Hahn’s Displeasure With Parks Brewed for Years

The year was 1997, and then-City Atty. James K. Hahn was sitting in the sixth-floor office of Police Chief Bernard C. Parks, trying to persuade the chief to change his mind.

Parks had just decided to disband the popular senior lead program and reassign the officers who served as community contacts back to patrol duty.

Can’t you reconsider? the city attorney asked the chief.

But Parks wouldn’t budge. He wanted all officers to engage in community policing, he said, not just senior leads.

“I remember saying, ‘Chief, I’ve heard the old saw that if you make something everyone’s job, then nobody does it,’ ” said Hahn, recalling the encounter.

Mayor Hahn’s announcement last week that he could not support a second term for Parks came as an abrupt and stunning decision to many in the city, but the seeds of Hahn’s dissatisfaction with Parks had been planted over the years in encounters the two men had as they traveled their respective career paths, according to Hahn and others who know both men.

A look at some of their conflicts helps explain why, seven months into his administration, the mayor is already convinced he cannot work with the chief.

Never close, Parks and Hahn embraced distinct philosophies about the structure and the priorities of the Los Angeles Police Department. In particular, they tangled over civilian oversight of the department and police reform.

Their differences only occasionally surfaced in public. Rather, the relationship was marked by a back-room tug of war between a strong-willed police chief and a persistent city attorney.

Former City Councilman Mike Feuer said Hahn may have asked himself if Parks would ever see things his way. “That answer, I think, was provided by his previous experience” with the chief, Feuer said.

Despite their conflicts, however, Hahn held his tongue during last year’s mayoral campaign--a race in which he depended on African American support to defeat Antonio Villaraigosa.

Hahn was the only candidate who did not say he was inclined to oppose the chief’s reappointment. While he stopped short of endorsing the chief for a second term, Hahn said at the time that he thought the chief could reform the department if he was properly focused on the task.

That fact now upsets some African American leaders who campaigned for Hahn and feel misled because Hahn never told them of his reservations about Parks.

“It would have made a difference,” said Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray of the First AME Church. “Given what we know at this particular time, I don’t think the mayor would have received the support of the black community.”

Hahn insists that he had not made up his mind to oppose the chief’s reappointment when he was running for office.

“The miscalculation that I made earlier is that I had thought that the chief’s resistance to things . . . was because he was in sync with the person that got him appointed, Mayor [Richard] Riordan, and that I’d have the opportunity to work with him and have him share my vision and that he would be as enthusiastic and as supportive as of the previous mayor,” Hahn said in a recent interview.

“Now, after seven months here, I realize he was being absolutely true to himself.”

Chief Says He Was Surprised

In public comments since the mayor’s announcement, Parks has said he was surprised to hear of the mayor’s dissatisfaction, saying he believes they have had a “very positive relationship.” He also said he has fully supported the mayor’s agenda.

“I don’t know where these issues are coming from,” he said at a news conference Friday outside Parker Center.

But others, including Hahn, said there has been a long history of disputes between the two men. During the 4 1/2 years that Parks has been chief, the two have been at odds over a wide range of issues, including the Rampart corruption scandal and the federal consent decree that lays out steps the LAPD must take to reform its practices.

The mayor and the chief have styles that did not endear them to one another. A proud and confident man, Parks has a tendency to lecture those he thinks don’t understand an issue. Such encounters irritated Hahn.

“It’s difficult to communicate with someone in that mode,” the mayor said.

“He seems to make up his mind and then be unwilling to change it,” Hahn added. “Even if everybody on the planet said, ‘You ought to change this,’ if he believes he is right, he’ll stick to it.”

For his part, Parks says a good chief of police should voice his dissent when he believes a policy is misguided.

“I don’t think it would be helpful in this city if I accept responsibility for something I think is wrong and not tell someone,” he said Friday.

Over the years, the distance between the two men was widened by their philosophical differences and attempts to curtail each other’s scope of authority.

Shortly after becoming police chief in 1997, Parks proposed a plan to appoint a deputy city attorney or in-house counsel to work full time at Parker Center exclusively on police matters.

