LAPD

Los Angeles Times

June 11, 2000

SUNDAY REPORT

Inside LAPD’s ‘Us vs. the World’ Culture

A professional, aggressive approach to policing long ago made the department a global model. But with it came a stubborn insularity and periodic excesses that have left the force painfully out of step with the times.

By TERRY McDERMOTT, Times Staff Writer

The Los Angeles Police Department, renowned worldwide for its spit-and-polish professionalism, has over the last 25 years repeatedly engaged in activity that has brought disgrace and embarrassment to the department and the city.

Some examples:

A South-Central woman named Eulia Love is shot and killed in a dispute over an unpaid gas bill. A four-plex apartment house on Dalton Avenue is destroyed in a rampage by 88 police officers armed with sledgehammers and crowbars. An intoxicated motorist named Rodney King is clubbed and kicked by a handful of police officers while a posse of others watches. A detective named Mark Fuhrman brags about being a racist and a sexist. A bike patrol officer shoots and kills a tiny, deranged street person named Margaret Mitchell, who the officer said threatened him with a screwdriver. Finally, anti-gang officers in the inner-city Rampart Division are accused of routinely framing and beating, sometimes even shooting, unarmed suspects.

The department in these situations defended itself in one of two ways: by declaring the actions appropriate responses to dangerous situations-Love, Dalton, King and Mitchell-or the aberrant behavior of rogue cops-Fuhrman and Rampart.

Often, an investigation is undertaken, followed by recommendations for sweeping change, which are ignored or halfheartedly implemented. The cycle is so habitual that one steadfast aspect of each new report is a section wondering why the recommendations in past reports haven’t been carried out. These notorious cases are not by any means the only instances in which the LAPD has engaged the public with inopportune results. Just last month, police in Hollywood shot and killed a man armed with a pair of scissors. The month before, officers in San Pedro shot and killed a man armed with a butcher knife. In the last five years, the LAPD has shot and killed 88 people, not all of them obviously dangerous.

The thousands of individuals who make up the police force are not all-or even mostly all-bad. Almost everything they do is welcomed by the community. So how come this stuff keeps happening? Why doesn’t anything change? Is there something in the way the LAPD goes about its business, something deep in its bones, that causes it to go seriously astray?

The defining values of the Los Angeles Police Department were formed 50 years ago in a different era to address vastly different circumstances. The organization has been remarkably adept at maintaining those values and transmitting them to generation after generation of recruits. The values have been, if anything, strengthened.

The result is a law enforcement agency skilled at doing what often turn out to be-to outsiders-inexplicable things, yet an agency that insists with its every breath that no one outside has standing to challenge what it does. In dozens of interviews with people in and out of the department, in the examination of litigation and the LAPD’s own data, statements and policies, the department is described as an institution caught painfully out of time, a department in transition between two very different and very difficult ideas of how to keep the peace, paramilitary professionalism and community engagement; a department riven by internal dissension; a department accustomed to shrugging off external criticism now drowning in a torrent of it.

Operating in the particularly difficult and dangerous environment that is Los Angeles, most of the time the LAPD is not embroiled in scandal. Its officers are broadly seen as a strong, physical, authoritative presence-tough, honest cops, cops who can and will take command of a situation, who do not sit and wait, but the kind of cops, as they like to say in the department, who go looking for trouble.

That they should so often find it is not an accident. And if it is an accident that they find it now more than ever, then it is an accident 50 years in the making.

Founding Father: Bill Parker

LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks is a notably stern man. His most influential predecessor, Chief William H. Parker, would make Parks seem like the class clown.

“Parker never smiled. Never,” says Tom Reddin, one of Parker’s deputies and his successor. Parker was a workaholic-first into the office and last to leave. He trusted virtually no one-with good reason, given the number of crooked cops who populated the department as he climbed its ranks.

The LAPD for much of Parker’s early career was little more than a handmaiden to organized crime and corrupt politicians. By 1950, when Parker became chief, another reform movement had swept local government and he was to become its agent in cleaning up the department.

He did much more. In his 16 years as chief, Parker remade the LAPD. In the process, he popularized a new style of policing that would eventually become the standard not just in Los Angeles but across the country.

Parker, who could quote whole pages of Scripture-sometimes at the top of his lungs-brought an almost religious commitment to reinventing the LAPD.

“Parker rebuilt the department, establishing everything from organized crime units to the blue wool uniform,” Reddin says. “People would come from all over the world to study us.”

“He started a planning and research division,” says Daryl Gates, another former chief. “What police department ever had planning and research?”

In an era when police training in much of the world consisted of an occasional visit to the target range, Parker turned the Los Angeles Police Academy into a civilian version of a military boot camp. He added boats, helicopters, Breathalyzers and portable radios to the department. He built a new headquarters with a research library.

But for all the gear with which Parker equipped his officers, his two most enduring achievements had little to do with the physical stuff of police work.

First, he built a political base for the department, assiduously courting politicians and going around them to the people when he needed, making hundreds of speeches a year to civic organizations. Parker’s persistent and winning argument was that in order to keep the department free of pernicious corruption, he needed to keep it free of political encumbrance.

