WHAT IS BERNIE PARKS THINKING???

City Council Member Bernard Parks thinks that the new LAPD Headquarters ought to be named once again for William H. Parker, the guy who was Los Angeles police chief for 16 years and, in the eyes of many, the father of modern policing.

Last week, Parks introduced a motion at the City Council regarding his Parker Center sequel and got it passed out of committee. (Tony Cardenas was the only other committee member present and he voted YES too.)

The name would be fine were it not for the pesky fact that Parker was something of a notorious racist. True, he cleaned up the graft in the LAPD. In doing so, he turned the department into a paramilitary organization, urged police to set themselves apart from the community. He also coined the term “thin blue line,” implying that all that stood between the citizenry and chaos was the police. Parker’s strategies, as Bill Bratton has said, came at the expense of the city’s minority communities.

Commenter/blogger Jasmyn Cannick writes, “As much community relations work that today’s L.A.P.D. is doing to turn around its very tattered image, it makes no sense to want to hold onto the name of one if its most notoriously racist leaders.”

(She has posted a very good video on the issue, which I’ve embedded above).

LAPD Chief Bratton is not for keeping the name of Parker Center either. Nor is police commission member, John Mack—and a long list of other critics of the idea.

“I agree with Bill Bratton,” said Father Greg Boyle. “[We should call it] Police Administration Bldg.”

(NOTE TO CITY COUNCIL: Do not, I repeat, do not, open this up for a citywide vote or we’ll end up naming the new headquarters after Stephen Colbert.)

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INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY—UNLESS YOU’RE AN IMMIGRANT

The AP has an excellent story on the people whose rights—and lives—are being trampled by the immigration system—even when they are in the US legally or, as with some of the cases, US citizens.

Here’s a clip:

The American judicial system deems everyone innocent until proven guilty and guarantees a fair hearing with a lawyer – but not when it comes to immigration. Then there are far fewer rights. And as the system comes under pressure from a flood of new cases, the strain is showing.

One result is that U.S. citizens arrested as illegal immigrants or deportable residents cannot count on the legal system as a safety net. The odds are stacked against them. On the basis of interviews, lawsuits and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, The Associated Press has documented more than 55 such cases since 2000, and immigration lawyers count hundreds more.

I am aware of several such cases-–one in particular in which a man I know spent over a year in lock-up while he fought to get the immigration court to believe that he was an American citizen. (His father was a citizen meaning he is too.) He was finally released a couple of weeks ago.

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LAUSD’S CORTINES PULLS 1900 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS OFF THE FIRING LIST

On Monday, LAUSD Sup Ray Cortines said that 1900 out of the 3500 teachers slated for layoffs, will not have to be given the boot. All 1900 are elementary school teachers.

Also, yesterday, Mayor Antonio Villaraisgosa pushed for shaving teacher salaries and some work “furloughs” in place of the layoffs.

According to the City News Service, Antonio said that “…laying off more than 3,000 teachers is not an acceptable option. These extraordinary circumstances demand an approach of shared responsibility and shared sacrifice. I’m asking everyone to come together, pitch in and be a small part of a bigger solution.”

If every employee took a 3 percent pay cut this year, about 2,280 school-based jobs could be saved, said AV.

The mayor is right. But there is only one teensy weensy problem with that plan: The district cannot simply unilaterally make those pay cuts. The union will have to go along with it and so far the union has said, Fat chance! Don’t even think about it, bud! (Or words to that effect.)

Today the LAUSD board will have to vote on what to do about the remaining teacher layoffs.

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SHOOTING IN FRONT OF LOCKE HIGH

Just before 8 a.m. on Monday morning, a guy walked up and shot a 17-year-old Locke High School student in the chest right in front of the school He survived after he walked into the school to get help. Police are searching for the shooter.

Locke is the Green Dot conversion school.

As the press showed up on the scene, Green Dot’s Steve Barr, looked grim. The campus is a safe, calm place, he said. But “we can’t control what goes on outside the school.”

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R.I.P. JUDITH KRUG……GLORIOUS WARRIOR QUEEN FOR FREE SPEECH

You have likely never heard of her, but the American Library Association’s Judith Krug, who has just died of cancer, was a remarkable woman who, for forty years, fought righteously and ferociously for Americans’ freedom to read.

