THE GOOD NEWS: Today the Los Angeles City Council voted 13 to 0 to reopen the discussion as to whether LAPD officers working in gang or narcotics units should have to provide detailed and, in the eyes of many (myself included), invasive information about their finances, as has been demanded by U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess, the guy overseeing the department’s federal consent decree.

The idea behind the much-loathed financial disclosures is that any dirty cop who might be skimming money and drugs from gang and/or narcotics busts would be nabbed by a regular review of his or her checking accounts, Visa bills and Roth IRAs—a strategy that both defies logic and has little or no record of actually working since, as a general rule, thieving officers don’t deposit their ill-gotten gains in their Wells Fargo checking accounts.

It’s nice that the City Council has shown this moment of sanity and support for the rank and file officers who will be affected by this ill-conceived disclosure requirement. And I’d even like to think that my LA Times Op Ed on the subject of financial disclosure, which heretofore had been an inside baseball issue that largely flew under the radar, might have helped matters.

THE BAD NEWS: Although the police union is feeling chipper about the Council’s decision to pull rank on the Police Commission, which recently cosigned on the judge’s demand, all this revisiting is unlikely to change much of anything. As Chief Bill Bratton put it (as quoted in the LA Times) after the vote:

“In the end there is going to be financial disclosure. Nothing that is going to happen in [the City Council] is going to change the judge’s decision in my opinion.”