Unmentioned in his crime-fighting speeches, he also employed an intelligence unit within his department that routinely collected incriminating material on local politicians. A change in the City Charter before he took office had given him virtual life tenure, and he used his permanence to build a power base surpassing that of any other local official.

“The police became a power unto themselves, unregulated by the democratic process. From the inside, everybody on the outside was an enemy or potential enemy. If politicians-instruments of the will of the people-tried to intervene, the police dismissed it as political meddling,” says David Dotson, a retired deputy chief.

Abetted by the movie industry and then TV, and what amounted to his own personal propaganda department headed by Jack Webb’s “Dragnet” series, Parker made the LAPD a national force in policing and used the celebrity to cement his political power at home.

His second lasting achievement was to change the very definition of what a cop was.

The prototypical cop had been the beefy, not entirely ambitious, not particularly bright sort more likely to be an adornment to a coffee counter than an active agent of law enforcement. Parker institutionalized the idea of a police officer as a professional-highly trained, specialized, fit and above all assertive. He emphasized hyper-aggressive, proactive policing.

Like so much else in Southern California, this was shaped in part by the boundlessness of the place. As Bayan Lewis, a former interim chief who joined the department at the height of Parker’s reign, expresses it: “Because there were so few of us with such a large area to cover, we were hunters, hunter-killers. We were not a community-friendly organization, because we didn’t have the time. The feeling was: I don’t have time for the touchy-feely stuff.”

The notion of a highly mobile police force, armed and equipped to the teeth, was born.

Reddin recalls that Parker so wanted his officers to be active, he voluntarily cut an already small force to increase their responsibilities.

“Parker wanted it to be small,” he says. “Once, when budget cuts were proposed, he stepped forward and offered to cut 600 officers.”

Parker brought social science into the squad room, treating the department like a factory. He began measuring officer productivity, ranking officers by the number of arrests they made, interviews they conducted and traffic tickets they wrote.

These rankings, called the recap, are still posted monthly in roll call rooms throughout the department. “Just keep the numbers up to keep the folks off your ass,” says Dotson. “It’s a relentless push.”

Says Rich Andert, a patrol officer in the West Valley Division: “If your recap numbers are down, you hear about it. They don’t look for a certain number. But they praise the ones who are productive, and they let you know if you’re not.”

Before Parker, most police work was done in reaction to crime. Somebody did something bad, police tried to catch them. Parker turned it around. He made crime suppression part of the police lexicon. Forty years before New York declared a law enforcement revolution with a new zero-tolerance program built largely on aggressive police stops, Los Angeles cops were frisking anybody they felt looked capable of committing a crime.

Parker’s officers would in many years make double or triple the arrests made in New York, which then had three times as many people and four times as many cops.

As remarkable as the transformation of the LAPD under Parker has been the persistence of his changes. Parker died in office in 1966. Since then, the department-with only brief interludes, most notably Willie Williams’ misbegotten five-year term-has been run by three direct Parker descendants: Ed Davis, Daryl Gates and Bernard Parks.

Davis as a young lieutenant was handpicked by Parker to write the department’s now 621-page manual. Gates was Parker’s driver. Parks as a young officer was a Davis acolyte and still consults him. All career LAPD men, they are different in many respects but fully committed to Parker’s central notions of a proactive police led by a politically powerful and independent chief with unquestioned authority.

On Patrol In South L.A.

Randy Cochran seems out of place in the 21st century, as if he slipped under the millennial curtain without a ticket. He has an open, uncomplicated quality about him-not a shred of cynicism or irony. He’s guileless, by every account an honest man. He’s also a big man, not buffed-out big, but stout big, big enough in any case that you wouldn’t want to pick a fight with him. You wouldn’t run from him either. He has an unguarded, welcoming face. Whatever he’s thinking is written there to see.

Cochran is a cop Bill Parker would have loved: a straight arrow, proud of the department and of himself-a producer. He and a longtime partner used to consider their day a failure if they quit their shift without answering at least 20 calls and making a felony arrest.

“I got this arresting thing down to a science,” Cochran says.

He has been on the force for 26 years, almost all of them on patrol in South Los Angeles. The LAPD is divided into four broad geographic bureaus, and each of those is subdivided, for a total of 18 geographic divisions. Each of the divisions serves 150,000 to 270,000 residents.

Southwest is one of four divisions in the South Bureau. It is bounded roughly by the Harbor and Santa Monica freeways, La Cienega Boulevard and 52nd Street. Its most notable landmark is USC. It is further divided into 10 patrol districts, called “basic car” areas, which are the department’s smallest geographic unit.

Southwest, with 164,000 residents in 10 square miles, is one of the smallest, and busiest, divisions.

Cochran is just back on patrol after four months on what they call “soft duty,” behind a desk recuperating from an eye operation. “It was absolutely killing me,” he says, referring to the desk job, not the surgery.