She was the director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, and the executive director of the Freedom to Read Foundation, the First Amendment legal defense arm of the ALA.

She was the founder Banned Books Week, which brought to the attention of US readers what works of literature were being banned and challenged—both present and past.

She led the charge to have section 215 of the US Patriot Act repealed-–a statute she believe invaded a reader’s privacy intolerably.

Her life’s passion was doing anything and everything she could to protect the Constitutional rights of citizens granted under the First Amendment.

It was a battle she fought hard and well.

She modeled a commitment to the principles of intellectual freedom for an entire generation of librarians.

She will be sorely missed.

All day Tuesday some of the main players in the realm of LA criminal justice got together at the Davidson Center at USC and talked with each other and the audience about what a successful 21st Century criminal justice system ought to look like. Among those present were LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, LA civil rights attorney Connie Rice, gang intervention specialist, Bo Taylor, Urban League president Blair Taylor, author and former California state senator Tom Hayden, LA gang czar Jeff Carr…and lots more.
The discussions were moderated by journalist/author Joe Domanick and bounced around between such subjects as gangs and gang violence, California prisons, the LA County jail and the broken parole system.


I’ll blog about the high points later. But the conversations were remarkable for their lack of defensiveness or grandstanding. Everyone seemed to have showed up with the willingness to genuinely talk about solutions—and how the ideas discussed this week could get beyond talk to actual implementation.

Here’s some of what Victor Merina, Senior Fellow at the the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, wrote about the conference:

For Connie Rice, an attorney and architect of Los Angeles City’s landmark anti-gang report, reforming the criminal justice system is critical in dealing with an “endemic epidemic” of violence on community streets.

For Sheriff Lee Baca, who oversees the country’s largest jail system, a criminal justice system overtaxed by mental health issues among those incarcerated has worsened a staggering problem.

For Darren “Bo” Taylor, a former gang member who now works with at-risk youth as founder of Unity One, the everyday violence in communities of color is simply “a crisis. It’s an emergency.”

And Blair H. Taylor, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Urban League, puts it even more dramatically, calling the need to curb community violence today’s paramount issue. “It’s a problem, I believe, bigger than any problem in the 21st Century,” said Taylor, “bigger than global warming, bigger than terrorism.”
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A showdown is brewing…

On one side we have Antonio Villaraigosa, who made a promise last year that he would put 1000 more police officers on the streets of LA, and he would find the money to do so by raising the city’s trash fees. Now that the fee hike is raking in around $150 million in new revenue, AV is ready to make good on his promise, and hire more cops.

On the other side we have former LAPD Chief, Bernard Parks who, during Tuesday’s fit of ABB mania (anything to Bash Bratton) said that the city is badly over budget, and the LAPD is over budget too—ergo sum, nearly all that trash money ought to go into the general fund, not into the hiring of cops. In addition, Parks (whom the Daily News has taken to calling Bitter Bernie) is pushing for a cap to any cop hiring—money or no money—and he’s persuaded half the City Council to side with him.

The mayor’s response Wednesday afternoon was to say in so many words that he was willing to take this one to the wall. “The council is going to cap police hiring over my dead body,” snarled Villaraigosa.

Certainly, Antonio likes the drop in crime that’s occurred on his and Bratton’s watch and has no intention of giving it up. He also wants to keep his popular police chief happy. AND he wants credit for keeping last year’s promise of getting 1000 more cops on the street with the help of the trash fees.

So far the smart money’s on Antonio to win this one. But there are still a lot of balls in the air….so stay tuned.

By the way, the LA Times is so busy covering the WGA strike that it’s failing to report on the fight that’s ratcheting up at city hall. But the Daily News’ Rick Orlov is doing it up right. Check this story and this, and this one, for lots more of the details.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing: On Wednesday, Parks also introduced a non-binding resolution to ban the use of the N-word in Los Angeles.

