and data-collection screw-ups—of which there have been plenty—the Justice Report discovered gang prevention programs that may be systematically excluding many of the kids that most need their help and intervention programs that are based on a model that has little or no proven success. Further, the programs may fail to emphasize the most basic services that have been shown to help the men and women in LA’s most violent, troubled neighborhoods leave gang life behind.

As with many city and county problems, the situation is complex, so bear with us. Policy analysis can be wonky at times. But this is no academic exercise. LA is the gang capital of America, and the stakes of the gang-reduction debate are measured in blood.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa invites you personally (plus all your closest friends and associates) to meet Charlie Beck, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Nominee, on Thursday November 5, 2009 at 6:00 p.m. at a Community Town Hall.

The Town Hall will take place at the El Sereno Senior Center located at 4818 Klamath Place, Los Angeles, CA 90032. Doors open at 5:15 pm.

I’d be there, were it not for the fact that I’m taking the night off and will instead be watching the taping of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! —which seems like much-needed and entirely silly fun.

Although many false messages went out last night…… (More about that later or tomorrow.)

…The New Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department is Charlie Beck.

CONGRATULATIONS TO CHIEF OF POLICE CHARLIE!

GREAT choice, Mr. Mayor. (Chosen from a 3-some of strong choices.)

The new era begins!

P.S. For a glimpse into what kind of leader our new LAPD head guy will be, and what kind of person he has been before the floodlights turned his direction, reread this July 2008 interview with Chief Charlie. It’ll make you feel good. I promise.

PPS: The LAPPL reminds me that Beck started his career in the LAPD as a reserve officer. He volunteered. Did it for free. And then went to the academy. All this and he’s a motocross champ, a problem solver, a respecter of civil rights, and a guy with that command presence. He is also personally secure enough that he is unafraid of allowing his own views to evolve—and admitting to it.

Chief Beck is completely read to lead now, but watch him also grow on the job.

The official announcement is scheduled for Tuesday morning at 11 a.m. at Getty House. The news media will start setting up at 4:30 a.m., and start broadcasting around 8 or 8:30.

I was made dizzy contemplating the various rumors that swirled about last night. None were conclusive, but the one thing they suggested was this: whatever we thought we knew about who was or was not a sure thing….it was all very possibly dead wrong.

MEANWHILE, ONE MORE QUICK LOOK AT THE THREE CANDIDATES (in alphabetical order)

CHARLES BECK

Deputy Chief Charlie Beck is the quintessential cops-cop. His father was a deputy chief. His daughter is a police officer. His son is in the academy headed toward graduation. If you asked Central Casting for a guy who really looked like he ought to be Chief of Police, they’d send you Charlie Beck.

Right now, Chief Beck is the commanding officer of the department’s Detective bureau.

At 56, Beck is the oldest of the three finalists, but he competes in motocross events and is, in all seriousness, the current Police and Fire Motocross national champion.

Beck has worked assignments across the spectrum: gang units, undercover narcotics, Internal Affairs. His star began to rise most precipitously in 2006, when Bratton promoted him to Deputy Chief and gave him command of South Bureau where he gained a strong reputation for working successfully with the hard core gang intervention agencies that many previous commanders in the department had long shunned.

When Bratton brought Beck to Parker Center to take over the Detective bureau, Beck became problem-solver-in-chief, taking on the faulty fingerprint analysis debacle that was a department embarrassment, and then the rape kit backlog mess after that. Of the three finalists, he has been the one openly talked about as Bratton’s choice to succeed him.

Charlie Beck is extremely personable, a straight shooter, and no-nonsense tough when need be. He knows how to stand his ground without blinking. And yet he never, ever reeks of ego.

The rank and file like and respect Beck a lot. But so does civil rights lawyer Connie Rice plus those in some of the city’s most problematic communities. He will go to bat for LAPD officers, yet has a deep understanding of the need for still more change in the Us versus Them, Thin Blue Line mentality that characterized the department, pre-Bratton, and believes he could lead that change.

