Parks Is el Hombre, if Not un Hermano

There was no surprise in Mayor Richard Riordan’s decision last week to nominate Bernard C. Parks as Los Angeles’ new chief of police. I saw it coming for, oh, about 15 years.

That, as best as I can recall, is when I first met Parks at an Urban League dinner where he was among the honorees. I’d just been named to The Times editorial board, and the man who told me that Bernie Parks was someone I should get to know was our former publisher, Tom Johnson.

Sure enough, during the dinner, Parks stopped by Johnson’s front-row table to pay his respects to Times executives seated there, then went on to work the rest of the room like a seasoned politician. Watching the formal, handsome young police officer circulate comfortably amid so many of the city’s black and corporate leaders, I pegged him as an up-and-comer.

Nothing that has happened since then has changed my opinion. Not the Rodney King beating in 1991. Not the terrible rioting that followed in 1992. Not the hiring of Philadelphia’s Willie Williams to be this city’s first black police chief in 1993. And certainly not Williams’ controversial decision in 1994 to demote Parks, then one of his assistant chiefs. If anything, when Williams turned against Parks, who had tried to cultivate a constructive relationship with the new chief, it helped guarantee Parks’ ultimate ascension. For being on the outs with Williams established Parks’ bona fides with all the LAPD insiders who disliked Williams for being an outsider.

That was a pretty neat trick, given the tendency of many of those same LAPD old-timers to be at least a bit cool to an ambitious black man in what was still largely a white bastion.

The only thing that could have stalled Parks’ methodical progress toward the chief’s job were the dramatic demographic changes taking place in Los Angeles.

With the city’s Latino population approaching 45%, and with many of those Latino residents becoming citizens, voters and business or property owners more rapidly than expected, some Latino activists began to talk about the police chief’s job as one of those key local government posts that should go to a Latino almost automatically.

Of course, that view is as erroneous as it is presumptuous. But it is so widespread that it could have been a real political problem for Parks had it not been neatly finessed by Riordan’s Police Commission.

First, the commission singled out four Latino police executives--two from inside the LAPD and two from other police agencies--to be among the six semifinalists for the chief’s job. Then they picked one of the outsiders, Sacramento Police Chief Arturo Venegas, to be among the three finalists, along with Parks and LAPD Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker.

That was nice symbolism, but rather transparent.

The Police Commission knew that the city’s civil service scoring system works against an outsider like Venegas by giving inside candidates extra points for LAPD experience. Still, the message sent by the Spanish surnames on the semifinalists’ list was effective: Hay que ser pacientes. Be patient. Your time is coming.

That is why there has been virtually no criticism of Parks’ selection among Latino activists. Even supporters of the local police official who should have been on the list of LAPD finalists, Chief Lee H. Baca of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, aren’t complaining. They’re too busy planning how to get him elected sheriff next year.

So after 32 years on the force, Parks coasted into the LAPD chief’s office with virtually no opposition and all but the most cynical critics of LAPD wishing him well. But that doesn’t mean the job will be easier for him than it was for Williams. He still must convince many rank-and-file police officers that he is more than a politically savvy downtown bureaucrat.

And he still must convince skeptics like me that an insider long affected by the LAPD’s insular and often rigid culture is capable of reforming the department.

Riordan clearly hopes that Parks, as an African American, will see LAPD from both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective, bringing to the job the loyalty of a man who has devoted his adult life to the force as well as an acute awareness of its flaws. If so, then Parks has already shown that he has the political skill to keep the two perspectives in balance.

Still, I remain among those who think that the best man for LAPD’s top job is a woman. Only someone who can’t even get into the men’s locker room at Parker Center can get beyond the macho locker room mentality that is often at the root of LAPD’s problems. But until we find her, Parks is a solid choice.