LA City Councilman, Bernard Parks has many good qualities. He’s very well liked by the South LA communities he represents, and makes a real effort to regularly get out among the ordinary people who elected him. He’s supportive of the various jobs programs around the city that help at risk young men and women with barriers to employment, and speaks eloquently in those programs’ behalf.

Plus, the man has has great cheekbones. (Okay, not one of the main traits one commonly demands of one’s Councilperson, but darned handy when he’s doing those requisite photo ops.)

BUT….and it’s a big but—Ex-LAPD-Chief-turned-Councilman Parks is near pathological in his behavior whenever the subject turns to LAPD’s present day Chief, Bill Bratton, or the Los Angeles Police Department, in general.

It’s as if Parks —normally a reasonable, intelligent, charming, savvy guy—-keeps an evil twin locked in his basement, a sort of menacing Creature of the Dark that is magically released to terrorize the local populace, whenever someone utters the fateful letters: L. A. P. D.

This Bad Bernie doppelganger had its most recent outing yesterday when Parks, who happens to be chairman of the Council’s budget committee, proposed that the money from city trash fee increases, that had been set aside to pay for hiring new LAPD Officers, be diverted to libraries and parks. Now I’m as much for supporting libraries and parks as the next person (actually, when it comes to libraries, probably more than the next person), but the rise in fees were sold specifically to Angelenos as a way to get more cops on the streets of a town that has one of the worst police-to-resident ratios of any big city in America.

The union—the Police Protective League-–was quite right this morning when it labeled the Parks-proposed move a bait and switch on Los Angeles homeowners who are, after all, the ones paying the increased fees, so their say-so ought to carry the day.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has threatened to veto any such proposal if the Council shows the bad sense to vote it through. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. (The issue is being discussed at the Council today.)

In the meantime, Bernie, seek therapy. I make that suggestion as a friend.

(Original, un-messed-with photo snatched from ViewImages.)

As I posted yesterday, the “Final Report on the MacArthur Park Incident”-–also known as the May Day Melee report— was presented to the Police Commission Tuesday morning.

And, in your spare time, you too can download all 80 plus pages in PDF form from the LAPD website. The thing includes diagrams, training manual excerpts, and a minute-by-minute timeline of how matters went south—and it actually makes for pretty interesting reading (or skimming, if I am to be completely honest).

While some people present at MacArthur Park that day (and their lawyers) have already disagreed with certain perceptions put forth in the timeline, nearly all agree that the report is truly heartening for its detail and transparency.

From nearly day one, Bill Bratton and his command staff have displayed a willingness to issue in-depth mea culpas—a 180-degree change from the pre-Bratton years when the LAPD’s knee-jerk MO was to place blame anywhere BUT on the department’s shoulders—no matter how laughable the logic required to perform this pretzelling of responsibility.

Yet, again Tuesday Chief Bratton apologized to both the rank and file and to the public—an act that most listening agreed is completely unheard of. “In 33 years,” said Police Union head, Tim Sands, “I’ve never seen it.”

The report was written in the same spirit by Deputy Chief Michael Hillman, and LAPD Consent Decree head, Gerry Chaleff, and it lays out with unusual candor all the missteps made by those in command that ultimately resulted in the mayhem that left 40-some people injured and resulted in more than 100 lawsuits.

Among the problems cited are the following:

There were contradictory orders given….there was a failure to “issue a lawful dispersal order” to the crowd….there was an inexplicable okay of the use of force on the crowd…..plus a lack of communication and “abrogation of responsibility” by incident commanders.

And then, even when things started to get really out of control, none of the on-scene shot callers bothered to pass that information up the chain of command (a VERY big deal, according to Chief Bratton).

Moreover, the report doesn’t just list failures, it names names, calling out all those brass who blew it—something that is, in itself, unprecedented.

The seriousness with which the department intends to take the report was heralded last spring when Bratton made swift changes at the top, yanking two of the men who take the much of the report’s heat. Former South Bureau Deputy Chief Caylor “Lee” Carter, and Commander Louis Gray were replaced by Deputy Chief Sergio Diaz, and Commander Andrew Smith.

