A ‘Reform’ Doomed by Its Very Nature

People are asking the wrong question when they want to know why Los Angeles Police Department reform has faltered. The right question is: Why did anyone ever believe the LAPD could or would be reformed?

What followed the much-heralded Christopher Commission’s recommendations for changes in the LAPD was a debacle presided over by a newly appointed Board of Police Commissioners, liberal do-gooders including Stanley Sheinbaum, Melanie Lomax and Ann Reiss Lane, who knew nothing about police matters, much less police reform. They first were done in by former LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates when they suspended him without due process and then when they put race over substance and chose as Gates’ successor a lightweight new chief who also knew nothing about the LAPD. These police commissioners soon disappeared, and their new chief was left to founder at the mercy of the LAPD establishment. Soon he, too, was history.

Things then got back to normal. An old line LAPDer replaced the out-of-towner as chief. A new mayor who had no real interest in police reform replaced the old mayor, who never was up to actually effectuating reform. A new, weak, sycophantic board of police commissioners was appointed to do the new, insider chief’s bidding.

Not surprisingly, the lack of dynamic and the stasis between the new, authoritarian chief of police and the new, toady board of police commissioners returned to roost. More than seven years after the Rodney King beating, virtually none of the important Christopher Commission reforms having to do with prevention of police brutality and civilian oversight of the investigation into and discipline of LAPD misconduct had been put in place. One reform, however, did manage to squeak in, in 1996, before the old new chief of police, Willie L. Williams, got the boot for his incompetence: an inspector general.

In the person of Deputy Dist. Atty. Katherine Mader, the inspector general was given a broad mandate and roving commission to monitor and report on both police misconduct and the department’s investigation into and discipline of misconduct. She nominally was an outsider: not outside enough for police reformers yet too outside for insiders.

The police commission liked her just fine when they were able to use her criticism of the LAPD to get rid of Williams. But once he was gone and replaced by insider and long-time Gates crony Bernard C. Parks, the commission no longer had any use for Mader, and her making public findings perceived to be negative to the LAPD’s swaggering self-image came to be a bother. What to do with such a squeaky wheel?

Mader never had any real power to take any action at all concerning the LAPD. Her very limited power was to report to the Police Commission and to make public information about the LAPD. Nothing ever has been more important to the LAPD than burnishing its image, and that is why virtually any cop who is perceived to have tarnished that image is labeled as a “rogue” cop.

Because the LAPD institutionally never has accepted any of the Christopher Commission’s findings, it never has perceived the need for any positive change. That is why the Christopher Commission’s most important reforms have not been put in place. Yet Mader, as inspector general, was an in-their-face challenge to the institutional position that nothing was amiss at the LAPD. (The King beating was an aberration, done by rogue cops.) So, having used her to oust Williams, now it was her turn to get the heave-ho.

The hatchet for Mader was chosen by the entire Police Commission when it hired former LAPD Commander Joseph A. Gunn to be executive director of the commission--Mader’s boss. The hatchet was wielded by commission President Edith Perez and Gunn, who proceeded to strip Mader of her access to unadjudicated complaints of police misconduct, snipe at Mader in public and then force her resignation.

Why all this would be a surprise to anyone who had even a cursory knowledge of the history of the LAPD and the civilians who were supposed to oversee it is a mystery.

The LAPD always has been a world unto itself, it shall remain unto itself and all those who dare to resist its very strict enforcement of its rules soon will become either toast or history.