Criminal
Jul. 26, 2002
Paramedic Hahn Puts Tourniquet on LAPD, Calls It Good News
Column by Garry Abrams - The spectacle of politicians trying to deliver reassurance in a sea of troubles is a constant of American public life. Faced with stock markets tanking faster than the Titanic, for instance, presidents of many administrations have expressed faith in the underlying American economy.
The spectacle of politicians trying to deliver reassurance in a sea of troubles is a constant of American public life.
Faced with stock markets tanking faster than the Titanic, for instance, presidents of many administrations have expressed faith in the underlying American economy.
And in the current flood of corporate scandals, President Bush has trotted out the standard national explanation for corruption: It's only a few bad apples who cooked books and otherwise flimflammed investors into believing gravity didn't exist on Wall Street.
In Los Angeles, the only-a-few-bad-apples mantra is practically written in stone as an explanation of why the city's Police Department has been mired in scandal almost constantly for more than a decade. From Rodney King to O.J. to the Rampart scandal, the LAPD's supporters have resorted to the bad-apple defense to explain offenses committed by officers on the witness stand and in back alleys.
At any rate, all those bad apples have turned the Police Department into a political hot potato. So in late winter and early spring this year, the city was treated to a duel between Mayor James Hahn and Police Chief Bernard Parks.
Parks wanted a second five-year term as chief. Hahn wanted Parks out and blamed Parks for many of the LAPD's troubles, notably morale so low it couldn't be scraped off the floor with a putty knife.
With the assistance of the police commission, Hahn won - sort of. (That same commission is sorting through 50 applications from wanna-be successors to Parks, a process that promises to generate additional controversy.)
Hahn's victory over Parks cost Hahn much of his support in the African-American community, which had supported Hahn heavily in last year's mayoral election.
Against this backdrop of turmoil, Hahn and other city politicians, along with some top cops, gathered Wednesday at the LAPD's Hollywood division to deliver what could be called the good-apples view of the department.
Hahn and company trotted out an array of facts and figures that purportedly showed the LAPD no longer is being shunned by prospective recruits and abandoned by officers who jump ship to work for less-controversial police agencies.
Recruitment for the LAPD was up 28 percent during his just-ended first year in office, Hahn said, while attrition was down 26 percent. Recent classes at the police academy have been full, he said, noting that in the not-so-distant past the academy sometimes had to postpone training because of a lack of recruits.
Hahn credited the LAPD's new flexible work schedule, which Hahn promised as a candidate, and a streamlined and shortened application process among the reasons the department is retaining more officers and attracting more recruits.
Some of Hahn's statements at the press conference sounded like campaign promises, offering a seductive vision of L.A. as a real Lotusland, as opposed to the current fractious, low-rent version where people - not all that infrequently - are killed by stray bullets.
"We need to make Los Angeles the safest city in America, and we're committed to doing that," Hahn said.
But other Hahn remarks indicated that L.A. as paradise - or blemish-free orchard - remains a fairly distant goal.
"We stopped the bleeding," Hahn said of the efforts to retain and recruit police officers.
Some other statements just made me wonder.
For instance, Hahn said the city has contacted 400 former Los Angeles police officers about coming back to the LAPD.
Of those, 60 have submitted applications to be reinstated in the department, the mayor said, while another 200 have responded "positively."
That could mean anything from "Yeah, I'll come back when pigs fly" to "I didn't know you cared."
Hahn's bottom line at the press conference was that, by the end of the year, the LAPD will have a net increase of 150 officers, a number he called "modest."
It will take a few years to bring the department up to full strength with 1,000 additional officers, he said.
Let's hope the apple crops defy agricultural probability and are 100 percent wholesome for all those years - because the old metaphors are rotten to the core.
Garry Abrams
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