IT IS LONG PAST TIME to retire outdated stereotypes of the Los Angeles Police Department. Unfortunately, a recent blue-ribbon panel has given them new life.
Police Chief William J. Bratton commissioned the Rampart Review Panel in 2003 to evaluate whether his department was still at risk for a corruption scandal like the Rampart gang-unit fiasco of 1999. Ignoring the radical changes in the department over the last four years, the panel, chaired by civil rights attorney Constance Rice, incorrectly concluded that it was. Worse, it recycled old chestnuts about a racially insensitive, overly aggressive LAPD that will only make the panel's stated goal of improved police-community relations more elusive.
The key conceit of the report is a Manichaean distinction between what it portrays as the good policing in the revamped Rampart Division and what it sees as the bad policing that allegedly remains the norm in South Los Angeles. Rampart policing uses what the report calls community problem-solving to reduce crime. South L.A. policing supposedly relies on what the report dubs the "LAPD warrior model" and "proactivesuppression" tactics. Those needlessly harsh tactics are largely to blame for the police-community tensions that plague South L.A., the panel claims.
Given the otherwise bleak tenor of the report, one must be grateful for the accolades that it justifiably pours on the Rampart Division. But its thesis that policing there is an aberration rests on blindness to the systemwide reforms of recent years and the decades-long cultural shifts within the LAPD. The same innovative leadership at Parker Center oversees the Rampart Division and the South Bureau. It equally demands lower crime, professionalism and accountability from both commands.
The Rampart Division benefited from an infusion of extra officers after the corruption scandal. The added manpower allowed it to more rigorously enforce such nuisance violations as graffiti, a strategy that Rice denounced as gangster-like posturing in a 2002 Op-Ed article. Then-Rampart Capt. Charles Beck also tirelessly reached out to community representatives. As a result of these initiatives, MacArthur Park was reborn as a neighborhood sanctuary.
But South Bureau commanders and officers work just as hard at forging ties with the local community. They cooperate with other city agencies in combating gang violence. If those efforts have not yielded results as dramatic as in Rampart, the difference lies not in policing philosophy, but in the cultures of the two areas.