Police work is highly stratified, varying greatly according to rank, specialty and place of assignment. Many street cops don’t have high regard for inside work. Squint jobs, they call them. Wanting to advance in rank-promoting, they call it-is seen not as a destination or an activity, but a state of being and an indication of low character.

Cochran’s partner today is a young patrol officer, Irma Garcia. Garcia is about a foot shorter, a hundred pounds and 30 years lighter than Cochran. Cochran loves partnering with her nonetheless because, like him, she wants to work hard and put people in jail. Generations apart, they are quintessential LAPD cops.

The LAPD at the moment is experiencing a sort of maturity crisis. As the generation that filled the ranks after Vietnam retires, the department is getting younger. Almost three-quarters of the patrol force has 10 years’ experience or less. Fifty-six percent have five years or less. The result is that the police officers who deal most with the public have the least experience doing that.

Overall, almost half the total force (46%) has been hired since the Rodney King beating in 1991. In that hiring, the department has done a remarkable job of diversifying what was once criticized as an overwhelmingly white male force. A majority are now people of color, with Latinos making up a third. The force is still heavily male, but women now constitute about a fifth. About one-fourth have college degrees. One-fifth served in the military.

At roll call, computer printouts of crimes reported in the division are passed around. Every division now has people assigned to computer crime analysis. The squad rooms are plastered with their handiwork-maps, graphs, increases, decreases and goals.

It’s part of Chief Parks’ campaign for a data analysis system called FASTRAC. This particular system is new to the LAPD but is no different in concept from the pushpin maps the department has used since the Parker era.

Today’s handouts deal with gangs and cars. In the Southwest Division, as in the rest of the city, there has recently been a resurgence in gang activity. Police think the disbanding of the department’s anti-gang units after the discovery of abuses in the Rampart Division caused this increase. Coincident with the gang revival has been another surge in car thefts, late-model Toyotas in particular.

Cochran and Garcia check out equipment-Ford Crown Victoria patrol car, 12-gauge pump shotgun, riot helmets, radios. Some cars also carry military assault rifles, added to the LAPD arsenal after officers found themselves outgunned at the 1997 North Hollywood bank robbery. Neither Cochran nor Garcia is qualified to use the rifle, so they don’t carry one.

The radio cars themselves are another LAPD innovation, first deployed in the 1930s. Cops call them shops. A group of eight officers is assigned to each car: two patrol officers per eight-hour shift, plus a sergeant and a senior lead officer. Theoretically, the officers are assigned to work with the same partner all the time, but in practice there is a constant shuffling because of vacations, schedule conflicts or training.

Cochran is the senior lead, or SLO, for Basic Car 3A57, the patrol district that includes USC. He treats his assigned area as an old-fashioned beat, makes it a point to know people and their habits, in part out of natural friendliness, in part to be aware of who belongs and who doesn’t. He cruises the district with the window down, calling out, “Hello,” and “How ya doin’?” People wave back, call him by name, or say, “Hey, Sarge.” Whatever his actual rank, he looks like a Sarge.

Cochran has been on patrol for 20 years. He’s never even taken the sergeant’s exam.

Afraid of failing? he’s asked.

“Afraid of passing,” he answers. “If I go up any higher, I’m off the street.”

Cochran is a minor legend within the LAPD, a career patrol officer who excels at the single activity most prized within the department-making arrests. People tell stories about arrests he’s made, like the time he tracked down a felony suspect with an outstanding warrant. The guy told Cochran he’d be happy to get arrested tomorrow, but today he had to pick up his son, who was himself just getting released from jail. If he weren’t there to meet him, the father said, no one would.

Cochran, to the chagrin of his partner, bought the guy’s hard-luck tale and told him to turn himself in after he got his son. The next day, sure enough, the guy showed up at the station and asked for Crocker, which was the name of a street in the neighborhood and which residents gave Cochran for a nickname.

“What for?” the man was asked.

“I come in to get arrested,” he said.

Cochran and Garcia are moseying through their district when they pick up the first radio call of the watch-a residential burglary alarm, one of the most common and irritating calls police get. Ninety-nine percent of the calls turn out to be false alarms, but there is no way to know without checking. They roll on it.

It’s in a nice neighborhood but at a house that has seen better days. Cochran goes to the door, raps and hollers, “Po-lice.” He repeats it, louder, and the door opens on a grizzled old man, standing back in the semi-dark. He has some sort of twine draped over his shoulders.

Cochran tells him they came to check out the alarm. The guy responds unintelligibly.

Cochran asks what he’s doing in the house.

Packing, he says.

It’s not clear at first if this means he’s getting ready to move or what.

Packing what? Cochran asks.

This, the guy says, and follows the twine down from his shoulders to his waistband, where it is attached to a .38-caliber Beretta.

“Whoa,” says Cochran.

Garcia reaches for her pistol.

Playing It By the Book

Police preach that every situation, every call, has a potential for danger. Most involve none. Those that do can be grave.

Several weeks ago, Harbor Division police were called to a residence in San Pedro where they found a woman and her son, both seriously wounded by a knife. The woman’s boyfriend had attacked them, they said. An ambulance rushed them to a hospital, and police went looking for the boyfriend.

