BRATTON REALLY, REALLY, REALLY WANTED TO BECOME BRITAIN’S TOP COP

You gotta love Bill. Sunday’s Guardian reports on how much Bratton wanted to apply for the position of commissioner of the Metropolitan police—an ambition that got squashed over the weekend. The Guardian also reports in great detail about how Bill verbally thrashed anybody who suggested that one ought to be born in Britain to hold such a job.

The New York Times also has a report on the Bratton in London adventure.

Adore the aviator glasses, by the way.

CITY ATTORNEY’S OFFICE SAYS VETERAN’S ADMINISTRATION DUMPED PATIENT AT A DOWNTOWN SHELTER

The LA Times Alexandra Zavis and Richard Winton have the alarming story. Here’s a clip:

The graying veteran in a wheelchair was found in the parking lot of a Westside cold weather shelter wearing hospital pants, carrying a urine bottle and screaming for help.

Senior officials at the Los Angeles city attorney’s office say they believe James Boykin was “dumped” Dec. 1 at the shelter after his toe was removed at the nearby Department of Veterans Affairs medical center because of a bone infection. Moreover, according to city prosecutors, VA officials blocked an investigation that could have shed light on whether there were other similar incidents.

“This was an unprecedented interference with an investigation,” said Jeffrey B. Isaacs, who heads the office’s criminal and special litigation branch.

VA officials strongly dispute the allegations involving Boykin, adding that the city does not have authority to conduct a criminal investigation on federal property.

RE: SECURE COMMUNITIES – DEAR OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, YOU’RE NOT HELPING

Julia Preston for the New York Times writes that resistance to the Secure Communities program is growing. Here’s a clip:

Mayor Thomas Menino, who often invokes his heritage as the grandson of an Italian immigrant, was one of the first local leaders in the country to embrace a federal program intended to improve community safety by deporting dangerous immigrant criminals.

But five years after Boston became a testing ground for the fingerprinting program, known as Secure Communities, Mr. Menino is one of the latest local officials to sour on it and seek to withdraw. He found that many immigrants the program deported from Boston, though here illegally, had committed no crimes. The mayor believed it was eroding hard-earned ties between Boston’s police force and its melting-pot mix of ethnic neighborhoods.

Last month, Mr. Menino sent a letter to the program with a blunt assessment. “Secure Communities is negatively impacting public safety,” he wrote, asking how Boston could get out.

On Aug. 5, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which runs the program, gave an equally blunt response. Its director, John Morton, announced he was canceling all agreements that 40 states and cities had signed to start Secure Communities. Their assent was not legally required, he said, and he planned to move ahead anyway to extend the program nationwide by 2013.

A STRING OF NEW CASES COULD HIT THE SUPREMES ASKING FOR A CLARIFICATION OF THE 2ND AMENDMENT

In Monday’s Washington Post, Robert Barnes has a round up of the second Amendment cases that are likely headed to the Supreme Court.

A funny thing has happened in the three years since gun-rights activists won their biggest victory at the Supreme Court.

They’ve been on a losing streak in the lower courts.

The activists found the holy grail in 2008 when the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller said the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to own a firearm unconnected to military service. The court followed it up with McDonald v. Chicago two years later, holding that the amendment applies not just to gun control laws passed by Congress but to local and state laws as well.

The decisions were seen as a green light to challenge gun restrictions across the country, and the lawsuits have come raining down — more than two a week, according to the anti-gun Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

But it is the Brady Center that is crowing about the results.

“Three years and more than 400 legal challenges later, courts — so far — have held that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Heller was narrow and limited, and that the Second Amendment does not interfere with the people’s right to enact legislation protecting families and communities from gun violence,” the center said in a report optimistically titled “Hollow Victory?

NEW HOPE FOR FINDING A JOB—EVEN AFTER PRISON

On Monday, Jim Newton’s LA Times column profiles Chrysalis. A Los Angeles-based nonprofit with facilities in Santa Monica, Pacoima and on the edge of skid row that manages to put desperate people to work.

