Who Polices the Police? The Case of MacArthur Park

Every great Los Angeles policing crisis since 1965 has resulted in modest but real reforms which would have been impossible to achieve otherwise. The current crisis arising from the LAPD assaults on immigrant rights protesters and reporters in MacArthur Park provides yet another opportunity.

Forty two years after the McCone Commission, there still is a fundamental problem of the police engaging in illegal misconduct beyond the control of the Chief and elected officials.

The police violence in MacArthur Park shows that anyone who believes the federal consent decree imposed as a result of the Rampart crisis should be lifted is deeply mistaken. That includes the Mayor and the Chief. The consent decree must stay in effect until these problems are solved.

Chief Bratton needs to decide, and tell us, whether he is willing to spend more time in Los Angeles instead of traveling out-of-town about one-third of the year. The events in MacArthur Park prove that the Chief cannot succeed while being out of town, or by claiming that the LAPD is a well-oiled machine that can run by remote control while he is away at conferences. If he is unwilling to sharply reduce his travel, the mayor needs to look at other options. The events in MacArthur Park reveal that the most highly-trained and touted police units cannot restrain themselves in the face of minor provocations.

If the Chief is willing to spend more time here in Los Angeles, fine, he should have reform benchmarks to achieve in his second five-year term. Failure to achieve the benchmarks should involve some consequences. Implementing the core findings of the two Connie Rice reports, which the city paid $800,000 to have produced and Bratton endorsed, is the place to begin. Instead the reports have been shelved.

The Mayor's understandable hopes of avoiding yet another police misconduct scandal during his watch have vanished, and he needs to take a more active role as a police reformer too, not delegate the tough issues to his appointees. He should join in calling for benchmarks as the basis of renewing the Chief's contract.

The Inspector General needs to be more aggressive and be given the power to launch independent investigations, instead of merely reacting to investigations carried out by the LAPD. The IG and Commission need to achieve greater autonomy as a result of this scandal.

The existing protocols concerning the media's right to cover demonstrations, signed after the 2000 Democratic convention police episode, should be enforceable, not simply aspirational.

The police commission needs to adopt an official policy statement declaring that the LAPD should respect and avoid interfering in legitimate gang intervention activities. Rehabilitation programs, jobs and economic development are ignored and underfunded while billions are poured into police and prosecutorial suppression strategies. The LAPD is pursuing a globalization of its war on gangs, recently signing a collaboration agreement with El Salvador, where there are plenty of death squads and no meaningful controls on the poice and prisons. MacArthur Park shows that the street-justice spirit of the disbanded Rampart CRASH unit is far from banished, but is alive even in the highly-trained Metro unit. This is the moment to adopt a new approach as the Mayor and Council look at funding a proposed gang violence reduction program and the Rice reports.

The core issues revealed in all the blue-ribbon reports since 1965 have to do with deep and secret patterns of a warrior organizational culture, one which is almost impossible to change in anyone's tenure. The only answers in the short term, therefore, are clearer rules, stronger regulation, and a consensus on civilian control of police, not the other way around. There were something like 6,400 citizen complaints last year, but the police accepted only a few hundred as valid enough to even investigate, with a paltry few resulting in real discipline. Secrecy still surrounds the multi-million dollar costs to taxpayers of those few cases of police brutality that are settled behind closed doors. Unless the embedded "problem officers" choose to get out of Dodge, Los Angeles needs the checks and balances of an independent police review process, fully staffed, with community-based offices to receive citizen complaints, the solution that has been avoided for political reasons for thirty years.

So long as the police continue to police the police we will see more MacArthur Parks. That's neither acceptable or viable in a city claiming to be a 21st century crossroads.