Now’s the Time to Ask Tough Questions

For anyone having trouble reading between the lines, here’s the breakdown on Thursday afternoon’s big news flash from the center of the metropolis:

The old LAPD is dead.

Three outside candidates for police chief, only one of whom has spent more than 10 minutes in Los Angeles, are the finalists to make the department something other than a dispirited occupying army with a colorful past.

Six current members of the Los Angeles Police Department got a phone call thanking them for their interest in the top job and wishing them luck.

A couple of former New York cops, one of whom lives in Philadelphia, made the list. So did Oxnard Chief Art Lopez, who used to wear an LAPD badge.

“This is my dream job,” Lopez told me a few months ago.

What the department needs most, he said, is a return to so-called community policing, and someone with enough crackle and pop to rally the troops.

“Those are my two strengths,” Lopez said.

Maybe so, but don’t put the house up for sale yet, Art.

For one thing, his department has had some messy police brutality problems he’s going to have difficulty explaining, and we’re supposed to be entering the current century here.

For another, the message from Mayor Jim Hahn and the commission was loud and clear:

They want fresh blood.

They want it so badly they completely snubbed a couple of strong inside candidates.

“We’re in shock,” one Westside cop told me. “It’s disbelief. We tried this once before and it was a disaster, and people are just walking around shaking their heads.”

This fear and loathing is not necessarily a bad thing, in case you were wondering. That very resistance, in fact, is part of the problem with the LAPD, and the main reason Mayor Hahn refused to trust an insider to get the department in order.

The “once before” was Willie Williams, and the fact that he did a belly-flop off the high dive doesn’t mean an outsider can’t get the troops marching in a straight line. I knew Williams’ work from my years in Philadelphia, and here’s my take:

Had the city with the cheese steaks thrown in the Liberty Bell, Rocky Balboa and the canine unit, L.A. still would have lost out with this stiff.

Williams was mediocrity at its finest. On top of that, the Civil Service rules in LAPD were different back then, and he couldn’t bring his own team in with him.

That’s like hiring a new football coach and telling him he’s going to have to use the same offensive and defensive coordinators. But the rules are different now, and whoever comes in can bring some brass along with him.

“Look, there’s going to be resentment on the part of police officers,” John Timoney told me by phone Thursday.

He would know, having become commissioner of police in Philadelphia after a long career in New York. The Philadelphia Police Department, which is a smaller version of the paramilitary jihad we’ve got here in Los Angeles, didn’t throw Timoney a party upon his arrival.

“There’s always resentment to outsiders,” Timoney said. “You overcome it by going out to the troops. Yeah, they’ll be ticked off. But that’s one of the barriers that’s easy to overcome.”

Now here’s an interesting tidbit about the Timoney selection:

When I talked to him the other day, he said he really didn’t know the LAPD and wasn’t sure exactly what he’d do in the way of reforming it.

Interestingly enough, nobody here bothered to ask him. On Thursday, Timoney told me that in his discussion with the Police Commission, he was never asked about a specific plan.

“We discussed a whole bunch of things, including dealing with an immigrant population, an alien population, a whole host of issues,” Timoney said. “But it was very global.”

Call me nosy, but if I were looking for a new commander to deliver the LAPD out of the Dark Ages, I might have asked another question or two, like: Hey, John, would you mind telling us how you’re going to do this?

They apparently didn’t even ask much about the controversial “quality of life” philosophy Timoney and the other New York finalist--former NYPD boss William Bratton--executed in New York in the 1990s. That’s when they went after broken-window crimes, public urination and whatnot, on the theory that bigger crimes grew out of that kind of disregard and disrespect.

It worked, by the way, and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in typical fashion, took most of the credit and all of the bows.

Just one problem.

As the crime rate dropped, citizen complaints and civil rights suits soared. In some neighborhoods, law-abiding citizens were terrorized by the presence of overzealous Robocops, and some did not fare well in these encounters.

If the commission didn’t talk to Timoney about this stuff, what on earth did they talk to him about?

“What they were trying to do was not get involved in minutiae or very fine specifics,” Timoney said of his questioners in Los Angeles, “but to looking at the person and judging their character, knowledge, and the way they handle themselves.”

Fine. But now would be a good time to zero in on the minutiae.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com