Consent Decree

The Los Angeles Police Commission has completed its work and forwarded to the mayor three capable candidates to succeed William J. Bratton as chief of police. The matter now rests with Antonio Villaraigosa, who must decide what he wants in a chief. This is a moment of great consequence: The mayor will not likely make another appointment with more serious ramifications for the city or his legacy. Bratton's tenure offers many indicators of what qualities are important for a chief's success -- as well as a few where improvement is in order.

Now that Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton has announced that he is leaving his job in October, the popular law enforcer has become practically untouchable. But for the future of policing in Los Angeles, an independent inquiry is needed into whether his departure involved a conflict of interest that has compromised the latest chapter of police reform. In May 2001, the Los Angeles City Council selected a former New York prosecutor, Michael Cherkasky, and the firm he then ran, Kroll Associates, to be the independent monitor overseeing police reforms mandated by a federal consent decree in the wake of the Rampart scandal.

In announcing his decision Wednesday to step down as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and reenter the private sector, William J. Bratton turned a spotlight on the firm that has hired him. Altegrity is a company with several thousand employees and a significant presence in a secretive industry that, among other things, provides businesses and government agencies with intelligence-gathering and other investigative services.

William J. Bratton has been the best thing that happened to the LAPD since William H. Parker, the man who created our modern Police Department over half a century ago. Bratton came to a city plagued by high rates of crime, rampant gang violence, the unhappy memory of the Rodney King riots, deep distrust between the police and the black community and a consent decree in which a federal judge made clear his intention to make wholesale changes in how we were policed.

Declaring that the Los Angeles Police Department has reformed itself significantly after decades of corruption and brutality complaints, a U.S. judge on Friday ended a long-running period of federal oversight. U.S. District Court Judge Gary A. Feess terminated the consent decree federal officials had imposed on the LAPD in 2001, after the Rampart corruption scandal.

A federal judge said Monday that he needs more time to decide whether federal monitoring and oversight of the Los Angeles Police Department should continue. U.S. District Judge Gary Feess had been expected to issue a decision this week but instead filed an order extending the consent decree to July 15. Feess wrote that he received motions to terminate the consent decree from the city, as well as submissions from the police union and American Civil Liberties Union, and other materials since a June 15 hearing.

It is time to end the 8-year-old federal consent decree that already has spurred the Los Angeles Police Department's remarkable transformation from an institution essentially at war with much of the city into one that -- on most days, in most places -- does its best "to protect and to serve." The qualifiers in that sentence are employed only because there is no perfection this side of the grave, in policing or any other human activity. That is one of the things U.S. District Judge Gary A.

A judge Monday postponed deciding whether to free the Los Angeles Police Department from years of federal oversight. More than eight years ago, following the Rampart corruption scandal, the LAPD was forced by the U.S. Department of Justice to agree to a sweeping set of reforms aimed at improving officers' behavior and the department's ability to maintain order in its own house. In 2007, U.S. District Judge Gary A.