Thin Blue Line Wrapped in Red Tape at LAPD
Bureaucracy and politics come between the Los Angeles police and their work.
Police work is often a stressful endeavor, but not for the reasons you might think. Yes, there is the risk of being shot, stabbed, or clubbed in the head, but most cops will tell you that the threat to life and limb is not, in fact, the most stressful aspect of working the streets. Rather, what really gets the bile flowing in a cop’s gut is the nonsense he must routinely endure, nonsense that rains down upon him in torrents from incompetent superiors and craven politicians. Sometimes adding to the frustration are media types who, either out of ignorance or bias, present an inaccurate picture of law enforcement to their audiences. Here in Los Angeles, recent events have produced some vivid examples of this, sending many cops to their medicine cabinets in search of relief. To wit:
- Two weeks ago, the Los Angeles police commission continued on its quixotic mission to stem “racial profiling” in the LAPD, this despite the absence of even a shred of evidence that such profiling occurs.
- Later that week, even as the police commissioners busied themselves in the implementation of their vision of a bias-free utopia, the decision was made elsewhere in the LAPD to have some officers assigned to narcotics, vice, and gang assignments work during the day, thus sparing the city the expense of overtime payments to those officers when they attend court during their off-duty hours. The fact that the crimes those officers are supposed to investigate and curtail occur primarily at night was insufficient to deter this decision.
- Capping the week was a ruling from a federal judge who lifted the restraining order that had blocked implementation of a remaining provision in the consent decree under which the LAPD has operated since 2001. The LAPD is now free to impose financial disclosure requirements on officers working gang and narcotics squads. The judge made his ruling despite the near-universal acknowledgment that the required measures will be ineffectual in curbing corruption and will only discourage officers from seeking assignment to the affected units.
- The final insult — in the current cycle, at least; more will surely follow — came the following Monday with an article in the Los Angeles Daily News that completely mischaracterized changes being made to the LAPD’s disciplinary system, changes designed to make the system more equitable to police officers and less burdensome to an already unwieldy bureaucracy.
LAPD officers take to the streets today weighted under the burden of all this officially sanctioned lunacy, compared to which the possibility of a mere gunfight or conk on the noggin is like a day at the beach. We’ll work backward through the list.
The Daily News article described changes being made to a disciplinary system widely regarded within the LAPD as capricious and inflexible. Though much improved since 2002, when Bernard Parks was ousted as chief of the LAPD in favor of William Bratton, the system is still seen as an impediment to effective law enforcement, consuming resources and discouraging proactive police work. Deputy Chief Mark Perez, who heads the department’s Professional Standards Bureau, describes the new system as one that puts “strategy over penalty.” Sounds reasonable enough to me.
But note how Daily News writer Rachel Uranga summarizes the changes. “The new process applies across the board,” she writes, “from officers who accidentally wreck their squad cars to those who beat or shoot people.” Thus the reader is left to conclude that the LAPD will deal no more harshly with an officer who unjustifiably shoots or beats someone than they would with one who gets into a traffic accident. And Uranga opens the article with a hoary reference to two of the LAPD’s more notorious perceived misdeeds, the Rodney King beating of 1991 and the May Day melee at L.A.’s MacArthur Park in 2007 (discussed here, here, and here). For all the hysteria generated over the May Day incident, acts of genuine police brutality were almost nonexistent. And as for Rodney King, if the LAPD’s critics need to reach back 17 years for their evidence, maybe things in the department aren’t as bad as they would have people believe.
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“Jack Dunphy” is the pseudonym of an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.
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6 Comments
1. DavidN:This whole issue: whether the LAPD is any good at its job, and when it falls short, why, is one of those touchy issues that the city of LA seems to struggle with in a fashion that no other big city seems to. Perhaps it’s that we’re in the land of make believe. We’ve had not just the Rampart scandal, but the Biggie Smalls murder, and the whole intersected criminal action (documented rather thoroughly in the book LAbyrinth). And for whatever reason we get these absolutely silly criminal incidents where the most egregiously silly questions are asked as if they actually make sense. For instance, you get police officers accused of racial profiling in neighborhoods where the ethnicity of the residents is monolithic. A friend of mine used to teach junior high school math. The student body of his school literally was 99.5% Hispanic. One child in 200 was black, instead of Hispanic. Yet some moron is going to complain about racial profiling if white and Asian kids from the neighborhood aren’t questioned, too, whenever there’s a crime.
Our latest silliness is the Grim Sleeper killings. I didn’t come up with the name, and I agree it’s rather flip, but it’s handy, so I’ll use it. It was invented by LA Weekly. Apparently someone leaked the existence of a serial killer to the media. The police have been investigating for more than 2 decades. The killer murdered a number of people (I don’t have the figures in front of me, but it was 7 or 8 people, I think) back in the 80s, and then stopped for 13 years (hence the Sleeper reference) before restarting his crime spree in 2002 or 2003. The problem here, of course, is that media attention doesn’t catch serial killers; unfortunately, they’re usually caught by meticulous record-checking (Son of Sam), stakeouts (the Atlanta child killings), or sometimes dumb luck. If the community gets outraged, however, you have a large “task force” formed, which sops up money that would go towards fighting other sorts of crime, which wind up suffering as a result. This is why police officers are so reluctant to admit a particular set of killings are the work of a serial. They’re almost impossible to catch, regardless of what you see on TV, and the money can often be better spent elsewhere.
