Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (47 page)

This time, both in his massive use of stop-and-frisk, and during his re
sponse to the May Day fiasco, his careful nurturing of political support both personally and in terms of his otherwise progressive, reformist policies had paid off. And instead of May Day becoming a major black mark on his tenure in L.A., it became a mere footnote.

Not long afterward, the Police Commission voted unanimously to rehire him for a second term.

Laura Chick, February 2008, Office of City Controller; Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, City Hall

The reaction of the Los Angeles City Council to Connie Rice’s
Call to Action
report was to commission yet another study, a kind of second opinion from the Los Angeles city controller. It took eight months, but on Valentine’s Day 2008, city controller Laura Chick released her own
Blueprint on Ending Gang Violence
. Echoing the Advancement Project’s critique, it focused more narrowly on the city and county’s current youth-violence reduction programs, blasted them as shapeless, unconnected, and ineffective, and called for their centralization within the mayor’s office. Chick was a highly respected former council member from the Valley, and her confirming report put enormous pressure to act on both the council and the city’s mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa.

A liberal Democrat and former speaker of the California State Assembly,
Villaraigosa had defeated James Hahn for mayor in 2005. Young and still hungry, he was a self-made man who’d grown up poor and troubled on the streets of East L.A. Short, brown-skinned, and handsome, he was a smooth but self-preoccupied politician of the kind who’d warmly ask a question, appear to be listening intently, and then break away as you were in mid-sentence upon spotting someone higher on the political-opportunity food chain to chat up. He also had an eye for the ladies, and early in his administration had been
caught having an extramarital affair with a Spanish-language TV reporter, which was then followed by a high-profile separation from his wife. It had been a searing experience, a kind of baptism by fire filled with
head-shaking snickering and nasty vitriol from local right-wing talk radio. But to his credit, Villaraigosa worked hard to correct himself, and would prove to be an able and accomplished leader over his eight years as mayor.

He hadn’t, however, run on a gang platform, and now the idea of him taking leadership and ownership of L.A.’s gang problem was thrust upon him. The easy call was to stick with the status quo and not risk a backlash if it didn’t work out.

“
There was a lot of debate about what we would do about street gangs and violence in our city,” says Jeff Carr, an ordained minister who would become Villaraigosa’s first “gang czar.” “The [
Call to Action
] report that Connie Rice did really lambasted the city and county. It said we were at a crossroad and had to move in a different direction.

“But,” continued Carr, “
there was no guarantee we were going to do that. There were lots of voices saying Connie was crazy, that youth violence was a law enforcement problem and that what we needed was to [just] further suppress gangs.

“The day the city controller’s report came out, we had a meeting about how we should respond. About ten mayoral advisors were at the meeting. And almost all of them argued that
it was political suicide to take responsibility, that the violence was ingrained into the social fabric of the city, and that the mayor should stay as far from the issue as possible.”

And then, as Carr later told it, he spoke up. “This is why
you
were elected,” he told Villaraigosa. “You’re the first Latino mayor in 137 years in this city’s history. If you don’t take on this issue at this moment, who’s ever going to take it on?”

And, according to Carr, Villaraigosa looked at him and said, “You know, you’re right, and we’re gonna do it.”

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

With a unified approach to gang-violence prevention overseen by Carr now established in the mayor’s office, the stage was set for Connie Rice, Charlie Beck, and others to create a school for gang interventionists run by Rice’s Advancement Project.

Earlier city-financed intervention programs had run into trouble—large amounts of city money unaccounted for, an arrest on federal racketeering and conspiracy charges, accusations of thievery. Ensuring that there be no reoccurrence would require a powerfully reinforcing, comprehensively structured curriculum. And the “
Urban Peace Academy,” as it would be named, would have one, involving a carefully screened selection process, over one hundred hours of training, and a graduation and certification process. For their efforts,
interventionists would be deployed to the city’s hot spots and earn a minimum of $30,000 year and health insurance. Schools in those hot spots would identify at-risk students for counseling and services, and the city would continue to fund a version of Martin Ludlow’s “Summer of Success” program, called “Summer Night Lights,” in local parks and recreation centers.