Read it. It’ll cheer you up.

This week the news broke that Bill Bratton and his wife Rikki Klieman have taped a testimonial for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights organization working for marriage equality. He has done it, he says, because equality is the best preventative for anti-gay crime.

This is the best side of Bratton and makes perfect sense as a move for him.
When he first came to LA he talked with me about his dream that the LAPD could become a positive force in Los Angeles race relations, where it had once been a negative one. He sees those connections across sociological lines and his thinking on such issues is, I’ve found, unusually clear headed.

Al Baker, who is blogging for the NY Times, has the story. Here’s a clip:

The headlines come with depressing regularity: two men attacked in the bathroom of the Stonewall Inn; a group of men set upon by those hurling homosexual slurs in Chelsea; a wicked antigay attack in an abandoned apartment in the Bronx. And just days ago, the beating of a young gay man outside a McDonald’s in the West Village.

In the city’s schools, students suffered nearly 900 cases of harassment based on sexual orientation in the 2008-09 school year, according to the city Education Department.

To William J. Bratton — a former law enforcement leader in three of the country’s largest cities: New York, Los Angeles and Boston — the roots of the spasms of violence against gay and lesbian New Yorkers lie in the lack of equality that gays and lesbians endure in society and under the law.

With that in mind, Mr. Bratton, a New York City resident once again, has taped a 30-second video in favor of legalizing gay marriage in New York. Only unlike other advocates, whose chorus he is joining — including politicians like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and celebrities like Julianne Moore — Mr. Bratton is making his appeal for change from the decidedly square-jawed perspective of public safety.

Baker talked to Bratton and characterized him as very passionate on the topic:

He invoked history, saying that tensions around any number of issues — including the introduction of women in policing — were eased when legal rights were extended to those being discriminated against. Reforms remove the aura that enables prejudice, he said, and the result is “a safer community” for gays and lesbians and for the wider society as a whole.

“I was speaking from the perspective of my police experiences, that once you pass these laws, a lot of the bias or the hatred or the violence that is associated dissipates,” said Mr. Bratton, in expanding on the meaning of his video testimonial.

Go, Bill & Rikki.

HOW DO WE KEEP LAWBREAKING KIDS FROM RETURNING TO LOCK-UP? LA COUNTY SUP MARK RIDLEY-THOMAS AND CHILDREN’S DEFENSE FUND HEAD MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN…HAVE A 10-PT PLAN

The 10-step plan is part of a 65-page report on juvenile reentry commissioned by Ridley-Thomas and prepared by Children Defense Fund staffers, Michelle Newell and Angelica Salazar, who did much of their research when they were at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

While the report is not definitive, it’s smarter than the County’s purported professionals were able to turn out earlier this year, and features many good moments of analysis plus that list of sensible suggestions.

It is also an excellent place to start a conversation.

Here’s a snippet from its executive summary:

With the largest juvenile justice system in the country, LA County has high rates of youth incarceration. For most juvenile offenders, this incarceration will take place in one of the 19 County probation camps, or residential facilities, and these youth will be released after less than a year and face the challenge of reentering their communities.

Reentry is challenging regardless of the population, but for juvenile offenders it is particularly complicated given the range of developmental changes these youth are experiencing. In Los Angeles, these youth are burdened by high rates of mental illness and substance abuse, low rates of educational attainment and alarmingly high levels of gang involvement. Given these barriers, it is perhaps not surprising that juveniles are currently not successful in reentering their communities. Re-offending rates are high, and while the County Probation Department does not collect much outcome data, available evidence indicates youth outcomes are grim…

Ridley-Thomas and Edelman will be holding a press conference at 1:30 pm Thursday to introduce the report and the 10-step plan. The presser will be held in Ridley-Thomas’s office, in the Hall of Administration, 500 W. Temple Street, LA.