They found him not long after and cornered him in the backyard of an empty house. The search took awhile, and by the time they found him, more than a dozen cops were on the scene. The man still had what appeared to be a butcher knife.

In such a situation, LAPD officers are trained to use what they call escalating force. They begin by trying to talk the person into putting the weapon down. That failed in this case, and they moved up a notch to a nonlethal weapon-a shotgun that fires beanbag-like projectiles designed to stun their victim. The officers fired the beanbags several times to no apparent effect. The man refused to drop his knife.

The other officers played it by the book and deployed an electronic stun gun called a Taser, the same sort of weapon used against Rodney King. An officer prepared to fire the Taser. It jammed. The man took a step toward the officer who had the Taser.

The officers played it by the book, opened fire with their handguns and killed the man.

Unlike many violent confrontations involving the LAPD, this shooting was noncontroversial. It merited a single story inside the next day’s newspaper, then disappeared.

The next week, a senior detective spoke about the incident with regret-not for the man who had died, but for the man who had done the shooting, a Harbor Division sergeant.

“The officer did the right thing,” said Lt. Faryl Fletcher, the sergeant’s supervisor. “This man wasn’t going anywhere. It had to stop.”

Why? Why not wait?

“You could,” Fletcher said, pausing to consider it. “You could wait, but that’s not what happens.” He paused again. “Unless SWAT is called out. That’s what they do. SWAT waits.”

But why couldn’t your officers have waited?

“Waiting is not looked upon favorably,” he said.

Fletcher is not a cowboy. He’s a career officer, worried about his daughter’s grades, a man who has thought long and hard about what a cop is, what it has meant to him to be a cop. And he is right about this.

The LAPD habitually does not wait. A top command officer in the department, asked afterward about this incident, said with some exasperation, “Look, we carry guns for a reason. It’s not there for ballast.”

Written LAPD policies explicitly authorize the use of deadly force to protect officers or others from “an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury. . . . Deadly force shall only be exercised when all reasonable alternatives have been exhausted or appear impracticable.”

Among those things that are “impracticable,” the department maintains, are shooting to wound or shooting to disarm a suspect, like in the movies. The LAPD teaches its officers to shoot to kill, or, as it is more neutrally put, to aim for a “center mass hit.” Center mass on a human being is the chest.

Chief Parks is asked about the shooting, and about the LAPD’s general lack of patience.

“Spontaneous events will always be the Achilles’ heel of police officers,” he says. “Because they must act immediately. They can’t retreat. We would be offended if we turned on the TV and saw police officers retreating down the street, running from a crime.”

Asked why LAPD officers have repeatedly shot and killed people armed with knives, screwdrivers or other frequently less-than-lethal weapons, Parks says: “There is nothing in the manual that says an officer has to take a stab wound for LAPD. We train officers not to go into hand-to-hand combat with somebody with a knife. We tried the tools that were available-the Taser, the beanbag.

“Officers are looking at the worst scenario,” he says. “You have him cornered in the yard. Do you let him then go running down the street or through the house? If he had gone, if we would back away and let him simmer down and he kicks in a door and takes a hostage, what would the story then be that day if he kills a person in the house?”

But there was no one in the house. There was the guy with the knife and a bunch of police officers, all more heavily armed than the guy.

“Which one do you decide that we lose if he charges one of them and stabs him?” Parks asks.

If You Lose, You Die

So what the hell is Randy Cochran doing standing there chatting with this slightly loopy citizen who just happens to have a Beretta on his hip?

Cochran asks the guy his name-which corresponds with the homeowner’s-asks about the alarm again, then wishes him a good day.

“Be careful with that,” he says, pointing to the pistol. Then he and Garcia let out big breaths and walk away.

Once back in the squad car, they use their computer to run the license plate of a car in the driveway of the house and recheck the man’s name. It all matches. It’s his house, and there’s no law against wearing a gun inside your home.

How did Cochran know not to challenge the man?

“He looked like he belonged,” Cochran says.

Garcia, who stood to the rear and side of Cochran during the incident, says it was a tricky situation. The book says to ensure safety. How do you do that? For an LAPD officer, that usually means to take charge.

Ted Hunt, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League-the police union-and a former instructor at the LAPD academy, says the crux of that training is to be in command of a situation.

“You will take command. You better take command, or you’ll go back out there and run the track some more,” Hunt says.

It is maybe the hardest thing an officer has to learn on the job-when to back off, how to reconcile formal training with the real world. Patrol officers say almost without exception that this comes only with time on the street, five to 10 years. Younger officers typically carry what’s called “a heavy badge,” meaning that they are too insistent on asserting their authority. They haven’t learned that hard charging can be more dangerous, not less.

By the time most officers learn this, most of them are no longer on the street.

If it had been she at the door, Garcia says: “I think I would have handcuffed him. If you don’t, if something goes wrong, it’s going to go bad. If you take the gun away, nothing bad is going to happen.”