Thanks to the backing of Bratton, Beck, Bo Taylor, L.A. County sheriff Lee Baca, city controller Laura Chick, and finally the mayor, Rice and the Advancement Project were finally able to achieve two bedrock tenets of their
Call to Action
report: a gang interventionist program, and a centrally coordinated “Gang Reduction and Youth Development Program” (GRYD), within the mayor’s office—where power and accountability were consolidated under his auspices.

Prevention and intervention organizations and programs within the
GRYD would receive $21 million in 2010, a figure which Villaraigosa and the City Council would protect throughout the Great Recession despite severe cuts in other parts of the budget, including to the City Attorney’s Office and the LAPD’s counterterrorism task force.

The bigger, independent state and county social service agencies never bought into Rice’s wraparound approach, nor did the probation and parole departments. They were too busy fighting each other for funds and ensuring their self-perpetuation.

Nevertheless, the City Council and key philanthropic organizations would allocate
$700,000 for the first year of the gang academy’s funding and
then raise its budget to over $1 million. The LAPD, other city departments, and some of Los Angeles’s most liberal philanthropic organizations were now working together to reduce gang and youth violence.
Bill Bratton didn’t make that happen. But he supported Connie Rice and gave Charlie Beck the independence to facilitate it.

Bill Bratton, August 2009, Parker Center

Flying into Los Angeles from New York in early August of 2009, Bill Bratton was in possession of news already beginning to leak out.

He was resigning.

Neither the mayor nor the Police Commission nor his assistant and deputy chiefs had been notified. But the man who’d been charged with the day-to-day monitoring of the department’s consent decree, Michael G. Cherkasky, knew, because he was about to become Bratton’s new boss.

From 2001 through the previous month of July of 2009, Cherkasky had been
the
independent monitor, overseeing compliance with every aspect of the consent decree and then reporting his findings to federal judge Gary Feess. Bratton had wanted his decision to leave the LAPD to coincide with Feess terminating the consent decree.

Prior to becoming the decree’s monitor, Cherkasky had been an executive at the giant New York–based private security firm Kroll, Inc., during the nineties, and had been named the decree’s independent monitor when the firm was awarded the job in 2001. Shortly after taking the helm, he’d then named Bratton as one of his monitors.

And now, Cherkasky, who had recently become the chief executive of Kroll’s global parent company, Altegrity, Inc., was hiring Bratton
away
from the LAPD to become chairman of Kroll.

It all seemed a bit incestuous, but few questions were raised. Cherkasky had been the independent monitor before Bratton had been hired as chief; he’d had nothing to do with Bratton’s hiring, had filed critical reports about the slow pace of the department’s compliance, and was not the ultimate consent-decree-ending decision maker in any case. That was Judge Feess. He was, however, the ultimate
recommender
to Feess on when the decree should be terminated. And now he was recommending termination.

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

Bill Bratton had been chafing under the consent decree since at least 2006, when Feess had not only refused to end it but had extended it for another three years. And in late June of 2009, he’d told
Los Angeles Times
reporter Patt Morrison on her local KPCC radio show that the decree was an albatross wrapped around his and the department’s neck. That was why it had to be ended. “We are arguing,” said Bratton, “that if you continue the consent decree, symbolically, that basically is
a slap in the face of the department. The polling by the
L.A. Times
shows that a majority of the people in this city feel this department is really doing a good job.”

If Feess didn’t terminate the decree, Bratton continued, “The judge would effectively be saying, ‘Well, you worked hard over the last eight years [on the decree, but] it doesn’t count. We’re going to keep you in this consent decree for three more years.”

Back in 2006, Judge Feess had forcefully told the city and the department that the LAPD had defied reform for forty years and that, in essence, he was going to make damn sure that that didn’t happen again.

