Parks, Panel Finish Talks

The Los Angeles Police Commission completed a nearly nine-hour job interview with Police Chief Bernard C. Parks Tuesday, but made no immediate decision on whether he should be reappointed to a second five-year term.

The make-or-break sessions for the 37-year LAPD veteran, which stretched over two days, left commission members with so much information to digest that they said they will defer their decision until at least next week.

Parks appeared subdued in brief appearances Monday and early Tuesday. But when he emerged from the final portion of the interview about 2 p.m. Tuesday, he was walking jauntily and smiling broadly. He called the session “a great exercise.”

Commissioners, who lingered two hours after he left, ended their meeting in what appeared to be a jovial mood. The session was “very informative, very informative, really,” said Commissioner David S. Cunningham III.

Parks’ request for a second term was thrown into question when Mayor James K. Hahn announced earlier this year that he opposed the chief’s reappointment.

The City Charter calls for the commission, whose members are appointed by the mayor, to make the decision. The commission’s vote is subject to a City Council override.

A closed session to consider the chief’s reappointment scheduled for today was postponed until Monday, and is scheduled to continue through Tuesday and next Wednesday.

The commission’s much-anticipated interview with Parks was held in closed session, despite Parks’ request to open it to the public and the protests of activists who demanded that they be able to hear what he had to say.

It started Monday afternoon with a brief hitch, after Parks surprised commissioners by bringing his lawyer to the session and was told that would not fly. The session went more smoothly, commissioners said, as a presentation Parks had prepared evolved into what they described as a lengthy, free-flowing question-and-answer session that lasted well into the night and resumed Tuesday morning.

After a month of ferocious machinations and controversy over the chief’s reappointment, Tuesday’s session unfolded in a relatively quiet atmosphere. The commission’s regularly scheduled meeting was sparsely attended, with only about a dozen activists on either side of the battle on hand. Opponents wore T-shirts bearing the chief’s name with a line through it.

The commissioners also seemed at pains to downplay the drama.

Some of Parks’ most vocal advocates said Tuesday that the commission’s constantly repeated assertions that it was proceeding independently of the mayor’s view had left them less certain than before it started that the outcome was foretold.

The impression seemed to defuse some of the political furor that at times had risen to insults and implicit threats as the commission has set about evaluating the chief. Some Parks supporters Tuesday said they were resigned to simply waiting. “Strategically, we need to take time out,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League.

‘Maybe I’m Naive, but I Still Have Hope’

Despite what Mack said was widespread cynicism in the black community about the commission’s process in evaluating the chief, Mack went so far Tuesday as to say that, “Maybe they are serious. Maybe I’m naive, but I still have hope.”

Similarly, black activists who had planned civil disobedience in front of Parker Center to protest the commission’s decision to interview the chief in closed session postponed such plans. “Chief Parks made a comment that so far the hearings are going good, so we don’t want to do anything to disrupt them,” said Najee Ali, executive director of Project Islamic HOPE.

The chief’s opponents confined their activities to public comments at the commission’s open session, raising concerns about departures of officers from the LAPD, rising crime and community policing efforts.

The appearance of the chief’s lawyer Monday caused a stir. The move delayed the start of the interview, as commissioners debated whether it was proper to allow the lawyer to sit in. Assistant City Atty. Mark Burton advised them that under the rules that govern closed sessions, “the only people who are allowed to be there for a closed session are the people who are necessary for the board to make its decision.”

After a brief discussion, in which commissioners said they would not conduct the session with Parks’ lawyer present, the chief relented. The meeting resumed after his lawyer left.

Asked why he had sought to have his lawyer sit in on the session the previous day, a fleeting, wan smile crossed Parks’ face. “Everyone has a lawyer,” he quipped. But he declined to comment further or identify the lawyer, calling it “a private matter.”

Commissioners apparently never learned the lawyer’s name. “He mumbled his name, and no one knew who it was,” said Joe Gunn, commission executive director. Commissioners were taken aback, he said, adding: “It’s a job interview, and for a job interview you don’t bring an attorney.”

The incident was the second strategic curveball the chief had thrown at the commission since last week, when he requested that his job interview be held in open session. Commissioners considered the request, then denied it on the advice of the city attorney’s office, whose advisor said that the likely discussion of sensitive deployment, officer-involved shootings and personnel matters involving people other than Parks would preclude an open session.

Parks said Tuesday he had made the request because he believed it was in the public’s interest to hear his response to the commission, but was “not upset” that the session remained closed.

After the two days of meetings wrapped up late Tuesday afternoon, three commissioners, including commission President Rick Caruso, went out of their way to praise the chief, saying he had given a good presentation.

In a brief interview with The Times after the meeting, Parks shrugged off the suggestion that the situation had been a tense one. “Another day in heaven,” he said. “No reason to be nervous.”

Parks said he talked to commissioners about each of several performance criteria they had specified, ranging from management to crime control measures.

He said his proudest accomplishment was to lower crime levels in Los Angeles. Violent crime in Los Angeles followed a downward national trend during the 1990s, then edged back up at the end of the decade. But it has remained substantially below the very violent years of the late 1980s and 1990s, when new and disputed crack cocaine markets exploded across the city, leaving a trail of bloodshed.

New York Program Emulated by Chief

Parks’ efforts to control crime focused on a program he instituted called FASTRAC, in which commanders in different areas of the city are called to account for statistical data showing crime trends on a neighborhood level.

The effort is based on a model employed in New York City.

Parks said his second proudest accomplishment was forging better relationships with constituencies in Los Angeles previously alienated from the police--especially gays, Koreans and Central American immigrants.

Although Caruso said Parks had frankly discussed his weaknesses with the commission, Parks demurred on this question in a subsequent interview, saying only that “everything, we can do better.”

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Times staff reporters Patrick McGreevy and Tina Daunt contributed to this report.