Unfortunately, the report is far less complete when it comes explaining the acts of the Metro guys (and/or women) who actually did all the whacking and “non-lethal” shooting of reporters and fleeing parents with children, which turned up in video form on YouTube for the viewing pleasure of millions.
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Just slightly over two years ago, an LAPD SWAT team tried to rescue an 19-month-old little girl named Suzie Pena, who was with her drunk, drugged out dad in a car dealership while the dad shot (and shot back) at the cops.

After several hours of this, the SWAT team did an entry into the back gate of the dealership, crept through the dealership building itself, sent a “flash-bang” into the tiny interior office where the dad was holed up. They thought the flash-bang would stun him. It didn’t. He shot back. So they blew into the room firing, and killed the crazy, messed-up, murderous dad….and the little girl. She died in her father’s arms.

So now the little girl’s mother, Lorena Lopez, is suing the LAPD for her daughter’s wrongful death and negligence. (I wrote about this case for the Weekly, so in case you’re curious about the back story you can find it here…and here.)

As part of the suit, her attorney, Luis Carrillo is asking for the internal police reports from the department’s investigation into the gun battle. Not surprisingly, the department doesn’t want to fork them over. The Deputy City Attorney, a woman named Kelly Kades, insists that the police officers’ statements are for internal use only and are protected by the right against self-incrimination.

It’s kind of an interesting dilemma. Kades says that, unlike in civilian employment, the department can make officers testify against their wills and so the info that results should be kept confidential.

According to the AP, Carrillo argued that “there is no danger of self-incrimination because the district attorney’s office said in 2006 that none of the 57 officers and supervisors involved in the standoff and shooting would face criminal charges.”

Carrillo says he only wants to compare what the officers involved in the shooting told their supervisors with what they stated in their depositions given for this civil case.

On Tuesday, the judge, who clearly would prefer not to touch this one, ruled that…..somebody else can decide it. He’s ordered the two side to make their respective pitches to an impartial referee who will then advise the judge was to whether he ought to release the documents or not.

Okay, attorneys and arm chair attorneys out there, what do you think the referee will decide?

One thing I’d bet the ranch on: if the cops have to fork over the internal info, the department is toast in terms of this lawsuit. (Not that there was any ill intent. The SWAT guys were devastated by by the outcome.)

They may be toast anyway if Carrillo the attorney can, in any way, accurately reconstruct the way the tiny interior office looked after the shooting.

When I was reporting, I spent a long, long time in that office looking at the walls and at all those bullet holes. (The photo below only shows a small section.) And frankly I still can’t understand how those genuinely good officers could have gone into that little room, guns firing, and imagined the outcome would be any different than the tragic scene that resulted
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Baker….and new guy, Sands

The word just went out mid day on Thursday that Bob Baker, the police union prez for the past five years, is stepping down and is being replaced by his second in command, Tim Sands.

I’ve not always agreed with Baker (to put it delicately), but he’s a good man, always open for a heartfelt conversation…..and he managed to forge a more cooperative relationship with the chief and the city than we’ve seen in the recent past.

Interestingly, Bob’s going to work for District Attorney Steve Cooley, where he will be “working as a liaison with law enforcement.”

Don’t know much about Sands. So, for now, we’re in Wait And See mode.

But early word is Sands is a straight shooter, cops cop (read: an alright guy an all, but possibly a tad overly boy scoutish, and definitely not likely to be asked to do his own talk show any time soon).

Whereas Baker was the smart, genial guy in the crowd who could discuss a wide range of subjects with passion and humor, and managed to get along easily with most everybody—unless you crossed him on that one little issue, of course: the union. (But, we could respect his occasional intractability. The union was, after all, his job. His baby.)

Sorry to see you go, Bob. Cooley was smart to snatch you.

photo by Joseph Rodriguez

Yesterday the Washington D.C. based think tank, the Justice Policy Institute issued a 100-plus page report that is getting a lot of attention. The report, called Gang Wars, analyzes which strategies work to combat gang violence, which strategies really don’t work, and which approaches only make the problem far, far worse.

The good news, according to the research, is that there are strategies that have been proven to be effective. The bad news is that Los Angeles, long the gang capital of the world, is the model for how NOT to solve the gang problem. The report points out that, rather than put money and effort into gang prevention and intervention programs, LA county has spent the past several decades trying to arrest and incarcerate its way out of the problem—and has failed spectacularly.

