ValleyVote Update for 6-17-01 |
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Re "L.A.'s thin blue line" (May 27):
The police manpower shortage is a disgrace to the city of Los Angeles and is the epitaph of our current City Council. In the City Council's effort to destroy the moral fiber of this city, it has made itself out to be above the Constitution by refusing to honor the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the Boy Scouts.
It is no wonder that thugs and gangs are running rampant in our city. And, for good reasons, the "blue flight" is on. The LAPD blue's job is to uphold the law. How can they when the members of the City Council hold their personal beliefs above the decisions of the highest court in our land? God help us, when the highest and only city official who has the guts to stand up for the law and the Constitution is our sheriff.
Mike Haendiges West Hills
Wire Services The federal judge presiding over Rampart civil litigation ruled that Los Angeles City Council members can be held liable for damages in cases stemming from the Rampart police corruption scandal, officials said Friday.
U.S. District Judge Gary A. Feess denied a request by council members to be dismissed from a civil-rights lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles Police Department and city officials. On Thursday the judge also ruled that the LAPD can be sued as a racketeering enterprise, officials said.
That ruling could lead to a sharp increase in the city's financial liability from the Rampart police scandal. It also marked the second time in seven months that a federal judge has rejected attempts by the City Attorney's Office to dismiss police corruption claims filed under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
The ruling is significant because Feess is presiding over about 100 Rampart cases. He also is overseeing the consent decree between the city and the federal government that was formulated to avert a civil-rights lawsuit planned by the U.S. Justice Department.
The ruling also is groundbreaking because no police department or major police official has ever been held liable under the RICO statute, legal experts said. [Only in LA]
By Rick Orlov Staff Writer
Three years after abandoning a popular community policing program, Mayor Richard Riordan announced Tuesday the Los Angeles Police Department's senior lead officer program would be fully restored next month.
Neighborhood groups who fought vigorously to get the senior leads brought back reacted to the announcement with skepticism, but Riordan insisted their voices had been heard. "From the Valley to the harbor, from Hollywood to Venice, Angelenos have let us know they want us to bring back community-based policing," Riordan said at a news conference in front of the LAPD's Pacific Division headquarters with about two dozen community activists and police officials.
"Today, we can say: Angelenos, we've heard you."
Under the new program, all 168 senior lead officers will be returned to their previous duties of working with community leaders. But they also will be subject to more supervision by commanders.
The decision marked a personal defeat for Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, who killed the program, saying the senior leads were needed on patrol and that all officers should be involved in community liaison.
On Tuesday, he said senior leads will serve at least four of five days a week in their community-liaison role but also will be available for patrol duties, depending on the needs of a local station. In addition, they will attend all roll calls and work with younger officers on community policing. "This gives us the ability to develop a work plan that we can have confidence in -- that community policing is there but that officers also are available," Parks said.
While insisting he had never abolished the senior lead officer program, Parks said he was trying to develop a system under which all officers in the department took on some of those community responsibilities. However, community groups had fought his proposal from the start and had waged an ambitious campaign to see the senior leads available to them to deal with issues as varied as graffiti, illegal dumping and gang activity.
"I think this is an important first step, but I want to see what actually happens," said Page Miller, co-chairperson of a group calling itself Save Our Senior Lead Officers. "We've had a 3 1/2-year war and this is a big victory, if what they say will happen does happen." Sandy Munz, co-chairwoman of the group with Miller, said she also wants to see what happens.
"When we had our senior lead officer, we would get 50 to 70 people at our Neighborhood Watch meetings," Munz said. "Now, we're lucky if we get seven or eight. The Neighborhood Watch groups all over the city have been decimated."
Don Schultz of the Van Nuys Homeowners Association also was hesitant to embrace the program. "I hate to say it, but I am skeptical," Schultz said. "I want to see what really happens and if the senior leads are truly available."
Riordan and Councilman Joel Wachs, who had called for restoration of the officers, said they understood the reluctance of local groups to immediately embrace the plan. "They have to judge us by what we do, not what we say," Riordan said.
Wachs, a candidate for mayor invited to the announcement because of his role in returning the program, said it is crucial for the program to work as promised. "This has to be an absolute priority if we are going to regain the public's trust," Wachs said. "If we don't do this, it will confirm what people who want to secede have been saying. If we are going to save this city, we have to keep our promises.
"Everywhere I go, people of this city tell me they want to be partners with the police. We have to partner with them for the good of us all."
The new program has been in development since October, when Riordan and Parks first announced plans to reinstitute the program. At the time, they said half the officers would be returned to the field as soon as possible with funding available for the remaining senior lead officers in next year's budget. The new fiscal year will begin July 1.
