Some Friendly Advice to the Councilmember: Get Over It.

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.