JIM MCDONNELL

Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell, 50, is the big picture guy of the three. He teaches at UCLA’s school of public policy where he talks to his students about the nature of cultural and community change. McDonnell has the ability to visualize systems as a whole and then to figure out what it might take to transform them. His 100-page plan for reorganizing the department was one of the roadmaps that Bill Bratton used when he took over the chief’s job in 2002.

Boston Irish by birth, when McDonnell joined the department, he opted early for assignments that would lead him into management. As First Assistant Chief, he is guy to whom Bratton handed the keys when he was out of town.

He moves easily among the city’s elected officials and community leaders, yet his name was most often mentioned when asked rank and file cops to name their 1st choice for C.O.P. In addition to being chief of staff, Chief McDonnell oversees the department’s Use of Force Review Board, where he has gained a reputation for being firm but scrupulously fair-minded.

Of all the finalists, McDonnell talks with the most intuitive understanding of the challenges faced by residents in the city’s low-income, violence haunted communities—including those young men who join gangs.

He is a committed advocate of community policing, and has ideas how to better accomplish it, in spite of the LAPD’s less than ideal officer-to-resident ratio.

McDonnell is a recipient of the LAPD’s Medal of Valor, the department’s highest honor for bravery.

Last Tuesday, when a student in my class asked him what personal principle most guided him, Jim McDonnell thought for a moment, then returned his gaze to hers, his face unclouded by doubt, “The Golden Rule,” he said.

MICHEL MOORE

Deputy Chief Mike Moore, 49, is the commanding officer for the very large Valley Bureau of the LAPD where the entire region seems to have embraced him as their favorite son.

Although all three candidates have great credentials when it comes to working cooperatively with community groups to achieve gang violence reduction, Mike Moore had the prescience to come to that party the earliest.

When he was a commander in the Valley Bureau working under then-Deputy Chief Ron Bergmann, Bergmann pioneered programs that paired local gang intervention organizations with LAPD programs, and Moore was the in-the-field guy who implemented the programs and became their public face.

After leaving the SF Valley for a year stint as Deputy Chief of the department’s West bureau, Moore was transferred back to run the Valley bureau after Chief Bergmann retired, where he continued and expanded community partnerships. That strategy, along with an early devotion to computer-driven crime mapping, plus the intense attention to detail that characterizes his management style, is credited by many for the Valley’s sharp downturn in violent crime, which dropped a startling 28 percent in 2008.

Moore is a hands on guy who does not lead from afar, but enjoys being at the center of the action in the field.

Like McDonnell, Moore was given the department’s Medal of Valor. He understands the best and worst that officers have to face—as he himself had to shoot a suspect on two occasions, one of those times fatally.

A year ago, during the Sylmar fire that decimated the Oakridge Mobile Home Park, Mike Moore quite literally rescued a woman from a burning building.

Bottom line: All three men have considerable, and very different, strengths (which number more than I can list here). None among them is perfect. (Who is?) All are extremely well qualified to run the LAPD.

And very, very soon one of them will be named to be our new Chief of Police.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

I am hearing from surprisingly credible sources that everyone’s sure bet of this weekend may not be a sure bet after all.

Too early to say what this means.

Stay tuned.

Okay, so we were all geared up, popcorn in hand, waiting for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to announce his selection for Chief of Police on Monday. We were primed. We were deliriously anticipatory. We had paper streamers and noisemakers and were entirely prepared to whoop and holler supportively for whichever of the three he named: Charlie Beck or Jim McDonnell or Michel Moore.

Furthermore, we really, really felt we knew who it was going to be. We’d done our reconnaissance flights, read the I Ching, laid out the Tarot, swirled some tea leaves, thrown some bones. We figured our analysis was a Las Vegas oddsmaker’s sure thing. And we surmised that the decision had likely been locked and loaded for a while—even though the mayor made a big To-Do about calling everyone back for interviews on Sunday, and everything.