Officials would not discuss why it had taken so many months to come to the agreement -- time which also allowed for enough money to be available to reinstate the entire program."We are not looking back," Parks said. "We are only looking forward."
Recently, our ill, 15-year-old son turned up missing. We turned to the LAPD for help. There were two officers in particular who realized how serious the situation was and immediately came to our aid. I want to publicly acknowledge Officer E. Yepes and Officer G. Smith from the Foothill Division for their help in searching for our son.
With all the negative publicity we've recently read about the LAPD, please
don't forget that the majority of our officers are really doing an excellent job
and have a sincere desire to make a difference.
-- Abbi Witty
Tujunga
By Rick Orlov Staff Writer
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a $500,000 settlement in another lawsuit arising from the Rampart Division police corruption case involving former Officer Rafael Perez.
The settlement to Paul Thompson arose from a 1996 incident in which he was convicted of being a felon carrying a firearm. He was arrested by Perez, who later confessed that suspects were framed and assaulted by officers in the Rampart station's anti-gang unit.
Thompson served three years and seven months in state prison before being released as a result of the investigations into Perez's cases, said Chief Assistant City Attorney Tom Hokinson. "A number of witnesses came forward and questioned whether he had the gun," Hokinson said.
In an unrelated matter, the council also approved a $480,000 settlement to five women who accused the Los Angeles Fire Department of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in hiring and promotions [A million here a million there it starts to add up]
By Rick Orlov Staff Writer
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved a $1.2 million program to shift police officers to new assignments as part of the city's efforts to comply with a pending federal consent decree.
Chief among the plans is to hire more people for the Inspector General's Office as well as assign people to work on a new computerized tracking program of officers." These are important programs if we are to meet the terms of the consent decree," said Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who chairs the council's Public Safety Committee.
The proposed court-sanctioned agreement, involving reforms in the Los Angeles Police Department, was negotiated by city officials and representatives of the U.S. Justice Department. It is subject to approval by a federal judge.
Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said the council needed to give special emphasis to any aspect dealing with Police Department reform to prevent it from becoming considered a routine matter. "If we treat these as routine then we reduce reform to that which is pedestrian," Ridley-Thomas said. "If we do that, I am afraid we will find ourselves with a whole new series of problems in 10 years. "Making sure we have these reforms is important to the health of the Police Department and the health of the city," he said.
Councilman Rudy Svorinich opposed the funding, saying he wanted more details on the overall cost and where the officers are coming from to work on the consent decree. "I am concerned that with the difficulty we have had in hiring and the high attrition rate, that we will be affecting community safety," Svorinich said.
Officials said the department plans to keep patrol forces at their current levels.
The LAPD is about 1,000 officers short of its target staffing level due to difficulty in hiring as well as officers retiring or taking jobs in other agencies.
The department has attempted to maintain patrol staffing levels at the same time as it reinstitutes the senior lead officer program, a popular community liaison program.
BERNIE-bashing has become all the rage among the would-be mayors of Los Angeles.
At a candidates' forum last week, Steve Soboroff, Joel Wachs, Antonio Villaraigosa and Kathleen Connell all took turns taking a whack at their favorite rhetorical pinata -- LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks.
James Hahn and Xavier Becerra weren't there to join in on the fun, but they made similar remarks earlier in the week.
No one was actually so bold as to support firing Parks -- that, after all, would require the guts to say unequivocally what they meant without wiggle room. But simply blaming him for at least half a century of city government failure won't put the Humpty Dumpty Los Angeles Police Department back together again.
Ever since the Rampart scandal came to light, the anti-cop lobby has targeted Parks as the fall guy. He's tough, hard-working and a good manager. Not that he, with his stiff-backed approach to leadership, doesn't deserve some of the blame. The guy at the top has to take responsibility for what occurs on his watch, and there's no denying that under Parks, crime is up, arrests are down and the department is in the midst of a major scandal.
But the failure to reform the LAPD in the past 10 years is mostly the fault of the mayor and the City Council. Instead of leadership, we got political manipulation, leaving a vacuum for zealots to fill. The result is an emasculated and demoralized police.
It might be convenient for the mayoral candidates to hold Parks responsible for a long history of failure, but it's unfair and, even worse than that, it does nothing to revive the department as a crime-fighting force. Fixing the LAPD will require a lot more than hiring a new chief. The failures of Parks and his predecessor, Willie Williams, should make that clear.
The next mayor will inherit a bona fide mess in the LAPD. Mitzi Grasso, president of the Police Protective League, recently lashed out against "serious flaws" in the Consent Decree that the city's leaders have been unwilling to address. The union that represents the LAPD rank and file understands that giving in to the demands of people who think criminals are the good guys is a recipe for lawlessness.