A NEW VOLLEY IN THE BATTLE OVER HIRING MORE LAPD OFFICERS

LA Police Protective League president, Paul Weber, has an op ed in Thursday’s LA Times that explains a bit more about why the union is fighting the mayor’s and Chief Charlie Beck’s collective promise to hire more police officers.

Weber says the department should first use its existing officers more wisely. Here’s a clip.

When the City Council voted to raise trash fees in 2006, the action came with a promise to Angelenos that the money would be put toward expanding the Los Angeles police force to more than 10,000 officers. But even as we’ve moved closer to meeting that goal on paper, the number of officers on the street is being eroded.

Because of attrition, early retirement incentives and mandatory furloughs, the number of police officers doing actual police work is gradually declining, and the problem is becoming more acute.

One huge reason is that the city is no longer paying officers for overtime. There is no way to avoid overtime in police work: An officer making an arrest, say, can’t simply let a suspect go because a work shift has ended….

PS: For the record, I think the department should keep hiring, but let’s not use cops for jobs that non-sworn folks could do cheaper (and just as well).

WWBD? WHAT WOULD BILL DO?

By sheer coincidence, former LAPD chief Bill Bratton indirectly addressed the issue when he was in London consulting with the Brits on policing and gave an interview to some local press:

“In terms of creating safer communities, cops count and policing does matter. But successful policing is not only about making the right investments in law enforcement. You cannot spend your way to a safer community and it isn’t about how much money you spend, or how many staff you have on the payroll.

“It’s about what you do with your most valuable asset - the sworn officer….

(My ital.)

LA’S LIGHT RAIL FIASCO

The LA Weekly’s Gene Maddaus has written a terrific article in Thursday’s edition of the paper that shows LA’s light rail project to be both horribly over budget and a projected 2 years over its deadline for completion.

Oh, yeah, the project’s CEO, Rick Thorpe, lives in Utah, not LA, and is collecting a salary of $334,000. As Maddaus points out, Thorpe, who oversees a staff of 16, makes more than the CEO of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who is responsible for 8,000 employees (!!!)

A PORTRAIT OF A TWICE ARRESTED STUDENT PROTESTER

Neon Tommy’s Callie Schweitzer writes about 21-year-old University of California, Berkeley senior Ricardo Gomez, who has been arrested twice for protesting in what is “part of a growing student movement fighting tuition increases in the 10-campus system.”

Read the rest here.

9TH CIRCUIT JUDGE THINKS CALIFORNIA MAY BE
ABOUT TO EXECUTE AN INNOCENT MAN

The details are in an unsettling LA Times Op Ed by Alan Dershowitz and David Rivkin Jr.

COLUMNIST/WRITER/MOM MEGHAN DAUM COMES BACK FROM THE BRINK AND TELLS US ABOUT THE VIEW

The LA Times’ lovely, smart, talented, soulful columnist, Meghan Daum, was scarily sick last month and writes about it well in two parts – here and here.

(A lot of us are just very glad she’s okay. We didn’t like that tubed up and skating-the-edge thingy one bit.)

Photo by TIMOTHY NORRIS

I’ll be discussing the LAPD’s handling of the aftermath of the fatal shooting by an LAPD officer of Manual Jamines on Thursday night’s Which Way LA? with Warren Olney. The show begins airing at 7 p.m. and is on KCRW 89.9 FM.

FYI: I was on the 10 minute segment called Reporter’s Notebook, which should be on the air….hmmm…likely around 7:30….or at 7:50. I’m not entirely sure. (Which Way LA? is always taped earlier in the day.)

Whether or not I added substantially to the public dialogue on the matter is for y’all to determine. But have a listen, and let me know what you think.

