Police and Politics Make for Strange Bedfellows Indeed

It’s the rare day that you can pull a laugh off the front page, but there it was:

Some cops are so peeved at the LAPD’s new discipline drills that they’ve run for help to that antichrist acronym, that outfit that a U.S. attorney general once told the California Peace Officers Assn. is a “criminals’ lobby”--the ACLU.

That was last year’s antichrist. This year’s is the chief, Bernard C. Parks. The police union’s somewhat squirrelly poll gave Parks a thumbs-down rating of 93%. I say “squirrelly” because even Satan doesn’t get negatives like that.

The story that made me laugh at the beginning had me banging my head on the table by the end. My colleague Jill Leovy wrote about the LAPD and the Christopher Commission reforms that Parks is enforcing.

She wrote that the LAPD now gets two complaints for every three cops, most for lesser offenses like “discourtesy.”

No one outside a rubber room can say the LAPD didn’t need fixing. Twelve, 15 years ago, for a cop to get busted for undue force, he almost had to gun down a paraplegic in front of an archbishop. A few guys driving patrol cars with “There’s no excuse for domestic violence” bumper stickers went home and smacked the old lady around. A citizen complaint line set up after Rodney King practically had an unlisted number.

And so we come to life on the beat after the Christopher Commission, after Rampart, and a different one it is. Reporters have always known they can’t just walk into a police station and say, “Hi, why do you hate your boss?” and expect an answer.

But now you can.

Maybe even more than reporters, cops can be champion whiners. They admit it. Think of a Dilbert cartoon with nightsticks.

They hated Chief Willie Williams; now he doesn’t look so bad. They loathed the notion of civilian review; now it could be that civilians are less critical than the LAPD brass.

The other night, at a police station I’ll not name, I started talking to one cop. Others drifted in. When one heard I’m a reporter, he slapped one hand over his nameplate and the other over his crotch. But pretty soon he was telling tales too.

* A veteran approved for a detective badge said he’d been told it was stopped because in his dozen years, he had three “discourtesy” complaints--smart-mouthing, mostly. He’s joined other officers suing over the discipline process.

* A cop filling out a field investigation card asked the man his “descent,” his race--a required box on a required form. The man didn’t like the question and filed a complaint.

* Myriad complaints are filed for trying “to convert an official on-duty contact into an off-duty relationship,” meaning a cop hit on someone he met on the job. One told me, “Heck, I’ve met all my girlfriends that way; Chief Parks met his wife that way.” (Technically, the effervescent Bobbie Parks approached the solemn Bernard.)

There are two ways of assessing how this new system can go askew.

One is a twist on the broken-window theory already used on crime. Let the little offenses slide, and the big ones get out of hand. Stop the little stuff cold, the big stuff never happens. But who decides what’s “little stuff”?

The second is the cry-wolf theory: Spend too much energy dithering over the minor stuff and by the time the major stuff happens, no one’s listening any more.

If this is about reform, listen to what one cop said: He was putting a handcuffed gangbanger in a police car when the guy spit in his face. The cop admits he’d have clocked him--if there hadn’t been a supervisor watching. Now the supervisors are inside thumbing through complaint forms, when they should be outside stopping the conduct that gets complaints in the first place.

I asked Warren Christopher, the architect of reform, what he thinks of this house of his designing, but he demurred, saying it’s for the police to answer.

I also asked Joseph Wambaugh, the writer who once wore LAPD blue. “The LAPD is still the same first-rate police force it always was, so it’s not the Christopher Commission stuff--that’s just common sense. It’s Bernie Parks.... I was a big supporter of Bernie’s.” But he “squandered the goodwill of the troops.... I’m afraid Bernie’s just gotta go.”

Now we find out that Mayor Jim Hahn agrees with Wambaugh.

Just what we need, more of those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the police chief and the mayor, Gates and Bradley, didn’t speak to each other for months on end.

I remind you of the saying, when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.

My fellow Dichondra, get ready for the battle.

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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@ latimes.com.