Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (28 page)

In front of him was a reporter who’d just asked Eide a question about the LAPD’s traditional emphasis on paramilitary policing and how the department’s training had changed since Willie Williams had become chief almost five years earlier.

“
We don’t have paramilitaristic [
sic
] training, never have,” answered Eide, not bothering to hide his annoyance. The captain responsible for in-service training for the entire LAPD, Eide had been involved in training at the academy for “eighteen months
this
tour.” As he continued, his irritation seemed to accelerate. “
The Police Department,” he says, “has a job to do, sometimes that’s finding lost kids, and sometimes that’s removing a suspect who’s barricaded himself in a building and who has weapons. . . . Militaristic training is kind of a loaded term.”

“What about community-based policing?” the reporter asked.

“
That
,” said Eide dismissively, “is
a catchall term that started here
[with the LAPD], rolled across the country and now has come back packaged up with a ribbon on it, but the LAPD has been at it for 25 years, there’s been no difference. . . . The idea of problem solving, that’s what team policing was about back in 1971, ’72 and we’ve had senior lead officers ever since then, and have been and are today at the forefront of—quote-unquote—‘community-based policing.’ . . . This is new to writers and other people: it is not new to this Police Department.”

It was astounding that Eide, five years into Williams’s commitment to community policing, was still holding out the 1972 LAPD version of a community policing model that was all police and no community. Under that model, the LAPD defined
who
the community was and what organizations could be involved, maintaining the right of approval and refusal. It also dictated the agenda and refused to consider complaints about how officers in the community were doing their jobs or how they might do them better. Community policing circa the 1970s, in short, had never been implemented with a real level of grassroots involvement—as a meaningful partnership with a broad, representative spectrum of residents. It was owned and operated by the LAPD interacting with the same old cop groupies, even as police-community relations continued to deteriorate in vast segments of the city.

If Eide—as a captain in such a key position—didn’t see any problem with that old model, it was no wonder that Willie Williams’s version of community policing was being so roundly criticized four and a half years into his tenure. Community policing had been one of Williams’s key selling points as a candidate for chief, and he had pointed to community policing in Philadelphia as a model. But he’d never really gotten it off the ground in Los Angeles. Instead it became more of a talking-point sales pitch than an activated reality.

“I helped put together a community policing plan for the LAPD under Williams,” Ron Noblet, the highly respected veteran gang intervention worker would later say. “We spent a year on it, and it was fantastic. We had a big public meeting to announce it. And
the report went up on some shelf and we never heard from the department again.”

“
The Police Commission Office started monitoring the Community Policing Advisory Board,” says Gary Greenebaum. “A lot of City
Council members were having trouble with them, because all the decisions were being fiercely held on to by the department, so that nobody else could make recommendations or put members on [the local community policing boards]. The civilian leadership was worried that the boards would just become police booster organizations, and be seen that way by the community.”

**************

As Captain Eide’s interview continued, he then moved, unsolicited, to another area he thought the media hadn’t gotten right: the department’s use of force. “
The people who think the LAPD had problems with excessive force 10 or 15 years ago are wrong,” he said. “I can lay out the numbers that show that the newspaper opinion and the media’s opinion is not borne out by the facts. The use of force was a big issue with the Christopher Commission. . . . I can explain to you . . . why that’s all nonsense.”

In short, while Richard Eide was fuming about some stats from a decade earlier and declaring that nothing had been wrong in the first place, Willie Williams had allowed Eide to be in charge of shaping the attitudes and training of what was supposed to be a new reform generation of LAPD officers.

That same year the
L.A. Times
ran a story that profiled
Sergeant Nicholas Titiriga, an eighteen-year veteran of the department who was also an instructor at the Police Academy. When he was in the field, Titiriga had “compiled a total of eighteen misconduct complaints—all unfounded or unresolved.” “At times,” wrote reporter Stephen Braun, “when [Titiriga] talks about the changes taking place around him, his voice tightens in fury.
What reformers reject in the old department, they reject in him.” In other words, in what should have been the Holy Temple of the new LAPD, in what should have been the Fountain of Change, there stood an officer with
eighteen
complaints and a pissed-off attitude teaching the department’s new recruits. King’s beating and the riots brought new laws that increased oversight and limited the LAPD’s heretofore impenetrable political power. But because of the LAPD’s resistance and Williams’s weak and indifferent leadership, those statutory
changes were never reflected on the street. As
Deirdre Hill, an African-American Police Commission president during Williams’s tenure, would later point out, the LAPD had “no in-service training” to change the way officers operated.

That same pivotal year of 1997, Allan Parachini, an ex–
Los Angeles Times
reporter who was then handling the press for the ACLU, had a conversation with Commander Tim McBride, the LAPD’s chief media spokesman. “McBride was talking about what he thought was wrong with Williams, and
assassinating Williams behind his back,” says Parachini. “And if Tim McBride would say these things to me as Williams’s official spokesman, God knows what else he’d say to others. He went off on the chief about being uneducated—which you hear all over the top ranks of that department—about how Williams had come into the department not knowing anything, and about how his learning curve was too slow. . . . He used everything but the ‘N’ word. It was a hostile,
ultimate slam job.” And very soon, like Willie Williams’s very real failures, it would have its effect.

Willie Williams, March 1997, Parker Center

In March of 1997, the Police Commission voted unanimously not to rehire Willie Williams, saying that “
the department cannot continue without more effective management and . . . strengthening the department management will require a change at the top, a new chief.” And it was true.

