Lift the LAPD consent decree

* Fully 43% of the women and men who now wear the department's badge have never known anything but life under the consent decree's reforms. Bratton has utterly transformed both the composition and the culture of the department's command staff. The proof of that comes when the police screw up, as they inevitably do. What's important is not the failure but what follows. For instance, when a collapse of supervision resulted in a police riot in MacArthur Park on May Day in 2007, the department disciplined those responsible, investigated the incident fully and issued a full report for everyone to read. More important, it altered its approach to volatile crowd-control situations, and the city saw the result this week in the LAPD's handling of the street violence that followed the Lakers' NBA championship.

* Finally, the most troubling of the ACLU's arguments for continuing the decree -- the statistics on police stops and arrests that seem to suggest continued racial profiling -- are problematic. It's possible to derive another meaning entirely from those same numbers. One of the reforms that Bratton has implemented involves a continuous redeployment of the department's resources to where serious crime is most severe. It's an unfortunate fact that 43% of the city's homicides and 38% of its violent crimes occur in just four of the LAPD's South Los Angeles divisions, whose people are overwhelmingly African American and Latino. Seen in that light, what may look like racial profiling is, in fact, the department's attempt to ensure that black and Latino Angelenos have equal access to public safety.

Los Angeles owes the Justice Department's civil rights division and the federal court a debt of gratitude for recalling the city to its duty to do equal justice to all its citizens. That's an ideal that will remain forever beyond reach, but the fact is that we can take the struggle from here.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com