Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (35 page)

He told Klieman that he’d also never really had the opportunity to
deal with community policing or significantly improve race relations while leading the NYPD. The flash point for racial tension in America’s cities for decades, Bratton believed, had been the police—and if they were ever going to get the consent of the poor people of color they were policing, they’d have to stop being part of the problem. As the most glaring example of that reality, L.A. would be the ideal place to work through the issues surrounding the problem. Those issues, she thought, went to heart of who Bratton was. So she agreed. They’d go after the job together.

**************

Sprawled across the dining room table of their house in Quogue were scores of papers, books, newspaper articles, and reports Bratton and Klieman had gathered together to help Bratton compete against the
fifty other candidates vying to become the LAPD’s next police chief.

Following his
long-standing practice of thoroughly researching the police department he wanted to lead, Bratton had obtained reports from UCLA about the department’s management that included a series of interviews conducted over the years with the department’s top brass; Daryl Gates’s autobiography,
Chief
; and two well-researched books about the LAPD after the ’92 L.A. riots. He and Klieman also read reams of stories from the
Los Angeles Times
and
LA Weekly
; all the Christopher Commission Reports and everything they could find about L.A. mayor James Hahn.

Then they began to assemble what Bratton would later refer to as his “
propaganda package”—a carefully assembled press kit of favorable stories and editorials from his tenure in New York City, his plans for tackling some of the LAPD’s problems, and a copy of his 1998 autobiography,
Turnaround
.

The kits were then individually sent to each of the five police commissioners as well as to some of the influential people Bratton had met in L.A. With his record of achievement in fixing broken police departments, Bratton expected to be greeted with open arms once he applied for the chief’s job. John Timoney, the craggy-faced, well-regarded Irishman
who’d worked for Bratton in New York, was
the only other candidate he regarded as serious competition.

He was therefore astounded to discover that he was considered an underdog for the job. All of his and Klieman’s diligent preparation, it turned out, was proving surprisingly counterproductive. “Some people,” says Bratton, “thought that [the press kits] were
showboating, coming from publicity-seeking Bill—‘Broadway Bill’—showing off to them who he was. ‘Imagine the gall of this guy coming here with all this stuff—who does he think he is?’—that was the attitude, and that had been the issue with Giuliani—the idea that there wasn’t enough room on the stage for the two of us.”

Particularly offended was the president of the Police Commission, Rick Caruso, a local developer of high-end shopping malls who was then on his way to becoming a multimillionaire. “
He made it quite clear through intermediaries,” recalls Bratton, “that I shouldn’t apply, that I wasn’t wanted, that I was too brash.” Caruso was worried that Bratton might try to overwhelm Mayor James Hahn, a nice, quiet, unassuming guy, just as Bernard Parks had tried to do. If Bratton thought he could run over the mayor, Caruso believed, he’d try to run over the Police Commission too. And who needed that headache again?

William Bratton, October 2002, Los Angeles

Despite Caruso’s efforts, by September 2002 the search for a new chief had narrowed down to Bratton, Timoney, and a
Latino chief from the small city of Oxnard, California, who most people assumed had absolutely no chance of being selected, but who had been thrown into the mix because the commission was required to send three candidates to the mayor for final selection, and because it was good politics to include a Latino.

The
Los Angeles Times
, meanwhile, had been running profiles of the three, and both Bratton and Klieman had been outraged when Bratton’s appeared. They saw it as playing right into the caricature of him as a
cocksure carpetbagger so convinced he had the job all wrapped up that his wife was already in Los Angeles looking for a house in Brentwood—when, in fact, Klieman hadn’t stepped foot in L.A. since the selection process began. The article, Bratton later recalled, “
nearly killed my candidacy right when I was interviewing with the mayor.” In the final days of the process, the
New York Post
’s gossip column, Page 6, published a squib reporting that Mayor Hahn had decided on Timoney as chief. It was entitled, “Bratton Tried Too Hard.”

But contrary to the news item, if Bratton had been trying too hard, he’d done so very effectively. He’d paid a
personal visit, for example, to John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League and a lion of the black community for decades in its fights against police abuse. Over the course of two hours, Bratton queried Mack about what was wrong with the LAPD and left asking for his support.