Although Parks was careful to avoid publicly criticizing Hahn, the implication was clear: He thought the city attorney’s office was botching civil suits against LAPD officers. The chief, backed by Riordan and some council members, complained that Hahn was too willing to negotiate costly settlements.

As a compromise, Hahn set up a special team of lawyers and investigators to work toward reducing the multimillion-dollar costs of police cases.

In the years that followed, Hahn proceeded to hand down opinions that pushed Parks to open up the department to more scrutiny. When the LAPD inspector general complained in 1999 that he wasn’t getting enough information from the chief, Hahn issued a 17-page opinion affirming that the Police Commission could force Parks to cooperate with the inspector general on all matters, including handing over confidential documents.

In March 2000, Hahn announced that he favored the creation of an independent commission to investigate the Rampart corruption scandal, a step Parks opposed. Later, he sided with then-Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and ordered Parks to turn over all relevant information on rogue cops to county prosecutors.

Hahn also ruled in June 2000 that the council had the authority to force Parks to reinstate the senior lead officer program. Ultimately, Riordan pushed Parks to put the program back into place.

Consent Decree Was Biggest Conflict

The biggest gulf between the two men came over negotiations with the U.S. Department of Justice over the federal consent decree mandating reform of the department.

Parks adamantly opposed the decree, objecting to the intrusion of the federal government into local police affairs. He also balked at some of the specific provisions in the document, such as the collection of data to track racial profiling, information he said would be difficult to analyze.

Hahn, who was gearing up his bid for mayor, took the lead in the negotiations with the federal government, convinced that without the decree, the Justice Department would sue the city and win a more stringent set of reforms in federal court.

The differences between the two men came into stark relief during the six months of negotiations in 2000 that took place in a 32nd-floor office of a downtown law firm.

Hahn and Parks weren’t present, but their representatives were: Tim McOsker, Hahn’s chief of staff, and LAPD Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy, who is now retired. Also present was Riordan’s representative, Deputy Mayor Kelly Martin, who also fought on behalf of Parks. The two sides were often at odds, according to people who participated in the talks.

On some days, after hours of wrestling over issues, the city’s negotiating team would finally reach a resolution, only to reopen debate the next day when Pomeroy arrived with a new list of concerns.

McOsker would not discuss the specifics of the meetings but said the LAPD’s objections to aspects of the decree impeded the group’s progress.

Parks said Friday that even though he originally opposed the idea of the consent decree, he and his department fully cooperated with the process.

“Once the city decided to have a consent decree, we put our differences aside and decided to move forward,” he said.

When the consent decree negotiations ended in November 2000, the mayoral campaign was just starting to heat up. At that point, Hahn said he was inclined to reappoint the chief if he had to decide that day.

“I’ve had my differences of opinion with him, but he’s doing the job,” Hahn said during an interview in November.

Two weeks before the April 10 election, Hahn praised the chief’s discipline of officers and said he thought Parks could reform the department effectively if he refocused his agenda.

Hahn’s opinion about Parks seemed especially favorable when compared with that of the other mayoral candidates, who all expressed some misgivings about his leadership.

‘We Trusted Him,’ One Leader Says

Some African American leaders say Hahn’s careful stance during the campaign and his dramatic swing less than a year later contributed to their surprise and hurt.

The Rev. Frederick Murph of the Brookins Community AME Church said even though Hahn never promised to endorse the chief, many people assumed he was leaning in that direction.

“We put a lot of ourselves into him, and we trusted him as a friend, as a brother,” Murph said.

For his part, the mayor said he made clear during the race that he would judge Parks on the same issues that he voices dissatisfaction with now: the implementation of the consent decree, community policing and morale.

“I was not intending to mislead people,” he said. “I think I made it clear I would hold the chief accountable.

“I had assumed that we’d hit it off a lot better than we did,” Hahn added.

Parks said last week that he has done everything Hahn asked of him, and disputes the mayor’s contention that the city is out of compliance with the consent decree or has failed to implement the senior lead program fully.

But Hahn worried that he would never be able to influence his chief.

“I have enormous respect for Parks,” he said. “I like him, he’s a good man and had a great career. But I think in any situation, you realize at some point in time, this isn’t somebody who shares how you look at things.”