Short Takes and Updates: Bratton, Cardenas & Lisker

REPLACING BILL BRATTON

Christina Villacorte of the City News Service reports that the head of LA’s city personnel department will meet privately Tuesday with some of the members of the LA Police Commission, which will constitute the official beginning of the process of finding a new LAPD Chief.

Here’s how it works: Personnel Department General Manager Maggie Whelan oversees the actual recruitment process and then recommends six candidates for the Police Commission to interview. The commission then pares the list down to three and sends the three to the mayor who selects one—-who then must be confirmed by the City Council.

This means Maggie Whelan—whom we don’t know and have never even heard of, but now really, really, REALLY want to know better—has a great deal of chief-related power in her hands.

Interesting.

Whelan told City News Service she expects to hear from commissionn members what qualifications they would like to see in the new police chief, and whether executive search companies should be hired to facilitate the process.

I’ll be handicapping candidates starting next week.

PS: Check out Time Magazine’s story on Bratton leaving.

And here, the LA Weekly’s Patrick Range McDonald suggests that Bratton’s exit is Palin-esque—and that I, among others, have been merely stroking Bill’s ego, while he and FishBowl LA are the only folks asking the hard questions. Actually Tim Rutten asked a few harder questions a bit more thoughtfully, but whatever. Still, it’s worth a read.

[However, this moment of McDonald’s about Bratton, posted over at FishbowlLA could have used a teeny bit of a rethink before allowing it to see the light of day. (Favorite sentence: “Then a good source told me and other reporters at the Weekly about a certain event involving the chief that made us wonder about things.” All righty then.)]

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NEW GANG INTERVENTION BILL TO BE INTRODUCED IN CONGRESS

On Monday, City Councilman Tony Cardenas and Congresswoman Diane Watson announced a new proposed bill that, if passed, aims to “reduce gang violence and prevent wasteful spending on intervention programs that are simply not working.”

The bill also proposes “to help professionalize gang intervention workers across the nation and hold them accountable for the services they provide.”

Here’s what the Daily News has on the bill. And here’s what the LA Times has.

I see some very good things about the bill. (Accountability, for one.) And I also have some big questions about its emphasis on street intervention over offering men and women programs that helps them move out of gangs and into productive lives. (The point is not just to get gangs to stop shooting each other in the moment. We need to give people the tools to transform their lives, and their kids lives. Mere violence interruption is a finger in the dike.) But the bill is a worthy place to start the discussion.

Here’s a link to the bill itself, HR 3526.
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BRUCE LISKER TO BE RELEASED ON BAIL

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips, ordered court personnel to review Bruce Lisker’s case and to draw up bail recommendations, which should be completed before the end of the week.

Then friends an family will bail him out…. and he will wait to find out if the LA County DA’s office is going to file murder charges on him again.

Phillips was the judge who, on Friday overturned Lisker’s conviction and sentence Friday, concurring with a March opinion by a U.S.magistrate judge, who determined that county prosecutors used “false
evidence” to convict Lisker, who has been behind bars for 26 years.

(Back story here.)

A great deal of the credit for Lisker’s upcoming release belongs to then LAPD Sergeant Jim Gavin who, at great risk to his own career, sorted out the discrepancies in the evidence against Lisker, and made his discoveries public when the Los Angeles Police Department wished to do otherwise.

Here’s an earlier LAT story on the Lisker case.