That would have been precisely by the book. The man was a bit scary, he had a weapon, he wasn’t completely coherent. Exactly because of that, however, trying to disarm the man could have provoked a catastrophe.

“If I had Irma’s time on the job, I would have laid the guy out. I woulda had my knee in his back,” Cochran says.

“They teach you stuff,” he says, “to the point it’s second nature. And that’s good. They get you to that point where self-protection is the primary concern. If it’s not, he could kill you.

“The costs of doing a police job wrong are just deadly. If you lose, you die. It’s not like you break a No. 2 pencil and you go get another one. You’re dead.”

Cochran killed a man several years ago, choked him out. He had been called to a robbery in progress at a restaurant, which as in today’s incident, turned out not to be a robbery but a disturbed man making a commotion.

“He was a great big guy who didn’t rob anybody, but he was clearly disturbed,” Cochran recalls. “Got into a great big, honest-to-goodness knock-down-drag-out. I choked him. Or at least that’s what they said. I gave him the first choke and the last. There were several others in between. They said mine killed him. It had a profound impact on me. You go through those kinds of things. One minute you’re talking to him, the next he’s dead. How do you handle that?”

Cochran has since been restrained in how he handles people. But this sort of “soft policing” is not held in universal high regard in the department.

Dave Smith, a recently retired division captain, says there is a constant push for aggressive behavior.

“Compassion is a weak word. It’s worse than soft. It’s almost communist,” Smith says. “At roll call once I praised somebody for not shooting a robbery suspect. They had every right to, but waited that extra second and didn’t. Several sergeants came up to me later and said, ‘Cap, you’re sending the wrong message out there. Somebody could get killed.’

“The worst thing is to sit around with a bunch of cops watching a barricade situation. They’ll all be grousing, ‘Shoot the son of a bitch so we can get home.’ ”

Power Enshrined

Randy Cochran came on the LAPD after he was discharged from the Army Airborne. He was working at a refinery when he joined up, in Ed Davis’ eight-year run as chief. Tom Reddin had followed Parker as chief, but stayed only two years before taking a high-paying job as a TV commentator. Davis was next.

Davis didn’t shrink from Parker’s model of the chief as king of his domain. He embraced it-enshrined it, in fact, so that those who followed him took it as a prerogative of the job, even when in later years the community insisted that the chief be more of a public servant than a benevolent dictator-or now, when the federal government insists that Bernard Parks yield to its authority.

Davis was a far more flamboyant figure than either Reddin or Parker and, in a different way, as innovative as Parker.

He became chief just three years after the 1965 Watts riots and needed to repair community relations. He says now that he wanted to bring the community so close it couldn’t tell where the cops ended and the community began. He started the country’s first Neighborhood Watch organizations and

assigned some of his best cops to be community liaisons. He developed the Basic Car Plan still in use. The cops themselves weren’t completely sold on his approach. Davis didn’t care.

“Any good CEO has to kick some ass. I did,” Davis says. “You can’t want to be loved like Tom Reddin or cater to them like Daryl [Gates]. You need a chief of police who has balls, who will establish authority.

“I believe in believing. I believe in making sure the belief goes through the organization. A lot of guys in an organization have no organized religion. They believe in nothing but themselves. So you have to be a leader. You have to be a preacher.”

For all his innovation in dealing with the good citizens, Davis was unapologetic about how he dealt with those he thought were bad. And he was resolutely sure he could tell the difference. The God-fearing middle class was good; homosexuals, Black Panthers and a wide variety of other radicals and pornographers were bad. Davis spoke fervently about scrubbing the city clean.

He was an unusual combination of innovator and conservator. He left at the peak of his popularity to make an unsuccessful run for governor. He was succeeded by Gates, Parker’s young protégé.

By Davis’ judgment and that of many others, Gates virtually reconstituted the department the way Parker had left it. Both Reddin and Davis made changes, and Gates undid them. Reddin and Davis tried to bring the community into the department. Gates shut it out.

Proposition 13 arrived virtually at the same time Gates became chief, and he was forced to begin cutting budgets almost immediately. He says he wanted to do it by attrition, got into a fight with Mayor Tom Bradley over the plan and from then on he was on his own.

He and Bradley went years without speaking. The separation was more than symbolic. During Gates’ time in office, the LAPD’s resources shrank, and Gates insisted that the department nonetheless do more. He fostered an intense pride within the department, pitting it against not only crooks and criminals, but the mayor, the City Council, the Police Commission that was supposed to be his boss.

Dave Dotson recalls Gates chewing out commission members who dared to challenge him. Gates himself relishes recollections of threats against City Council members who opposed him.

“I’d challenge council members; told them, ‘I’ll go into your district and tell them you’re wrong, and I’ll tell them the reason why you’re opposing me is the police union contributes money to your campaign.’ ”

“You wouldn’t do that,” they’d say.

“Oh yes I would,” Gates says he would reply.