“Anti-gang legislation and police crackdowns are failing so badly that they are strengthening the criminal organizations and making U.S. cities more dangerous…..” writes the AP about the report’s findings. “Mass arrests, stiff prison sentences often served with other gang members and other strategies that focus on law enforcement rather than intervention actually strengthen gang ties and further marginalize angry young men…”

And over at the NY Times’ editorial pages they write:

It shows that police dragnets that criminalize whole communities and land large numbers of nonviolent children in jail don’t reduce gang involvement or gang violence. Law enforcement tools need to be used in a targeted way — and directed at the 10 percent or so of gang members who commit violent crimes. The main emphasis needs to be on proven prevention programs that change children’s behavior by getting them involved in community and school-based programs that essentially keep them out of gangs.

Most of us who’ve been paying attention, have been saying as much for a long, long time, but lawmakers have insisted on pursuing the crack-down/lock-’em-up policy almost exclusively.

“A 25-year anti-gang effort has cost taxpayers billions of dollars but has resulted in six times as many gangs and twice the number of gang members, because Los Angeles has not adequately funded social programs…” says the Washington Post of LA’s history of ill considered gang policy.

Statistics show that youth crime in the United States is at its lowest levels in 30 years and that gangs are responsible for a relatively small share of crime. In addition, according to a national Justice Department survey of police departments, gang membership declined from 850,000 in 1996 to 760,000 in 2004.

But occasional outbursts of violence prompt the media and politicians to seek immediate answers, said the report’s authors, Pranis and Judith Greene.

“And it’s more about politics than it is about serious efforts to do something,” Greene said yesterday. “It’s frustrating to see officials come forward with money for mass arrests, when the money is so sorely needed in programs that are tried and true and can really work.”

Interestingly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the AP and various other news publications all have longer news stories on the report than LA’s hometown paper saw fit to run.

So, Chief Bill Bratton and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa both testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning on that Feinstein gang bill…..(Here’s the LA Times story.)

Antonio said:

“Gangs are no longer a local issue and they are no longer isolated to urban cities. They operate sophisticated multi-state and multi-national networks that cannot be contained by municipal police alone. That is why we need a sustained partnership with the federal government if we are going to turn our neighborhoods around. Cities need the federal government to make an investment and play its part.”

ROUGH TRANSLATION: “We need money—or else our gangs are coming to your cities. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

Bratton said:

“This bill recognizes what cops already know, that we can’t arrest our way out of a gang crime problem. The police alone can’t own the gang problem. Society must step up to address intervention and prevention…”

ROUGH TRANSLATION: “We need money. We’re sick of the whole problem being dumped on cops and cops alone. What do we look like, social workers?”

It’s not my intention to make light of the situation. Beyond the political rhetoric, the mayor and the chief are pleading for essential resources. This month gang crime is down in Los Angeles. But if our city is to truly do something permanent about the violence that blows irreparable holes in too many LA families, it’s going to take a big infusion of cash.

In this year’s State of the City speech, Villaraigosa proposed targeting certain high crime areas of the city and flooding them with services in the form of a wrap around system of enforcement, prevention, intervention and community support. His plan was a sort of pilot version of the kind of all-hands-on-deck approach that Connie Rice had already proposed with her Advancement Project gang report.

But thus far the money needed to accomplish even the mayor’s mini version, just ain’t there.. It would be nice if Feinstein’s lock-’em-up gang bill provided a healthy share of the needed help, but it doesn’t. Out of its $1 billion budget, it allocates $50 million a year for prevention and intervention—for the whole country. Let’s say LA got a reasonable chunk, like maybe a full tenth of it—that’s $5 million. Split that five mil between law enforcement and prevention/intervention programs, and you can buy……not a hell of a lot.

Instead the bill turns petty crimes into Federal offenses, and puts its biggest bucks -behind an interweave of high profile Federal strike forces and multi-agency enforcement teams.