By paying Mack a visit, Bratton was helping himself with the mayor as well. James Hahn wanted at least the tacit approval of an African-American leader of Mack’s stature for his new chief.
Black L.A. had turned out in large numbers to support Hahn in his successful run for mayor and considered him an ally, as they did Bernard Parks.

No matter that Parks was having trouble with Rampart; he was one of their own—a native son who was the most visible and powerful African-American in a city where blacks were losing their political clout to Latinos. So when Hahn finally refused to rehire Parks for a second five-year term, Mack and the rest of the black leadership reacted with bitter, polarizing anger. Getting Mack to at least not
oppose
Hahn’s new choice as chief would be a start toward healing their breach.

It was a fight that Hahn had never wanted in the first place. But Parks, as much a believer in an LAPD unaccountable to civilian control as any of the previous white chiefs, had never hidden his contempt for Hahn or for the consent-degree reforms.

Fortunately, Bratton’s visit to Mack proved successful. “John Mack had seen anybody who opposed Parks
as a personal enemy,” recalls Connie Rice. “Yet
Bratton completely seduced Mack, who became one of Bratton’s biggest supporters. I call that skillful politics.”

By the end of the selection process Bratton had won over not just Mack but also Rick Caruso, who after Bratton’s interview before the Police Commission became convinced that Bratton’s propaganda package was far more a carefully considered plan and a commitment to reforming the LAPD than an advertisement for himself.

“Finally,” as Bratton would later recount, “
the mayor slid into my camp.” But first,
one of Hahn’s top aides was sent to New York to talk about Bratton with former New York governor Mario Cuomo, with Judge Milton Mollen—whose eponymous commission had critically investigated the NYPD during the department’s notorious corruption scandal in the early seventies—and with rank-and-file cops. Hahn’s guy came back, as Bratton tells it, “
appreciating what I’d done there.”

Directly after the announcement of his selection, Bratton, who was in Portland, Oregon, at a board of directors
meeting of the Rite Aid Corporation, was flown down to Santa Monica Airport in
the company’s corporate jet. After being officially sworn in as chief in a private ceremony at City Hall on Monday, October 28, 2002, he was greeted by his officers and the public at a second, huge celebratory swearing in at the Police Academy.

William Bratton, Patrick Gannon, and Gerald Chaleff, Fall 2002, Parker Center

When Pat Gannon first became acquainted with Bill Bratton in late 2002, Bratton’s greeting said a lot about where’d he come from and where he hadn’t been for the last twenty years. It was always “Hello, Captain,” “How are you, Captain?” “Nice to see you, Captain”—because, suspected Gannon, even after six months of weekly personal meetings,
Bratton hadn’t a clue what Gannon’s name was.

Gannon was one of three captains then working Internal Affairs. Each of them began thinking how funny it was that Bratton couldn’t—or wouldn’t—remember their names. So, after sitting with him every week around the long, darkly stained rectangular table in the chief’s
office, they’d make a point of saying: “
Hey, Pete, what do you think about that?” “Oh, Pat, I don’t know,” Pete would answer. They’d do it consciously, consistently, and conspicuously, but Bratton never caught on or caught their names.

But nevertheless, Bratton’s focus was always on the matters at hand. There was no bullshitting, glad-handing, or jokes from him. And instead of meeting with the three IA captains and no one else, Bratton invited others to listen in as the captains briefed him on current Internal Affairs investigations.

One of those most frequently in attendance was Gerald Chaleff, whose opinions and thoughts, as Gannon later recalled it, Bratton always seemed to find of particular interest. At first the captains were amazed that Chaleff, known within the department as “
a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” was even sitting in at the meetings. But it quickly became apparent that neither Bratton nor Chaleff thought for one moment that he should be anywhere other than where he was. In fact, Gannon was surprised about how “
strong” Chaleff was in expressing his opinion, and refusing to pull his punches.

Chaleff, however, wasn’t just stopping by to listen in. He was there in his official capacity as an LAPD bureau chief and commanding officer of the Consent Decree Bureau—i.e., the guy in charge of getting the LAPD in full compliance with the federal decree.