L.A. doesn't need another fall guy. It needs leaders who can articulate policies that will fix things, who can bring together conflicting constituencies and balance out competing interests. What's been lost in the name of reform is public safety.
Which candidate will muster the courage to offer a concrete plan that puts cops back into the business of keeping us safe in our homes and on the streets? We're waiting to see, as you should be.
* Re "Riordan Fires Police Panel Head," Feb. 6.
Poor Richard Riordan. So desperate to keep the music going that he fired the head of the Police Commission because he wouldn't dance to the Riordan fiddle. Riordan should have learned about Gerald Chaleff last year, when Chaleff and most of the other police commissioners refused to whitewash the shooting of homeless woman Margaret Mitchell. As if that wasn't bad enough, Chaleff then said he wouldn't approve the LAPD Board of Inquiry's Rampart Report unless he read it first, and agreed with it.
If Riordan wanted a puppet Police Commission, he should have staffed it with the people he appointed to the Planning Commission. They seem a lot more willing to foul up the city by following Riordan's marching orders. Chaleff simply doesn't operate that way.
Riordan has never accepted the blame for even the smallest mistakes made during his administration, and his attempt to manipulate the inner workings of the Police Department is no exception. Community policing, recruitment and morale problems in the LAPD begin with Chief Bernard C. Parks, who was hand-picked by Riordan, and work their way down.
The commission is a civilian oversight committee and is not supposed to be running the department on a day-to-day basis. That's the chief's job, whether he likes it or not. Any problems should be placed squarely on the chief's shoulders, not the commission's, and certainly not Chaleff's. Instead, Parks gets a salary raise and Chaleff gets the ax. Riordan is wrong again, and should apologize to the city.
WALTER N. PRINCE Chair, Community Affairs Committee PRIDE Homeowners Assn. Chatsworth
Re "Mayor: Fix LAPD now" (Feb. 6):
I got a good laugh from the mayor's latest solution to this serious problem. Everyone knows where the problem is and it is not at the Police Commission. It's at Parker Center. The problem with LAPD is not low morale, a drop in arrests, a decreasing force, an increase in crime -- these are symptoms of the root cause: the man who presides over the department.
Until he is removed from his day job, LAPD will continue to deteriorate, citizens will continue to have less and less faith in their protectors and the criminals will feel more and more comfortable on the streets pursuing their agenda.
Ellen Bagelman President Lake Balboa Neighborhood Assoc.
It seems to me that if the mayor were really concerned with police morale and the department's accelerating attrition, the person he should work on replacing is Bernard C. Parks.
Yolanda Petroski Granada Hills
Mayor Richard Riordan has "dissed" Los Angeles again, this time by publicly firing the president of the Police Commission to direct attention away from his own failures (read Chief Parks). Riordan personally selected Gerald Chaleff to serve on the commission in 1997, and his co-commissioners thought so highly of him they elected him to be their president.
Now, four years later, Riordan blames Chaleff for everything but the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. Let's face it: the Police Commission is not and should not be held accountable for department morale, department recruiting or community policing. The morale depends on the attitudes of the officers toward their leaders (read Parks and his merry men), recruiting is a function of the department's personnel office (which operates under the direction of Parks), and community policing was a huge success until Chief Parks, with the blessing of Mayor Riordan, decided to scrap it so the officers could write traffic tickets and bring revenues into the city's treasury.
Walter N. Prince P.R.I.D.E. Homeowners Assn. Chatsworth
Those responsible for the unprecedented flight of officers out of the LAPD would have you believe the problem is merely one of economics, work schedules or equipment. With the disciplinary system and lack of support the way it is on the LAPD, I don't blame officers for only wanting to come to work three days a week.
With crime in Los Angeles up dramatically, arrests down drastically, response times increasing, and officers' morale never lower, we are seeing the results of mismanagement and a lack of support for our officers translating into hardships for the average law-abiding citizen. It's time to put the onus back where it belongs, on criminals, and provide the leadership and support our officers need to make the city safe.
-- Ed Auerbach Los Angeles
Senior lead officers have not been reinstated yet. Don't call your SLOs and expect them to be able to respond to your needs -- yet. They cannot. The Senior Lead Officer Program Restoration and Enhancement Proposal was approved Oct. 24, 2000, by the Police Commission.
The proposal, written by LAPD management, is half-baked at best with shady wording that will not allow SLOs to be as effective as they were before. Both the community's input and the strong recommendations made by the Rampart Independent Review Panel for this proposal were disregarded. We will pressure the next mayor to order a more effective reinstatement of the SLOs. We will ask mayoral candidates whom they will appoint as the next chief of police. We will ask whom they will appoint to the Los Angeles Police Commission.
Page Miller Save Our Senior Leads, co-chair Valley Village
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