PS: One thing I didn’t get to say in the segment is that, on Wednesday, in a bit of news unrelated to the Westlake shooting and demonstrations, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department gave out three medals of valor. One of those medals was presented to Deputy Clay Grant Jr. who, as the LA Times reported it, managed to talk down a knife-wielding woman at Target, earlier this year, without having to fire his service weapon.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca awarded his department’s highest honor Wednesday to the deputy who stopped a knife-wielding woman in a slashing rampage at a West Hollywood Target store earlier this year.

Deputy Clay Grant Jr. was shopping for paper towels on his day off in May when he came upon the bloody scene. The woman ignored his initial demands to drop her two knives — dashing across the store’s aisles. Grant was praised for not firing his Beretta service weapon, eventually convincing the mentally ill woman to disarm with his words.

Mr. Jamines presumably did have a knife. (Yes, the new witness who says he didn’t is a bit troubling, but let’s assume for purposes of discussion that he had that knife with a 3-inch blade). But he was drunk and staggering, by most accounts. So why didn’t the officer fire a non-killing shot?

Look: I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to be a police officer who, in the course of work, frequently confronts violent people in the street. But, I do wonder why the officers in this instance, couldn’t have chosen a course more like that taken by Deputy Grant.

I’m just asking.

PPS: You can listen live to KCRW here. The podcast of the show may be found right here.

When I got home late last night, instead of posting, I’m afraid I collapsed into a useless puddle of exhaustion And am at UCI all day today. But a couple of things before I go.

First, everyone in LA (or who who cares about LA, or who once ever even vaguely drove through LA on their way to Las Vegas) must, of course, listen to the interview with outgoing chief, Bill Bratton, by Stephen Colbert.

Colbert asked: How hard was it to transition from one police stereotype in one city to another police stereotype in another city?

Bratton didn’t miss a beat: “From Jack Webb in Los Angeles to Andy Sipowetz in New York…?”

Anyway, it’s short and fun to watch. (McGruff the Crime Dog is mentioned)

Colbert: Why don’t you just become chief of police everywhere?

Bratton: “That’s what I’m trying to do with my new job.”

Speaking of new jobs, on Thursday, our new, nearly-chief-of-police Charlie Beck was on Patt Morrison’s show.

It’s a lovely interview. He sounds excellent. Beck talks again about how he will be “roots up” not “top down.” Bratton brought a lot of change to the department.

“Now it’s time to move those changes deeper down in the organization.” Yep. All true.

But much more—too much for me to randomly quote here and do it justice. Just listen.

But, while we’re on the subject, why is he still our new not-quite chief? Why in the world can’t the city council just confirm him over lunch today?

ONE MORE THING…. Kevin Roderick’s LA Observed segment on KCRW airs this afternoon. It isn’t up yet, but check back later as he’s going to be talking about Charlie Beck.

(How do I know this? A. Because Kevin’s a pal, and B. because called me for a Beck-related chat on Thursday.)

Most who closely tracked the selection of, at first, 13-candidates, then three finalists, and finally Deputy Chief Charlie Beck as the yet-to-be confirmed new chief of the LAPD, have likely read the article by Joel Rubin and Phil Willon in Wednesday morning’s paper, an account of the last minute wrestling match that went on inside the mayor’s office before Antonio Villaraigosa actually settled on Beck as his choice.

To summarize: Rubin and Willon write that the mayor felt intolerably pushed to choose Beck, because Charlie Beck had been Bratton’s choice. The recently departed chief had done a lot of lobbying in Beck’s behalf—some felt to an unseemly degree. Plus there was a cadre of others in and around city hall who were also pushing hard for the personable Deputy Chief.

Understandably irked at the efforts to box him into a choice that might or might not be his own, Antonio rebelled and, even though he actually liked Beck a lot, strongly considered going other directions. In fact, at the last minute, according to the Times the mayor was still dithering over whether to choose Charlie or the Valley Bureau’s deputy chief, Michel Moore.

Rubin and Willon write:

Though many had anointed Beck early on as the favorite to win the job, the outcome behind closed doors, where decisions were actually made, could easily have been different.