But by the summer of 2009 Bill Bratton was equally damn sure that
he
wasn’t going to wait around another two or three years for Feess to lift the decree. He was never good at, and in fact prided himself on not, hanging around longer than necessary. He told the
Los Angeles Times
in 2008 that he “
never wanted to go and just maintain something” but wanted instead “to be able to fix something.” And in his mind the LAPD was fixed, at least to the extent that he wished to take it.

All he had needed was for Gary Feess to declare it so and enable him to move on to the greener, more lucrative pastures of New York—the adopted home of both him and his wife, Rikki.

So when Feess appeared not to be budging on the issue, Bratton launched a campaign to generate some buzz in the press as a way of persuading Feess to unburden him and the department of the decree.

To buttress his crusade, Bratton decided to use money from the privately funded LAPD booster organization the Police Foundation to commission a report that would be called
Policing Los Angeles Under a Consent Decree: The Dynamics of Change at the LAPD
. And he would go to the very top to get the authors he wanted to conduct the study—straight out of the Harvard Kennedy School and its groundbreaking Criminal Justice Policy and Management Program, a program with which Bratton had had a long, fruitful relationship going back two decades.

Released in May 2009, the report was a generally favorable evaluation of the department. It pointed out how “
serious crime” had dropped by almost 35 percent from 2003 to 2008 (after dropping 52 percent from 1992 to 1999 under Williams and Parks, before rising by 5 percent from 2000 to 2002). It also noted a
30 percent drop in officer-involved shootings and the use of choke holds and strikes to suspects’ heads with a baton or flashlight. The report also showed that the number of Angelenos who thought that the
LAPD treated “all racial and ethnic groups fairly” had risen from 39 to 51 percent over the past four years; and that
pedestrian and vehicle stops had risen by almost 50 percent between 2002 and 2008, which they considered a good thing. The report’s authors, however, also wrote that they “
saw a lot of force displayed in what seemed to be routine enforcement situations.”

Overall, ho
wever, the report’s principal author, Christopher Stone, would point out that “we’re talking about a department that has been able to reduce crime, increase satisfaction with the community, while increasing law enforcement activity.” Stone then presented the report to the decree’s monitors; Cherkasky in turn presented it to Feess, who in August of 2009 approved a transitional plan that allowed the Police Commission to continue to oversee the last years of the decree’s existence.

As badly as Bill Bratton wanted out of the consent decree, however, the truth is that it had cut both ways for him. Its carefully crafted metric-based provisions may well have been annoying, time-consuming, and burdensome to implement, but they provided a structural blueprint for cultural and operational reform of the department that was extremely beneficial. And the reality was that he wasn’t asking out of the consent decree because he had nothing to show for it. He’d placed his extremely well-connected civilian, Gerald Chaleff, in charge of getting the consent decree
done
. And Chaleff, for the most part,
had
gotten it done.

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

Having accomplished what he set out to do, which was to rekindle his career and lay the groundwork for the reformation of the LAPD, Bill Bratton left Los Angeles a far better politician than he’d been in New York. He now understood how to work with the city government. The first L.A. mayor he served under, James Hahn, was soft-spoken, introspective, and unassuming. The second, Antonio Villaraigosa, was outgoing and engaging, a big personality who loved the spotlight. Neither was as egomaniacal as Giuliani; they both pretty much left Bratton alone to do his job, and he never really clashed with them. Never a man to suffer fools gladly, he would have his run-ins with the City Council, but ultimately even that wasn’t an issue.

For more than two decades before Bratton’s tenure in Los Angeles, the LAPD’s chiefs had been locked in often bitter conflicts with their mayors: Daryl Gates’s battles with Mayor Tom Bradley had been both legendary and destructively divisive; Willie Williams’s refusal to work with Mayor Riordan to hire thousands more officers killed their working relationship before it ever got started; and Bernard Parks’s contemptuous treatment of Mayor Hahn had ensured his own downfall.