IN OTHER WORDS….the bill does nothing to keep the disaffected fool of a 15-year-old from blasting at an “enemy”—AKA another disaffected teenager—-and maybe hitting a toddler instead, which is what the heart of LA’s gang violence problem really looks like.

[MORE GANGS AND POLITICIANS AFTER THE JUMP]

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Yesterday, several members of the LAPD’s command staff were worriedly blackberrying each other regarding the “Outside the Tent” Op Ed in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times by Bernard Parks, LA’s former police chief and present day City Council member. In the column-in-question, Parks takes the paper to task for having a “pro-Bratton bias”—saying also that it repeatedly slams Chief Bratton’s predecessors while giving the chief himself a pass.

Since the beginning of the chief’s tenure in 2002, The Times has steadfastly painted his administration as a crime-reducing, reform-minded, public-relations-savvy machine. In tirelessly making this point, the paper is not above dredging up the tenures of previous chiefs.

(Well, yes. And your point would be?)

Parks is particularly upset with the way the Times wrote about the May Day mess.

Confronted with a possible credibility crisis, The Times did what the LAPD did when it was faced with the May Day chaos — it panicked. Honesty and generally accepted journalistic standards would have required it to aggressively question the leadership of a department whose officers went out of control in the park. You’d think the head of the department would have to be included in that analysis, but he is the same guy The Times has bent over backward to praise since he arrived in L.A.

So instead, in the May 12 article, McGreevy and Lait drew comparisons between the current chief and his three immediate predecessors — again! — for no other apparent purpose than to praise the current chief’s response to the May Day incident. For instance, they stated that in contrast to his predecessors, Bratton doesn’t deny the seriousness of policing problems and is quick to launch investigations of wrongdoing and holding officers accountable.

He goes on to say, in essence, that he, Bernard Parks, was much tougher, more forthright, and had better poll numbers, and certainly better hair, or whatever, than Bill Bratton. (Okay, no, Parks really didn’t say anything about his hair versus Bratton’s, but that’s about the only thing he didn’t harp on.)

Command staff types were nervously asking each other if the Times folks would feel it necessary to suddenly be far harder on the department and/or the chief as a consequence of Parks’ writing. Here’s the answer: Nope. Not likely. Nor should they be.

Just today the Times ran an editorial saying that the Police Commission can’t rubber stamp a Bratton contract re-up, that Commission members must ask the chief some hard questions, and do a serious long-view examination of his five-year tenure. Certainly, they’re right. There needs to be a rigorous performance review—no just waving the guy through. But, frankly, this isn’t anything the Times hasn’t said before.

Yet, neither the Times editorial board, nor anyone else with any sense is seriously suggesting Bratton’s contract shouldn’t be renewed—no matter how many hostile op eds Bernard Parks writes.

The truth is that Parks’ repeated and near-pathological criticism of Bratton (often through proxies) comes off like the worst kind of sour grapes. And people see through it. That’s why LAPD’s command staff needn’t worry. (At least not about the op eds of former chiefs. They do, however, have one or two other little worries with which to occupy their time.)

Ironically, Bernard Parks is very well liked as a council member and, by nearly all accounts, quite good at his job. But when he does the ankle-biting routine with Chief Bratton, his motives appear unseemly and transparent.

How transparent, you might ask? I’ll give you a very recent example: Best-selling mystery writer Michael Connelly sets all his police procedurals in Los Angeles, his protagonist, Harry Bosch, a detective for the LAPD. In Connelly’s newest book, The Overlook, released just two weeks ago, one of the characters is a fictional police chief who was chosen from outside the department and who speaks with a pronounced (wink, wink) Boston accent. In this book, the author also writes about a former LAPD Deputy Chief turned City Council member who is the vengeful nemesis of the well-liked Boston-accented chief.

(I know all this because I’m a secret mystery junkie and was reading the new book on Saturday night, thus happened upon the relevant passages. They were so startlingly on-the-nose, I laughed out loud. Then, to open the paper on Sunday morning and find Parks’ op ed…. sent my irony-meter spinning into the red zone.)

GENTLE SUGGESTION TO BERNARD PARKS: if even the pulp fiction guys are making fun of your irrational fixation with Bill Bratton, it’s time to give it a rest.