Bratton had first met Gerry Chaleff in 2001, when Chaleff was serving as president of the Police Commission, and the commission was selecting monitors for the consent decree. About a year after Chaleff left the commission,
Bratton sent him a copy of his autobiography, along with a note letting him know that he was applying for the chief’s job. Chaleff, who
also knew Rikki Klieman from her days in L.A. covering the O. J. Simpson trial in 1994, replied by offering to recommend Bratton to people who might have some pull in the selection process, and to call him when he heard any relevant news over the grapevine.

A graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, Chaleff had grown up in the liberal, predominantly Jewish Westside of Los Angeles, and in 1968, while still an idealistic young lawyer, had helped found
Young Professionals for Kennedy, an organization that campaigned for Bobby
Kennedy’s presidential election. Chaleff worked hard for Kennedy. And on the
night of the California Democratic primary he was at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel celebrating his candidate’s upset victory when a woman shouted out the shattering news of
Kennedy’s fatal shooting. Chaleff, who still keeps a photo of Bobby Kennedy on his office wall, was crushed. About a month later he was informed that he’d been on a list of supporters who’d been
selected to go to New York to work on the next leg of the campaign, before it was so tragically aborted.

Instead, he remained in L.A., first coming to public attention in the early eighties when he and his then cocounsel, Katherine Mader (who later became the LAPD’s first inspector general), unsuccessfully defended the notorious “
Hillside Strangler” serial killer, Angelo Buono. Over the years, he worked for the DA’s office, as a public defender, in private practice, and in law firms. He also became active in the Southern California branch of the ACLU, served as president of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, and eventually was president of the Police Commission during Bernard Parks’s tenure as chief.

He wore a full beard and had the slightly disheveled appearance of a perpetually distracted literature professor, and was always miscast by Parks and the rest of the LAPD as a radical—as someone who, by reason of his occupation as a defense attorney, his professional affiliations, his ethnicity, and his education—was ipso facto a cop hater. In reality, however, Chaleff was a very politically astute guy skilled in maneuvering within the social and cultural complexity of Los Angeles. If he liked you, he appeared to be a mensch; if he didn’t, he could be a ballbuster.

On the Police Commission he got along well with its more conservative members, and worked quietly behind the scenes for what felt like glacial reform. He tried to avoid criticizing Parks publicly, and tried as well to get him to expand the Rampart investigation.

Above all, there was nothing of the embarrassingly sycophantic performance that characterized Edith Perez’s tenure as commission president. Gerald Chaleff was a serious man aware of his opportunity to help move LAPD reform forward, who unfortunately was consistently
foiled by Bernard Parks’s unwillingness to compromise. Nevertheless, in his waning days on the commission, Chaleff would battle back by playing a pivotal role in negotiating the consent decree with the U.S. Justice Department, while Parks was bitterly unsuccessful in convincing the City Council to reject the decree.

But it would be under Bill Bratton—the stranger in town—that Gerry Chaleff would fully blossom as the new chief’s indispensable consigliere, who intimately knew both Los Angeles politics and its players within City Hall and the LAPD.

Implementation of the consent decree would be Chaleff’s main charge, and of paramount importance to Bratton. If Bratton, with Chaleff’s help, could get the LAPD certified by a tough federal judge as in compliance with the decree, then he, Bill Bratton, would emerge with proof that he was indeed the miracle worker he was made out to be in New York. Fail, and his New York legacy—the essence of who he was in the world—could be further challenged.

And the judge in question—Gary Feess—
was
a tough customer, and with reason. He had been counsel to the Christopher Commission during its investigation, and thus had been deeply involved in the rush to reform the LAPD. It had been a good try, but ultimately one not strong enough to bolster an indifferent chief like Williams or thwart an imperious chief like Parks until the damage was done. It had taken a ten-year period—bookended by Rodney King’s beating and the Rampart debacle—for the federal government to finally intervene and impose the equivalent of a legal straitjacket. Now, as the judge overseeing a second attempt at finally bringing the LAPD to heel, Feess was determined to bring all of the decree’s powers to bear.