Of course, the glaringly ironic thing about this statement is the fact that chief among those “many” who most energetically and publicly “anointed” Beck was the LA Times.

NOTE: Before I get a slew of corrective emails, let me quickly state that I am not suggesting that anyone at the LA Times was campaigning for Charlie Beck. But I am saying they appeared to buy into the spin that was coming both from certain LAPD types and a small cadre in and around the mayor’s office, all of whom had a strong investment in Charlie being the choice.

The upshot was that, in addition to the behind the scenes pressure squeezing the mayor, the city’s main newspaper was yammering that the selection of Beck was nearly a foregone conclusion.

Which was not exactly helpful.

(It was also unhelpful when, the day after the Police Commission’s three finalists were announced, the Times ran an editorial that opined..“The commission has done its job well in winnowing out many less-qualified candidates.”

Dear LA Times: Really? Okay, so by “less-qualified candidates” did you mean Assistant Chief Earl Paysinger, the guy who was head of operations during the recent drop in crime, so is credited by most as having a big part in that downturn in crime stats? Or maybe you just meant Assistant Chief Sharon Papa, the first woman in department history to be promoted to that title, and the former Chief of Police for the MTA?

I hate to be picky, but what exactly are you people smoking over there when you write stuff like that?)

Anyway, so back to the mayor’s decision-making process. What seems to be true is that, at the last minute, Villaraigosa genuinely wobbled over his choice.

On Sunday night when AV moved his announcement back a day, from Monday morning to Tuesday morning even people like me assumed that the selection had been firmed up over the weekend, that Beck would be the new chief, and that the delay was merely stagecraft.

We assumed wrong. I now know from my own sources that, on Monday, the mayor was back on the fence again and phoning around to get a few more eleventh hour reads on the candidates.

Then on Monday afternoon, there was a sudden blast of rumors coming out of city hall that all bets were off—and that now AV was leaning toward Michel Moore.

Deputy Chief Moore had been the guy out of the three who—despite his capabilities and his impressive resume—was deemed to be the least likely of the finalists to emerge in the lead simply because, in addition to Bratton and others pushing Beck, a lot of the law enforcement community—inside and outside the LAPD— strongly favored Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell, who was also ultra experienced and supremely capable.

By early evening, some of the most ardent Beck supporters were in a flaming panic. The mayor was definitely going for Moore, they said.

Finally, sometime after 9 p.m. the gossip drums grew eerily silent.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

The timing was perfect.

Three weeks ago, when LAPD Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell agreed to speak to my Tuesday night class of Annenberg grad students about policing in general and about the job of LAPD Chief in particular, none of us had any idea that the short list of candidates to succeed Bill Bratton would be announced five minutes after McDonnell was scheduled to arrive in our USC classroom at 5 p.m..

In other words, Chief McDonnell himself would have gotten the fateful thumbs up or thumbs down telephone call right about the time he would leaving his office on the 10th floor of the new police headquarters to come to us. Or worse, maybe the mayor would call McDonnell when he was somewhere en route from Spring Street to campus in in his black Yukon.

For the sake of all concerned, my class and I really, really hoped that our scheduled guest was going to be on the commission’s list of three.

Jim McDonnell was always considered to be one of the front runners. But city politics can be quirky. And one never knew. I spent much of the morning Tuesday, on the phone with people from the police commission and the mayor’s office, getting updates as the commission continued to dither and ran late with it’s decision. I wanted to get a definitive read from somebody about whether our classroom guest was going to be sad or happy when he arrived.

Of course, as we now all know McDonnell was on the list—along with Deputy Chief Charlie Beck, and Deputy Chief Michel Moore, who oversees department’s Valley Bureau. (Just before I passed the field where the USC marching band was practicing on my way to the building that houses my classroom, I got the needed message, “The answer is ‘happy,’” my informant told me.)

