A Determined Chief Vows to Fight for Job

Nothing about Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks ever suggested he would accept the Police Commission ouster and simply walk away. He is, in a word, headstrong--and always has been.

He is so single-minded he used to study for advancement tests by holing up in vacant apartments. He once used a camper shell parked outside his home, reading by flashlight.

“It was like he was in prison,” his wife, Bobbie, later recalled.

So on Tuesday, when commissioners voted to end his five-year tenure as police chief, Parks responded in character, vowing to fight the action to the end. Next stop will be a hearing before the Los Angeles City Council. Should he fail there, Parks promised to continue reporting for duty until the very last day of his term--Aug. 12.

“I have only one plan at this time,” Parks said, moments after Tuesday’s 4-1 vote. “And that is to get reappointed as chief of police of the city of Los Angeles.”

Parks faced reporters with his head high, his voice eloquent and clear, showing the apparent pride and resolve of a man who has built his life--and his career--around those two very traits.

He also demonstrated the rigidness that critics have cited as a major cause of his downfall. Doggedly defending his track record, lashing out at commissioners and others for “politicizing” the selection process, he painted himself as a reformer and man of principle who simply ran out of time in trying to bring the massive Los Angeles Police Department into line.

In an interview with The Times, he acknowledged the strain of the afternoon’s events. Asked whether the day had been difficult, Parks said: “They are all difficult, but this is one of the more difficult.”

Of the police morale problems cited by commissioners as a reason for denying him another term, Parks said: “It is not the job of the chief of police [to look after] everyone’s individual morale. They have some responsibility to this community . . . to have a mind-set of service.”

Of his reputation for inflexibility, Parks said: “I am inflexible about corrupt officers, about officers who do not tell the truth, about officers who do not treat the public correctly.”

And of the recent upsurge in violent crime also cited by commissioners, Parks invited an inspection of crime trends in the last 30 years--or even the last five.

“You will find a remarkable reduction in crime,” he said.

When Parks achieved his goal of becoming the department’s top officer in 1997, the department was in a crisis. The police beating of Rodney King and the subsequent acquittal of four LAPD officers in that case had caused the riots of 1992 and resulted in public pressure on the department to carry out reforms.

A subsequent corruption scandal, centered on the Rampart Division, has put former officers in jail for skimming drugs and money and planting evidence.

Parks’ hard-line style in dealing with those issues has won him both praise and condemnation. While he traveled to Washington to meet with top Justice Department officials, he alienated some federal authorities who perceived him as strongly resistant to reforms.

Some Officers See Him as ‘Overzealous’

His efforts to enforce internal discipline alienated his own officers, who saw him as “overzealous,” in the words of one veteran motorcycle patrolman. Officers saw him as a man who would not listen to counsel from the ranks, who would not back them in a pinch, who wanted to make such a show of punishing wayward officers that no one was entirely safe in being a good, tough street cop.

“It can’t possibly get any worse,” the motorcycle officer said Tuesday at the 77th Division station in South-Central Los Angeles.

The 11-square-mile precinct has seen 37 murders this year in an eruption of gang violence that threatens to set homicide records.

Another policeman, a 28-year veteran who has spent most of his career in the same precinct, remembers when Parks was a captain there. Despite those ties, the officer was bitter and requested he not be quoted by name.

“When a manager says, verbatim, that morale is not a management problem . . . what direction would you expect things to head?” he asked, comparing the LAPD to Enron. “All the wishes of the officers are stifled. You can only bang your head against a wall so many times.”

He went on to call Parks’ removal “the first step to turn this department around and make an attempt to give the citizens of Los Angeles what they deserve.”

One of the constraints of Parks’ command has been a broad blueprint for reform negotiated between the Justice Department and the city of Los Angeles. The consent decree, signed in 2000, laid out hundreds of provisions for conducting internal audits and tracking problem officers as a way to protect civil liberties.

Parks initially opposed the decree, a point Mayor James K. Hahn has frequently noted in his campaign against him. But Parks defended his stance by saying the LAPD already was undertaking many of those reforms--without being told.

Resentment Over Federal Consent Decree

To Parks, the consent decree represented in large part the appropriation of many of his own efforts, stemming from the department’s investigation of the Rampart scandal.

Parks and his deputy chiefs were proud of what they felt were unique efforts to rout out corruption and squarely face its own failings--only to have others take the credit. Meanwhile, department brass were dismissed for purportedly defending the status quo.

In one sense, the debate over the consent decree was a crystallization of the attributes that brought Parks success--and that cost him allies.

He fought the decree in part because he deeply resented the notion that federal law enforcement authorities--the people behind Waco and Ruby Ridge, two tragedies associated with the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms--would tell him how to run a police department.

So committed was Parks to fighting the imposition of the decree that when his granddaughter was killed in Los Angeles while he was on vacation on the East Coast, he did not return home immediately.

First, he went to Washington to meet with Justice Department officials regarding their demands for the LAPD.

And yet, his stubbornness prevented him from seeing a political solution to the negotiations with the federal government. Even after then-Mayor Richard Riordan had bowed to the inevitable and agreed to sign the decree, Parks continued to fight.

Up until the final minutes before the deal was struck, he lobbied for changes, infuriating some federal officials and police reform advocates.

Parks talks frequently about principles and says honesty is his guiding ethos. That was a theme he hit hard in the days before the commission vote, saying, “I would rather lose my job than not do what’s right for the right reasons.”

One telling moment for Parks came just before the commission retired to closed session Tuesday to decide his fate.

There was a relatively minor agenda item involving the future of the DARE anti-drug education program. Commissioners discussed temporarily scuttling the program so officers could be reassigned to patrol, easing the manpower shortage on the streets.

But Parks, even with his own ouster pending, showed no signs of seeking to appease.

DARE was the department’s only prevention program, he argued. Commission President Rick Caruso, sounding faintly exasperated, finally agreed to defer the issue, after giving the chief a terse admonition: “I suggest you get creative.”

Parks has compared the job of running the LAPD to “keeping 1,000 plates spinning at once.”

Following the commission’s decision, he repeated his oft-expressed feeling that the LAPD is misunderstood.

“I don’t believe adequate attention was given to . . . the complexity of what we deal with,” he said.

“If the complexities are not understood, if we make simplistic decisions, we will end up harming the city.”