Be interesting to read what Mr. Dunphy has to say about this latest “scandal”.
Sep 5, 2008 - 2:56 am 2. Reactions, Media “errors” and more | The Anchoress:[...] a cop’s job even harder. Because that works so well in England. 3:05 [...]
Sep 5, 2008 - 12:05 pm 3. Rubicon:One wonders if “ALL” in public life were required to release all of their own financial information to the extent these officers must, if then that requirement might be considered onerous. Does the judge do this? Does the Chief do this? Are these records all to be “public”?
Sep 5, 2008 - 4:46 pm 4. Mike Boyce:Why should I allow my financial life to be broadcast to the world? Lets face it, the “leaks” coming out of public offices in local, state, and federal bureaucracies lately, are nothing short of breathtaking. So, once the financial dealings of an officer are revealed “accidentally, who pays the fines & who accepts responsibility for the “leak”?
The guy recommending this be implemented who also collects a $200,000 a month fee to review those records, is as biased as any partisan I’ve ever heard of. That fact alone should justify a higher court overturning this ruling.
BUT………… in liberal leftist la la land, where do as I say not as I do is the newest commandment of the liberal left, who knows!?
A fine and shining example of left wing, liberal, polictacl correctness gone awry and continuing to exist inspite of itself. The liberal politicians, judges and media just will not accept facts as evidence. They always have and always will continue to pound away at their theories and ram them down the publics throat in an effort to make a case that cannot be made. L.A. doesn’t deserve the quality officers they have. The people do, because they are the innocent victims (victims also of the propaganda foisted upon them) of a police force prevented from doing police work. I hate to remind the media in L.A., not to mention the police commision, that crime is not pretty and those who commit it are ugly and it takes tough, dedicated professionals to deal with it. I have an idea. Lets dismantle the LAPD and hire private, unarmed security guards under the ownership of confirmed liberals and see what happens. This PC madness has gone on way too long. Why is our American society so bent on self-destruction? And why do the pied-pipers of the left wing media manage to sell their tripe? It’s way beyond me. Thumbs up to the men and women on the street in the LAPD. I thank you doubly for your service in the face of crime, criminals and, oh yeah, people who break the law also.
Sep 5, 2008 - 5:17 pm 5. david:That was a depressing read. Thanks for the important info though.
Sep 5, 2008 - 5:19 pm 6. Irwin Copper:Last week, the media reported a historic reduction in the homicide rate for the City of Los Angeles. This is a great accomplishment for the hard working men and women of the thinnest of thin blue lines-the LAPD. The credit for the reduction rightfully belongs to the officers and detectives, not the managers that are assigned to desks shining their seat with their respective posteriors.
There could be so much more from this organization because as Mr. Dunphy astutely pointed out the LAPD is bogged down in a paper intensive, stifling, and an insanely inefficient bureaucratic nightmare. Thousands of officers are not assigned to field duties because Department managers, the courts, politicians have determined cops should be assigned to such critical divisions as Audit Division, Civil Rights Integrity Division, Art Theft Detail, Animal Cruelty Task Force, Professional Standards Bureau (one of the largest and most inefficient), Threat Assessment Unit, HAZ MAT, staff to command officers, and tons of specialized “do nothing” units that have absolutely nothing to do with the motto of the Department, “To Protect and To Serve.”
Don’t you believe me? If you can find one of these LAPD officers assigned to a specialized unit, ask them what they do on a daily basis. These “cops” usually work great hours with holidays, weekends, and three days a week off. The majority will attempt to explain to you how they spend their day on your tax money. The longer it takes that officer to explain their job to you the more you should deduce their job is a duplicate of another organization’s duty (like the Humane Society or even the feds) or responsibility, or it should be civilianized, or eliminated.
Badge carrying officers assigned to conduct audits of whether someone checked a box on an Investigative Report or Arrest Report. Ridiculous! Police officers assigned to units that traditionally were the purview of the Fire Department (Arson & HAZ MAT), teams of auditors, the Art Theft Detail. Court Liaison and Subpoena Control officers, and many filing units (officers that present cases to DA’s), There are too many to list.
The 257 people killed thus far this year in Los Angeles is a tragedy, not a success. To call this a success is especially horrifying considering the LAPD has thousands of officers not assigned to respond to help you if you call. Based on Chief William Bratton’s philosophy of, “…putting cops on dots,” (meaning placing officers in crime areas) the LAPD could do much better. If the LAPD put more officers and detectives in field positions instead of investigating whether Brittany Spears is harassed by TMZ, crime will continue to go down. By field positions, I mean officers and detectives that work 24/7 in the community police stations that patrol, conduct investigations, and respond to your calls in a timely manner.
How many Angelenos would not be victims of homicide, robbery, rape, burglary, and theft if the LAPD put the thousands of officers in the community, day and night, instead of behind a desk auditing reports or getting coffee for a Deputy Chief?
Sep 7, 2008 - 11:05 am