According to what was billed as leaked insider information reported by KNX radio and a local TV station, McDonnell was first on the commission’s list, with Beck and Moore following after, in that order.

So, as luck would have it, the journalism class got what I believe was the first full length interview with any of the candidates since the selection process began, and certainly the first since since the finalists were named. We were all pretty excited.

Chief McDonnell talked with the students for more than an hour, answering their questions press-conference style. On a day as significantly eventful as Tuesday, another man might have canceled, but instead McDonnell graciously seemed to delight in the opportunity to talk with a bunch of smart journalism students.

He spoke about topics as varied as why he thought he’d make a good chief, about the way helicopters are best used in policing, about the different elements that must be present if we are to lessen LA’s gang violence, about California’s prisoner reentry problem, about how to create better relations with LA’s urban communities—and about the single principle that most guides him.

There was more. The group of young reporters asked an array of skillful questions and McDonnell gave thoughtful and informative answers. But the class members are each writing up news stories based on the interview, so I’d prefer to wait for their insights rather than muddying the water with my own.

The mayor told the candidates he will interview each of them over the next three days (Beck, Wednesday, McDonnell, Thursday, Moore, Friday) and make his decision by Monday.

In the meantime, we’ll be watching and waiting (and analyzing and handicapping).

Stay tuned.

As any avid LAPD watcher knows by now, the short list of three is: First Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell, Deputy Chief Charlie Beck and Deputy Chief Michael Moore

Much more soon after I get back from USC.

Waiting for the short list.

Last we heard, the Police Commission was going to give the mayor its list of three candidates tonight or early tomorrow. Now we hear it will likely be today, and that the mayor will make an announcement before sundown—give or take a few rays of light. (It is expected to be around 5 p.m.)

So will the Commission give the mayor a strong threesome or a stacked deck (as it did last time around)? Either is permissible, of course. But with this many interesting candidates, I’d hope for the former strategy, not the latter.

We will know soon. Stay tuned.

By the way, one of the people who is considered to have the best shot of landing on that short list is coming to speak to my USC grad students this afternoon—right about the time that the mayor could possibly be announcing the names. (I ain’t saying exactly who the guest is as that is my students’ story to break—and there is, of course, no guarantee that this person will be on the list.)

In any case, we count on it being an interesting class.

One more thing: I’ve been meaning to comment on the story about the selection of the chief in this week’s issue of the LA Weekly in which the Weekly speculates that George Gascon, the former LAPD Assistant Chief, turned Chief of Mesa, AZ, now the Chief of the San Francisco PD, is one of the two secret out-of-towners being who were interviewed by the police commission.

It would be a provocative idea were it not for the fact that it’s TOTALLY WRONG—which a brief Google search could have told the writer, Dennis Romero, and his editors.

Although he has long hoped to succeed Bratton, Gascon said publicly and succinctly at his swearing in during the first week of August that he would not be applying for the LA job. The timing sucked for Gascon, who was a bit sandbagged by Bill Bratton’s surprise resignation, but he dealt with the matter elegantly. In any case, we have known for months that Gascon did not apply.

Research, people. Research.

UPDATE:

The police commission is going to announce an interim chief at 2:45 3:45 p.m.. They said they weren’t going to have an interim chief. But they thought about it, now they are as we are likely two-weeks out from having a new chief chosen by the mayor and confirmed by the city council, so they decided it would be the prudent choice to have someone officially at the helm for those two weeks.

Also, if one or more of the assistant chiefs—like Jim McDonnell or Earl Paysinger, say— are on the short list, then slightly politically awkward circumstances could arise if there is no acting chief while the selection is being made, and high level decisions need to be made.

So, good call, police commission.

CONFIRMED: Interim chief is Deputy Chief Michael Downing, the only one of the Deputy Chiefs who did not apply to be chief. Right now Downing heads the LAPD’s counter terrorism bureau.