“Gates saw he wasn’t going to get the money to grow the department,” says Bayan Lewis, then an LAPD command officer. “He really fostered the military aspect, created an occupational army, the Hammer, anti-gang task forces, sweeps in which we’d arrest 1,000 people, arrest anything that looked or spoke like a gang member. Few of them were ever charged, but it was effective. By God, if you even look like a gang member, you’re going to jail.”

Gates says he did all of that to maximize his limited resources, following Parker’s philosophy of doing more with less.

The net result, as everyone came to understand too late, was a huge divide between the community and the police that culminated in the Rodney King affair and the riots that followed.

“We started losing our way in the ’70s,” says Joe Gunn, a former LAPD cop and current executive director of the Police Commission. “People would say, ‘Your cops are having a hard time differentiating between the good people and the bad people.’ We started becoming over-aggressive.”

Whatever his faults, which by consensus were many, Gates built a pride within the department that overrode almost everything else, including any outside criticism. Gates is said by people who were with him at the time to have received his copy of the Christopher Commission report issued in the aftermath of the King beating and tossed it dismissively to the floor.

The Gates era was the formative period for most senior members of the LAPD, including virtually all the command staff. He did not leave behind an institution eager to accept change.

The short and unhappy reign of Willie Williams came next and is important now in illustrating the lengths to which the LAPD would go to reject outside advice, even if the outsider was the chief.

Williams was by every account a flawed leader. Whether those flaws or his outsiderness was the primary cause, his authority was compromised by a long internecine struggle to subvert and be rid of him. One of those who led the successful insurgency was the man who succeeded him-Bernard C. Parks.

The Unpopular Mr. Parks

Bernie Parks is tall and erect as a statue, and, critics say, about as flexible. Expressions of disdain for him within the ranks are so common and passionate, it seems impossible that he has earned them in just three years.

In any organization with such large differences between the work performed by its field and office operations, rifts inevitably develop. In the LAPD under Parks that rift has grown into an abyss.

It’s not all Parks’ doing. This is a singularly bad time for department morale. The Rampart scandal, following as it does the Simpson scandal and the King scandal and so on, has sapped the department’s strength. For the first time in decades, the LAPD is having a hard time finding enough recruits to replace record numbers of people leaving.

“People are leaving for other forces in the area,” says Ed Diot, a senior patrol officer in the Harbor Division. “When I came on, it was unheard of to go to another department. LAPD was the ultimate in law enforcement. There was no place to go from here.”

Rich Andert, another patrol officer, says he has heard mutterings of the unthinkable. “I’ve heard people actually wishing we had Willie back,” he says. “I can imagine someone sitting where I’m sitting saying, ‘He [Parks] is the stupidest man alive and should not be allowed to run this department.’ I can imagine someone saying that.”

What exactly has Parks done to earn such enmity?

Three things:

Faced with a growing shortage of patrol officers, he gutted the senior lead officer program, which went all the way back to Davis. He needed the bodies on patrol more than neighborhood liaisons, he says, and besides, community policing should be the work of the entire force, not just 168 people.

He refused to implement a compressed three-day work schedule of 12-hour shifts favored by patrol officers.

He has instituted a discipline system that many officers find oppressive and trivial at the same time.

The LAPD for decades has been accused of being lax in its discipline. One of the reasons the U.S. Department of Justice is threatening to sue L.A. is because the department has been unable to implement a system of tracking which officers get in trouble the most. Community members have charged repeatedly that their complaints are thrown out without so much as a cursory investigation.

This produces the paradoxical situation in which a chief attempting to deal with one of the worst scandals in LAPD history is being attacked within the department for trying to discipline wayward officers.

None of Parks’ internal critics think he should go softer on people like Rafael Perez, the chief informant in the Rampart scandal. But they think Parks has used Rampart as an excuse to impose his will on the entire department.

The issue of control is not an idle one for cops, especially not for LAPD cops. In many ways, it is the single issue that unifies the department.

Most cops, according to profiles constructed by LAPD psychologists, go into police work in large part because they like to have control over their lives. They like to be left alone to do their jobs. If not princes of the city, then they would be knights at least.

It goes through the entire department, from the chief’s desire to resist outside intrusion-“There’s no logic to it. It’s a belief,” says ex-Chief Reddin-to the beat officer’s notion that his patrol car, his shop, is his castle.

There is the additional pervasive and often troubling issue of controlling crime suspects, both physically and psychologically. Whatever personal venalities were involved, control of gangs was the overarching cause of the Rampart scandal.

Parks has waded into this thicket and offended almost everyone.

The field cops hate him because they feel he is trying to control every breath they take. As a result, many have, in effect, quit breathing. Although it isn’t reflected in departmental data, numerous officers say they have stopped trying to make arrests, for fear that somebody will file a complaint against them and Parks will investigate it.

One patrol veteran of 30 years says he was warned to buy new shoes because the soles on the ones he had were too thick.

Supervisors resent Parks for usurping their authority. This happens in big ways and small. One of the broadest is Parks’ top-down administration of his FASTRAC crime analysis project. Every month, area commanders are called downtown and grilled over the specifics of what they are doing about particular crimes in particular neighborhoods.