But, whatever. We liked each of the candidates a lot and were going to be happy whichever way it went.

Then came the word that, no, there wasn’t going to be a Monday announcement after all. The clay was still wet, the cake hadn’t risen, the pot hadn’t boiled, the stone had yet to be carved.

The mayor was still thinking.

The selection was now to be made public on Tuesday.

What’s this?! Tuesday? Was it really possible that AV was still undecided?

We were confused.

Then we talked to persons with cooler heads than our own (who also happened to be in something of a position to know). And they laid it out succinctly.

The mayor is not dithering. This isn’t indecision, or extended contemplation. It is stage management.

In part, Antonio is milking the moment. But the delay is more than that. AV is making it clear that it is he who is making this decision. Not the police commission. Not Bill Bratton. Not….fill in the blank with any number of prominent names who have been energetically lobbying behind the scenes for this candidate or that one.

Moreover, by delaying a day, Antonio is flashing a message in neon letters to the chief-to-be, that it is to the mayor—not anyone else—that the new head of the LAPD will owe his job.

Yeah, it’s a power play, with a liberal sprinkling of narcissism thrown in.

On the other hand, he who takes the credit also gets the blame if things go wrong. And, with the plethora of challenges presented by the present economy (double-digit unemployment, a sinking city budget, shredded social safety nets, looming prisoner release) a hell of a lot could go wrong under any chief. So, if Antonio is gambling a pile of political capital on the bet that he and the new C.O.P. will be able to continue to make things go right in the post-Bratton realm of protect and serve, one cannot honestly say that is a bad thing.

It’s even, kind of, you know, leader-ish.

Okay, then, see you Tuesday. Same time, same place, same noisemakers. New popcorn.

Okay, Gavin Newsom has dropped out of the race for California Governor, for “family” reasons (AKA bad polling numbers).

Meg Whitman is a rich witch [It's Halloween and that's a technical term.] who believes she can buy an election, can’t remember when she last voted and won’t show up for debates. (In terms of her chances to win the 2010 race: Ebay, shmEbay. Snowball meet hell.)

Thus far, the rest of the Republican field—Tom Campbell and Steve Poizner—ain’t strong enough to stand up to the once-and-would-be-future Gov: Jerry Brown who, even though he’s an old guy, he still has enough energy to lite several medium-sized cities and is running an excellent pre-campaign campaign, what with all his high profile nabbings of mortgage fraudsters and other nasty types.

But, then also yesterday there was the kerfuffle bannered on the front page of the SF Chronicle, about how Jerry’s press guy illegally taped a conversation with a reporter and now, as it turns out, a lot of conversations with reporters.

Quite a scoop—except that painting the taping as illegal is quite a stretch.

Federal law says that if one side knows about the taping, the other side doesn’t have to know. However, yes, California law requires that both sides must know, but only if the conversation is a “confidential communication.”

California penal code defines “confidential communication” as:

….any communication carried on in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto, but excludes a communication made in a public gathering or in any legislative, judicial, executive or administrative proceeding open to the public, or in any other circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded.

An on-the-record interview for the purposes of later publication does not snugly fit within the covers of confidential.

On the other hand, if you are working for the state’s top cop and you do this stuff without mentioning it to those whom you are recording, and then defend yourself by saying, “you guys do it so we get to,” you look like an idiot.

A little while ago, Jerry wisely suspended the staffer, Scott Gerber.

Which brings us to…….Antonio.

I heard late on Friday afternoon that after the twinned news announcements of Gavin’s bow out, and Jerry’s guy’s Nixonian moment, there was chatter among high level staff in the Villaraigosa’s office about what a “great governor” the mayor would make.

One assumes that this is merely wishful thinking, and that Antonio and his people are not (gulp) actually contemplating such a move.

It is just wishful thinking, right Mr. Mayor?