The LAPD's come a long way

The modern Los Angeles Police Department hit bottom on the afternoon of April 29, 1992. That day, a Ventura County jury refused to convict four officers who had been charged with assaulting Rodney G. King. Enraged by the decision and the department's culture of brutality and racism -- so vividly documented months earlier by the Christopher Commission -- a mob gathered outside Parker Center, heaving rocks at the building and setting a guard shack on fire.

At that moment, Chief Daryl F. Gates, who regularly decried the influence of politics on policing, was attending a political fundraiser across town. And in the hours that followed, the same LAPD whose brutality gave rise to this anger suddenly discovered its latent cowardice. Officers let the mob rampage downtown, and those sent to settle upwelling violence in South Los Angeles watched on television as Reginald Denny was pulled from his truck at Florence and Normandie and beaten to a pulp.

Recovery from those terrible days has been long and difficult, but successful. Today, Los Angeles' police force is better trained, more diverse, better disciplined and better led than the one that betrayed the city's trust in 1992. Its work is appreciated by residents across racial lines. Its record, though not perfect, is far less inflammatory and far more constructive.

As Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his Police Commission consider a successor to outgoing Chief William J. Bratton, they do so in an atmosphere of progress, not crisis. It has been more than a generation since a chief left the department in such strong shape, and that makes this selection an opportunity to improve rather than yet another mandate to start over. Today's LAPD has topped 10,000 officers for the first time; crime is down; police are using less serious force; and city residents overwhelmingly approve of the department's work. Those are heartening indicators.

There are, to be sure, areas where improvement is called for. The LAPD's disciplinary system, for instance, is a relic of Chief William Parker's "thin blue line" era; it is cumbersome and opaque. As Chief Bernard C. Parks used to say, the LAPD disciplines too many and fires too few. Too often, police operate outside the scope of public scrutiny. An officer wears his name on his uniform, but if he shoots and kills a suspect, the department, which once led the profession in public disclosure, will protect his anonymity. That is largely the result of a police union that misunderstands its mission and a department that has allowed it to do so. Rather than secure for officers the wages and benefits they deserve, the Los Angeles Police Protective League -- sometimes with Bratton's complicity -- has fought to protect individual officers from public scrutiny despite the public nature of their work. The next chief should do more to reward good officers and less to protect bad ones.