Midway through Williams’s tenure as chief, thirty-three of the forty-four cops with records so bad that the Christopher Commission report had specifically dubbed them “
problem officers” were still on the job—nineteen in frontline positions. In mid-1995, one of them,
Michael Falvo, had been involved in a highly controversial shooting death of a fourteen-year-old boy in a Mexican section of L.A. The shooting was so highly charged it almost sparked a riot. Then
Andrew Teague, another of the problem forty-four, who was in training to be a detective, admitted to falsifying evidence in a homicide case and lying about it under
oath. It was amazing that those officers were not only still on the job but were working in the field.

“In the most basic way,” Gary Greenebaum would say in 1997, “it is
business as usual. And this is something that the commission cannot legislate; this is something that has to do with this chief’s commitment to change—to real change.”

When
Willie Williams finally woke up to what was going on under and around him, it was late October of 1995 and it was too late to do anything about it. Calling an hourlong meeting of about a dozen of the LAPD’s deputy and assistant chiefs, Williams shed his amiable persona and talked to them in blunt, tough language. He’d been receiving pressure from City Hall about the slow pace of reform, he said—particularly the implementation of community policing and new officers being hired to work on the street.

The department needed to be “kick-started,” he emphasized, and he wanted to see action on community police and other matters—now. “
Senior officers unwilling to back [him],” said Williams, according to the
Times
’ then police-beat reporter, Jim Newton, were “not welcome in the department and should consider changing careers.”

Later, Newton spoke with some of those attending the meeting. One of those was Assistant Chief Ronald Banks, the department’s second-ranking officer. “The tenor [of the meeting],” Banks told Newton, was “[Williams] saying: ‘
I’d like to get more help from you when I ask for these things rather than being told that this is the way we’ve always done things.’ ” Others at the meeting told Newton that, in effect, it was the same old Willie Williams, criticizing the department and saying in general what he wanted but not offering specifics about
exactly
what he wanted or how to implement it.

Both interpretations of the fault line between Williams and his top staff were true. Williams didn’t have the leadership skills or strategic ability to succeed at big reform. And his command staff and many at Parker Center conspired to ensure that whatever he asked for would be ignored.

But there was so much more to it than that. The Stanley Sheinbaum/Jesse Brewer Police Commission had to select a candidate based on antiquated
civil service laws that precluded their considering another outsider. Tom Bradley had been working toward Daryl Gates’s ouster ever since the beating of Rodney King, yet he failed to change those civil service laws that so limited the competition, or to order his personnel department to thoroughly vet Williams.

Earlier that Commission had stepped far beyond the comatose, rubber-stamp Police Commissions prior to the King beating and worked hard to force Daryl Gates out of office and to choose what they believed was the best man to replace him among a limited group of candidates.

But then, remarkably, they had failed to set Williams straight when he ran out of steam after just ninety days in office, and didn’t say strongly enough, if at all, “Hey, you’re not reforming the department; this is not acceptable; get a grip.” Instead they allowed Willie Williams to give himself an excellent evaluation.

Still, over Williams’s next four years the Riordan Police Commissions, with people like Gary Greenebaum in leadership positions, did their job—or tried to—on this critical issue, writing tough, critical evaluations of Williams that were right on the money, publicly sanctioning Williams for lying to them, and then refusing to rehire him.

All the while Williams faced the passive and active resistance of a department that was determined to see him fail and that worked very hard to ensure that he would. He never understood, until too late, that L.A. was the kind of place that, when they stabbed you, they did it in the back and then told you to have a nice day.

But ultimately Williams was responsible for his own failure. His modus operandi was to deal with problems as they came up, be pleasant to everybody, let the department kind of run itself, and not waste too much time following up on promises and commitments that required any heavy lifting. With his selection his lucky number had come up, and his competition for the position had been either lackadaisical or barred as outsiders from being considered. So why wouldn’t he have taken that big fat pay raise and moved to the L.A. of swimming pools and movie stars and gone to the Academy Awards as the
Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department
and occasionally weekend in Vegas? Who would say no? Unfortunately, he was the wrong guy, in the wrong place, at the right time.

PART THREE

SOMETHING BLUE

Bernard Parks, August 1997, Los Angeles City Hall

“
It was an absolute love-in,” gushed Los Angeles city councilwoman Laura Chick, referring to the council’s unanimous approval of Bernard Parks as the LAPD’s fifty-second chief of police. Immediately afterward Parks received a spontaneous
standing ovation in City Hall. He had
not been asked a single question beforehand.

Just a week later, Parks’s triumph was replicated in a ceremony on the grounds of the Police Academy before
a crowd estimated at three thousand that included the mayor, the Police Commission, and various local, state, and national politicians and law enforcement leaders.

Many of the locals were breathing a collective sigh of relief that at last the LAPD was in the hands of a man they respected and trusted, a man whom—unlike his out-of-town predecessor—they knew and were sure they could work with.

As if to underscore that very point, during his speech Parks alluded to the fact that on this happy occasion he was wearing
the same belt he’d worn on the day he was sworn
in as a rookie police officer over thirty-two years earlier—a double-edged swipe at Willie Williams that Gary Greenebaum interpreted to mean: “I’m a man of Los Angeles and the LAPD, not an outsider, and I’m slim, not fat; I’m not Willie Williams.”

For most of the locals in attendance it seemed that a new era of good feelings between the department and the city’s political establishment had already commenced. As the fifty-six-year-old Parks said after
his earlier swearing before the City Council: “
I don’t view conflict as something bad. I think it’s [about] how it’s played out and whether we can agree to disagree but not be disagreeable.”

Unfortunately, that would emphatically not turn out to be the case.

**************

That summer of ’97, Richard Riordan was also fresh off a landslide reelection victory, and he too “beamed” after the council’s official swearing-in ceremony for Parks. “I’m so thrilled,” the mayor told
L.A. Times
reporter Matt Lait. “
Chief
Bernard Parks just sounds perfect.”