Our pandering mayor

Even now, we don't demand that a eulogy's lapidary phrases conform to the rules of evidence. At the same time, the appropriation of funereal remarks to some private purpose long has been regarded as dubious, not to mention coarse. Mark Antony's famous oration over the murdered Caesar's body, for example -- the real one and not the incomparable soliloquy imagined by Shakespeare -- still is regarded with a kind of revulsion for its self-interested incitement to civic discord.

That brings us to another Anthony -- Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- and the casually malicious use he made of his trip to the microphone at Friday's funeral for slain Los Angeles Police Officer Randal Simmons, who lost his life attempting to rescue hostages he believed were being held by a deranged young gunman.

Now, few politicians can be fully trusted near a microphone, particularly before a large audience on an occasion as emotionally charged as Friday's, but nobody could have predicted the reckless digression in Villaraigosa's eulogy of Simmons. First, he informed the audience that "the newspapers" only "tell the truth" about LAPD officers in obituaries. Then the mayor went on to say, "We know that the central story of this department has never been written in consent decrees or the reports of inspectors general."

Really?

If newspapers, including this one, only tell the truth about dead police officers, we are left to assume that they lie about the living ones. Does the mayor have an example in mind? Does he really believe that The Times' stories on the Rampart scandal, which helped lay the groundwork for the reforms now being undertaken under the federal consent decree, were lies? If so, let him say so directly and give examples.

Given the vast effort and expense that's gone into implementing the consent degree between the LAPD and the U.S. Department of Justice, and into making the civilian Police Commission's inspector general an effective advocate of the public's interest in policing, why the sudden desire on Villaraigosa's part to undercut both? Although there's been some entirely predictable resistance to the decree inside the LAPD, the truth is that the department's record of reform under Chief William J. Bratton -- like its generally good community relations and its constructive engagement with the Police Commission -- has been historically remarkable.