The commanders hate it. It’s like being called out in front of the class when you haven’t done your homework. The result is that they all have assigned people to analysis units, even if it meant pulling officers off the street to do it.

Deputy Chief Maurice Moore, who runs the program, says it doesn’t matter if people like it or not. The chief wants “command accountability,” he said.

Parks says being popular with the rank and file has “never been my goal, so if I don’t achieve that, that’s not something I care about.”

Jeffrey Eglash, the Police Commission’s inspector general, speaking more broadly of the department’s desire to be free from oversight, said: “Control really is the big issue for this department. I think for them, control is not a means to an end. I think control is an end in itself.”

A Question of Who Belongs

“I know they want a kinder, gentler police force, but it’s not a kinder, gentler society,” Randy Cochran says.

It’s a routine midweek day watch. He and his partner, Irma Garcia, had to make a trip to the other end of the division to check on a report of a transient living in somebody’s garage. The report had been filed a month ago, but the man who was supposed to follow it up is on the promotion list for sergeant and is afraid of getting into a dispute that would lead to a complaint.

Complaint avoidance is the order of the day.

Cops constantly talk about their “package,” what is or isn’t good for their package, how thick or thin or beef-ridden it is. The package is their personnel file, what in high school would have been called your permanent record. In an organization that has so many varied assignments and so much movement among them, having a bad package, one with too many complaints, is like losing your passport-you’ll go nowhere without it.

Tracking complaints is a central point of the recent discussions between the LAPD and the U.S. Justice Department. The feds want a computerized system and had previously allocated money for one to be developed. The LAPD has yet to do so, for reasons that have never been clearly articulated.

Critics see it as yet another example of the department’s resistance to outside suggestions. But that does not mean citizen complaints are ignored as they were in the past, cops say. They complain that nowadays the opposite is closer to the truth.

Garcia has applied to work on the narcotics squad and seemed set to be accepted when she received a complaint from a citizen who alleged that she had cursed at him. Fortunately for Garcia, she had tape-recorded her confrontation with the man-as many officers routinely do now-and the tape disproved the complaint.

The complaint, however, won’t go away and, with her package clouded, her move to narcotics is on hold. She’s still learning how to be a cop, and she has acquired a level of uncertainty that isn’t helping.

She got in a fight with a transient the week before and was almost choked to death. Her partner saved her. She still isn’t sure if her hesitation almost cost her her life.

“I tried everything. Tried to use our verbal judo to handle him, like we’re taught. Nothing worked. Given my size, I need to be aggressive. I’ve asked myself, ‘When should you be? When should you back off?’ That’s a difficult choice. I’m frustrated. Society is violent. I’ve experienced a level of violence I’ve never seen or anticipated.”

She grew up in the Hollenbeck Division, which is on the Eastside. (Cops often tell you where they live or where they used to live by naming the police division.) She went to Catholic college to become a teacher. She received a degree but decided she couldn’t bear the thought of being locked in a room all day with a bunch of kids. She came on the LAPD four years ago.

Cochran has been driving through a Latino neighborhood near USC. Suddenly, a 3-series BMW with a ski rack zooms through an intersection ahead of him. Cochran immediately guns the Ford to follow.

“Those don’t look like your average skiers to me,” he says. In the brief moment the BMW had taken to pass by, Cochran, who is white, thought he saw two young African Americans inside. The BMW is clipping along and Cochran follows while Garcia runs the plate. The car is registered to a man with a Spanish surname.

“I suppose this could look like one of those ‘driving while black’ things,” Cochran says.

Yes, in fact, it sure could.

“It’s not,” he says. “I see two young blacks in a BMW with a ski rack in a Hispanic neighborhood. The LAPD takes the little bitty things and uses them. Adds them up. I’m a product of LAPD. I see it as maybe a stolen car. I look at it as good police work.”

But who’s to say black people don’t ski?

Cochran’s point, he says, is that the BMW does not seem “to belong” in the neighborhood.

This is, almost on the face of it, explicitly what the courts have said police cannot do-make such judgments solely based on what the people look like.

On the other side, the fact that “he looked like he belonged” was the reason Cochran gave for not trying to disarm the man who earlier had answered his door with a handgun at his side. In that instance, Cochran used the same criterion to defuse an incident. How do you later not use the same intuition?

“I don’t know the answer to all that stuff. You gotta go with your life’s experiences,” Cochran says. “I’ve been doing this so long, anything other than aggressive patrol seems bad.”

The BMW pulls into a post office parking lot. A young black woman gets out of the passenger side, and a tall Latino gets out of the driver’s side. Cochran asks if he has keys to the car. The guy holds them up quizzically. Cochran says thanks and rolls on by.

This leads to a discussion of how you tell who is a gang member. Cochran and Garcia decide: baggy clothes, hanging out, attitude, tattoos, making gang signs.

But couldn’t one or more of these criteria apply to thousands of people who aren’t gang members?

