Patience Erodes as Personalities, Politics Flare

The blowup between Police Chief Bernard C. Parks and Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti is more than another institutional skirmish between two agencies whose feuds have a long and bitter history.

It also is a fierce clash of personalities, a politically and legally charged confrontation, and, according to some observers, such an exercise in overreaching by Parks that it instantly turned many of the city’s political leaders against him. Many of them were outraged at reports that Parks had effectively cut off the district attorney’s office from files and reports related to the Rampart police scandal.

“The chief has now made this his war,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a longtime friend of Parks. “He has raised the stakes so high and so personally that he has made this about him. That’s a tragedy. The chief doesn’t deserve it, but he’s brought it on himself.”

The explosive conflict between the chief and district attorney occurs against two backdrops, one historically rich, the other politically hot.

For years, police and prosecutors have battled over one thing or another, from the Police Department’s resistance to allowing prosecutors to wade too deeply into the scenes of police shootings to the testy disagreements about which agency was most responsible for blowing the case against O.J. Simpson.

In some cases, those disputes have grown personal. Garcetti and his deputies feuded with then-Chief Daryl F. Gates over prosecutors’ rights to inspect crime scenes and interview witnesses to police shootings. Those disagreements continued through the 1980s and 1990s, by which time Garcetti had been elected district attorney, and Police Chief Willie L. Williams was at the helm of the LAPD.

For the most part, however, those spats have been run-of-the-mill flare-ups between police and prosecutors, higher profile than in most cities but otherwise not that unusual.

This one is much bigger than a spat. Parks repeatedly has said Garcetti was going too slow in his Rampart investigation, refusing to prosecute the Rampart officers accused of wrongdoing. Garcetti has insisted that he wants to go further and deeper, gathering evidence for major felony prosecutions in Rampart and, if necessary, in other police divisions.

That has made the latest confrontation something else altogether.

“This is the most outrageous act ever committed by a police chief of this city,” said one observer with long ties to Parks, Garcetti and Mayor Richard Riordan. “And it’s got politics beneath it.”

Those politics concern Garcetti’s precarious position as an official facing a June runoff against his top deputy. The incumbent finished second in the initial round of that election, and many observers blamed his poor showing on Parks’ public broadsides attacking the district attorney for his handling of the Rampart scandal.

Now, Garcetti is in the fight of his political life, and no longer appears willing to take criticism from the chief lying down.

In interviews and news conferences Wednesday, Garcetti called the chief’s actions unilateral, illegal and unacceptable.

Any foot-dragging in the case, Garcetti said, was Parks’ fault, not his.

Despite his fiery, sometimes angry rhetoric, Garcetti said politics were not part of his calculation. Many observers are skeptical of that claim, but agree that his public break with Parks carries significant political risk.

Opinion polls conducted before the Rampart scandal was in full swing suggested that two of the region’s three most popular public figures were Riordan and Parks. The third, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, is not a factor in this debate.

As a result, staking out a position that is so starkly at odds with the mayor and chief could expose Garcetti to their supporters’ wrath on election day in November. It even could prod Riordan, who has been neutral in the district attorney’s race, into endorsing Steve Cooley against the incumbent.

More broadly, all the players in the case may suffer in the public’s estimation for their failure to work together.

On the other hand, Garcetti already may be so damaged by Parks’ public criticisms that some analysts suggest the county prosecutor has little to lose in taking on the chief directly.

As he attempted to extricate himself from the crisis, Parks met with a number of city officials and others, suggesting in those conversations that he had been misunderstood, that Garcetti had falsely accused him of refusing to cooperate and that news reports had exaggerated the split.

But some of those who met with Parks said they came away from those meetings unconvinced.

Some, including some who support the chief’s efforts to clean up corruption in the department, found his explanations contradictory. And several noted that, even as Parks promised to cooperate with the district attorney’s office in the future, he continued to complain about its handling of the case so far.

“When he was done explaining,” said one official, “I was more confused than ever.”

So inflammatory was Parks’ move to cut off the district attorney that City Atty. James K. Hahn, generally a supporter of the chief, called Riordan on Wednesday morning and told him the time had come for Riordan to tell Parks to back down and obey the law. Although Hahn would not describe the rest of their conversation, other sources said Riordan was noncommittal. Those same sources said Riordan rejected Hahn’s request to be allowed to join an afternoon meeting of Garcetti, Parks and U.S. Atty. Alejandro Mayorkas.

A flare-up over that meeting just a few hours later tested Riordan’s ability to play a constructive role in the police scandal. Riordan’s scheduled meeting with the various law enforcement officials fell apart when Garcetti spurned the invitation.

Riordan, the district attorney said, has “intervened in the past but not successfully.”

Pressed for an explanation of why he would not sit down with the mayor and police chief, Garcetti added: “There’s no useful purpose for the meeting.”

For his part, Riordan initially appeared caught between his loyalty to Parks, whom he appointed, and a universal legal consensus that the chief was out of line. The mayor tried to stay neutral and, as he often has in recent days, laid much of the blame for the latest controversy on the press.

“I am not going to pass judgment,” the mayor said when confronted by reporters at Fairfax High School early in the day. “My job as chief executive of the city is to get the parties together, to get them to work together, to get Rampart behind us. What I’m going to tell everybody, the chief, the D.A., everybody else, is beware of the media reaction.”

Faced with Garcetti’s brushoff, Riordan called on the district attorney Wednesday afternoon. According to people knowledgeable about the conversation, Riordan was seeking Garcetti’s help in finding a face-saving way out of the controversy that would allow cooperation to resume without unduly embarrassing the police chief.

Riordan held a separate meeting with Parks.

By late afternoon, Riordan’s patience had run out. At a news conference, the exasperated mayor crumpled his notes and tossed them out.

“Let me put this aside,” he said. “This isn’t a children’s game. The district attorney and the chief of police have been acting like children. They’ve got to start acting like adults and put the city first.”

Despite his shuttle diplomacy and his emergence with a truce between the law enforcement adversaries, some critics said the mayor’s difficulty in achieving that reflect his dwindling ability to marshal consensus in the Rampart case.

Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, once a Riordan ally but increasingly a critic, said the mayor’s uncritical acceptance of the LAPD had made his views largely irrelevant in an atmosphere where political sentiment is building for independent review of the department and its work.

“Clearly, the mayor has little ability to help resolve this,” said Ridley-Thomas. “He’s not looked to as one who has the capacity and/or the inclination to resolve the conflicts that are presented to us.”