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?

Homeboy Industries is still struggling financially (I’ll get back to that in a minute), but a some very good news was officially announced this past Friday at the downtown LA Ralph’s supermarket.

It seems that the Ralph’s folks were looking for some special products for the deli section of their store on West 9th Street so they approached Homeboy Industries with the idea of distributing some of the homemade salsa made by the organization’s Homegirl Cafe and Catering Service.

(NOTE: Homegirl Cafe’s chief chef, manager and founder, Patty Zarate, is an enormously talented creator of unique recipes, so the Ralph’s people were able to combine a good deed with a really great product choice. Your classic win-win. )

The upshot is that, starting last Friday, both mango and the hotter morita salsa from Homegirl are available behind the downtown Ralph’s deli counter. And if that works out, the idea is that Ralph’s will contract for more products.

Both the Downtown News and the LA Times have more on the story.

The Downtown News reported that even Mayor Villaraigosa dutifully turned up at Friday’s press conference for the new salsa deal, and that, although he liked both sauces, he preferred the morita “because it’s hotter.” (I do too.)

It was definitely nice to know about the mayor’s salsa preferences. But I wish some enterprising reporter from either the Times or the Downtown News had asked the mayor why—after his office has repeatedly promised cash-strapped Homeboy Industries $340,000—last time I heard, no money has yet materialized. (Actually the mayor’s office originally promised $500,000, but why quibble?)

By the way, I just noticed that NPR’s Mandalit del Barco recently did a very nice interview with Homeboy Industries’ director and founder, Father Greg Boyle. For those of you who have never seen or heard Father Greg speak, it would be worth your time to click here and listen. Because of the nature of the show she was doing, Mandalit came at the interview from a faith based direction, but Greg went somewhere else with it.

At the time that the interview had occurred, he had just come back from officiating at his 168th funeral for a young person that he knew and liked shot to death in the streets of LA because of gang violence. In this instance the kid was one of the Homeboy bakers. This was very much on his mind as he talked.

(photo from Eric Richardson’s photostream on Flickr)

You want outrage? Try the pedophile protector and the mayor.

Antonio Villaraigosa, showing the wild imagination and creativity too often missing from City Hall, tried hard this week to share his outrage over an L.A. firefighters’ union mailer that contains some low-quality photos of last year’s fatal Metrolink crash.

He even magnified the allegedly offensive photo by three times in a failed effort to prove that an unprincipled union, in a nasty budget fight, lost its moral compass and showed “body parts” of crash victims. But there are no body parts. When magnified, the photo shows a blood-stained sheet covering the body of a Metrolink engineer who died. But that didn’t keep the mayor from using the term “body parts” so many times I thought he was inventorying talent at a local TV station.

“When you see these images – body parts strewn on the ground — they’re absolutely unacceptable,” Villaraigosa told City Hall news conference. “They’re beyond the pale. They’re irresponsible and people should be held accountable for them, it’s as simple as that.”

The mayor was venting. Too bad he lacks a strong staff member who could keep him from going public with his mistaken photo criticism. I understand his frustration at seeing signs posted outside fire stations across the city, blaming his budget-cutting for endangering the public, but doesn’t this guy keep a scrapbook like the rest of us? He should turn to the page that shows similar photos used during last year’s successful lobbying efforts of well-connected Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills for a new hospital wing.

One key difference, of course, doesn’t show up in any photo. Unlike the firefighters’ squabble, the fight over the hospital expansion brought in campaign contributions.

And please don’t take this post as support of the firefighters’ union position in the ongoing negotiations over the city’s tight budget. No one in their right mind believes the city would fail to adequately respond to a disaster as grave as the Metrolink crash that killed 25 people. Most likely, the pampered union doesn’t want to wean its members from outrageous overtime and six-digit salaries.

For more deserving objects of outrage, I suggest that the mayor pick on the bad cardinal, whose Pedophile Protection Program remains in the crosshairs of a grand jury. Or take on Sheriff Lee Baca, who criticized a jury verdict in a deputy-involved Compton shooting and appears to support fatally shooting an armed man in the back.

Or, if he still has that magnifying glass handy, I’d be happy to share my grainy photos shot from a grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963.

Embedded in the middle of the mayor’s S.O.C. speech, there was one innocent sounding paragraph that has 76 of the city’s important community agencies in a justifiable state of panic. The paragraph was this one:

We are going to better connect help to the people who need it by creating 21 Family Source Centers located in our hardest-hit neighborhoods. Where people will be able to seek assistance for themselves and their families, file for critical tax credits, access affordable medical care, and benefit from programs at every level of government – and all on a single form. Each year, this program will serve at least 50,000 people.

Here’s the problem. Those nice, spanking new (as yet to be built) “Family Source Centers” will need to be funded.

And funding, in case you haven’t noticed, is a bit tight these days. So to create his new pet one-stop shopping centers, the mayor reportedly intends to yank funding from a money cache known as the Community Development Block Grant fund.

Unfortunately, that money is funding the aforementioned 76 existing organizations and has been, in many cases, for over 20 years. In some cases 30 years. We’re talking about an impressive list of service providers that range from well-known day care centers, homeless shelters, senior care centers, pre schools, mentoring programs, after school programs, low-cost legal services, services for persons with disabilities, jobs programs……and on and on and on.

These are proven programs that are already woven into the fabric of the communities they serve. They provide services on which the poorer communities have come to depend. In other words, they cover many of the same neighborhood needs that the mayor wants to provide in his new Family Source Centers. Except that they don’t have “City of Los Angeles” over their doors, as one mayor’s office staffer helpfully pointed out when questioned about the funding switch.

Now these 76 neighborhood organizations are being told, “Bub-bye. Lovely knowing you. Must run. I’ll be taking your bank account with me.”

Put another way, the mayor seems to have decided to reinvent 21 nice new wheels all monogrammed with his name…and to do so he’s tossing out the existing working wheels, which does not sound terribly wise—and is, one would guess, a lot more expensive.

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Okay, he gave it. It was pretty good. Antonio can be quite moving when he puts in the effort. The man does, after all, have skills. And, since he is planning to run for Governor, he did put in the effort.

The LA Times has a nice rundown on the main part of the speech, which had to do with what the city was going to do to help itself and its residents survive this economy. (You can find the speech in full after the jump.)

Apart from the economy et al, there was one other significant section of the speech. And that was the last big section, the stuff about education.

Antonio praised charter schools in a big way—in particular Green Dot and its takeover of Locke High School—which, now that it is eight months into its first school year, can be tentatively labeled a real and very heartening success, even though it is still early days.

AV also praised the new Alliance charter that has opened up to rave reviews on the Cal State LA campus.

Rather than fight the charters, Villaraigosa made clear that the district must actively partner with them—thus giving a loud message to the union leadership (We’re talking to you, Mr. Duffy) that they need to get over their charter aversion and start making some deals.

None of this was new. Antonio was just swaying to the popular music of the moment, educationally speaking, and telling us to sing along.

But he assuredly set the right tone. Charters are the reform leaders right now. Anybody paying attention knows that. But the mayor saying so gave it a nice official stamp.
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