“If you dress like a duck, act like a duck, quack like a duck, then you probably are. If I don’t think this way as a police officer, I’d be dead. And I’ve seen way too many dead people,” Cochran says. “It’s fine and dandy if all of this is on paper, drawn out. Out here, there’s a gray area that just keeps moving.”

Garcia agrees. She and Cochran are people of action. That’s why they took this gig in the first place. “Citizens are suffering out here because we’re not doing enough. The neighbors are tired. I’m here to serve this community,’” she says.

The words sit there, dead on arrival. She sighs. “Oh, I know everybody says that, but I really am. There’s been 13 homicides here in the last three months. That’s horrible. The gangsters have this attitude they can do whatever they want.”

It’s a fine day. The jacarandas are in bloom. The partners have been in one or two dangerous situations and, except for Cochran’s mental health, there were no injuries.

“I got a headache just from talking about this,” he says. “People say, ‘You’re doing it all wrong. You don’t have a clue.’ Well, bullshit. My whole life is in this. I know what I’m doing.

“This isn’t just something I do,” he says. “It’s part of who I am. And I wouldn’t know how else to be.”

We Run Toward the Bullets

The LAPD’s culture has triumphed too completely.

“Culture” is a neutral term, implying neither good nor bad. Most human organizations-countries, businesses, chamber orchestras-have cultures, which means simply that people within them learn ways to behave, how to speak, move, interact with one another and with outsiders. What distinguishes culture from other group characteristics is that it is learned.

The LAPD’s culture is not different in most respects from those of other police organizations. Many police departments in fact closely model the LAPD. They have grown alike in large part because other organizations have copied Los Angeles. But L.A. remains distinctive.

“The special culture of the LAPD is their military nature and their absolute resistance to outside scrutiny of any kind,” says Samuel Walker, a criminologist.

Inside the department, especially in the upper ranks, few concessions are made to the idea that something is dramatically askew. But the entry of the U.S. Justice Department into LAPD affairs and the apparent acceptance of that intrusion by much of the local political establishment illustrates the broad agreement outside the department that something has gone very wrong.

The LAPD’s command staff, almost in spite of itself, confirms the legitimacy of much of the outside criticism. The critics and the cops generally agree on what the department does. They disagree on whether it ought to be doing it.

Parks says those critics are a distinct minority.

“The general public has a much more balanced view of the department and human nature,” he says. “The general public does not view every incident as a scandal or corruption. They view it as they view their families, as some individuals do well and some don’t do well, but it doesn’t mean you throw the whole organization out.”

The LAPD, in fact, has a long history of popular support. City Councilwoman Laura Chick says that support is one of the reasons the department has been able to avoid change.

“We got more calls on the dog licensing, spay and neuter thing, than on Rampart-all of us did,” she says.

When they’re feeling particularly defensive, which is often these days, conversations with members of the LAPD often circle around to a scene in a movie-this is Los Angeles, after all.

The movie is “A Few Good Men.” In the scene often cited, an angry Marine colonel played by Jack Nicholson berates a lawyer who has questioned his judgment.

“Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You?” Nicholson says.

There remains in the LAPD a general feeling that anyone unwilling to stand in the line of fire is discredited as a critic of those who do. As numerous officers put it: “We’re the only people in society, when we hear shots being fired, we run toward the bullets.”

Bayan Lewis, public safety chief of Los Angeles County and the interim LAPD chief between Parks and Williams, says the department’s insularity is abnormal.

“All police departments tend to be inward-looking,” he says. “But LAPD is worse than anybody. It’s us against the world. We see ourselves as the last bastion of good people in a world that’s crumbling.”

Smith, the recently retired captain, says, “The hierarchy of the LAPD down to the patrol officer believes the people who know how to police Los Angeles are the police and no one else. If we continue to say we know better than everyone, we’re never going to change.”

Flying Low, Flying Blind

Think of it this way.

Hundreds of commercial airliners carry people thousands of miles on thousands of flights a day. They are designed with so-called triple redundant safety systems. Every critical system has a backup system; and the backup systems have backup systems. A lot has to go wrong all at once for them to fail, and, in fact, they rarely crash. When they do, however, scores of people can die.

Are they unsafe? By any measure, commercial flight is one of the safest means of transportation ever devised. It is inherently dangerous only because airliners operate miles above ground. On those rare occasions when a lot does go wrong, a crash is inevitable.

Imagine the LAPD as an airliner, a complex system that somehow manages to perform thousands of difficult and often dangerous tasks without incident every day. Backup systems are built into it to attempt to ensure that it doesn’t crash. But sometimes, when the right combination of things go wrong, it crashes spectacularly.

What makes the airplane susceptible to crashing is the fact that it is up in the air in the first place. LAPD commanders argue that, as with an airplane, danger is inherent in what they do.

But the department’s most fundamental beliefs-aggressive, proactive policing and a fiercely guarded political independence-are things that people in the department have chosen to believe. These LAPD core beliefs are not inherent, they’re learned. It’s the equivalent of an airliner taking off in heavy fog. If you choose to do so, every once in a while you are going to go down in flames.