"It's the culture, silly. What culture?"

Still no word on the status of the ethics complaint filed by community activist Kevin Dawson against Councilman Dom Betro or when it will be heard in front of the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee.

As reported here, Mayor Ron Loveridge apparently was asked about the status of the complaint at the Mayor's Night Out event held last week at Hyatt Elementary. Apparently he was surprised at the news that Dawson had not been notified by City Attorney Gregory Priamos by letter of the status of the complaint.

Now it's quite possible that the city council has just been very busy. I mean, three of the current members are still campaigning to keep their seats, which keeps them very busy. And summer's approaching and who wants to sit down and listen to an ethics complaint during that season? And wait, there might be runoff elections so will the hearing on the latest ethics complaint be delayed until after they are completed?

It's an interesting contrast to the rush to address the very first ethics complaint filed against a councilman since the implementation of an ethics code was adopted after a public vote in 2004. That elected official, Steve Adams, had his complaint handled so quickly, it was done before there was even an official process on how to handle complaints in place! In his case, the Mayor's Nomination and Screening Committee just adopted a rule against third-party complaints without ever actually meeting and discussing it in public and tossed it out.

Ethics complaint number two, which was Betro's first also was processed at lightning speed compared to this latest complaint against Betro. The first complaint was heard at the very first Screening Committee after it was filed and dispatched in less than 20 minutes.

Few people are keeping track of the process, most likely because Betro has been the recipient of most of the ethics complaints filed so far and no one wants to put pressure on their guy until the votes are officially counted. If it were Councilman Art Gage or even Adams receiving the complaints now, there probably would be a push to urge this now poky process along led by the Press Enterprise Editorial Board no doubt.

Not that the process is worth all that much.

What the committee showed the first time around is that it's very good at looking out for its own. Even though it's possible even likely that an independent panel might have achieved the same outcome on the last ethics complaint filed, it's more likely that the process would have had more integrity, more objectivity and been more user-friendly for the public. When it comes to addressing the city's ethic complaints, the process does matter as much as the final decision made during that process. And the process needs a lot of work along with an injection of well, ethics.

It's also quite possible that Priamos was quite busy dealing with what the Press Enterprise called in its article the illegal placement of signs by Ward One candidate Letitia Pepper. Pepper criticized the actions of the city through a letter written to the city attorney's office. Some have said that she has been singled out for this selective treatment by the city.



And there are signs from her campaign posted at a lot near the corner of Magnolia and 14th Streets in the downtown area, along with a sign that states that the placement of the signs is legal and if anyone witnesses anyone taking them down, to call a listed number and report it.


Those signs managed to remain in place the entire day. Maybe they'll at least finish out the weekend as well.






And just what the Los Angeles Police Department needed right now is not what it got. Instead, another one of its officers is being investigated by the department and the Garden Grove Police Department for inappropriate photographs he took of young girls including a five-year-old while offduty at a local festival, according to the Los Angeles Times. That girl's father tackled Officer Ralph C. Lakin to the ground.





(excerpt)



Spokesman Sgt. Lee Sands said the officer continues to work at Parker Center. The department rejected a request to interview Lakin.

Dornan, a brawny, 6-foot-plus man, tackled Lakin and wrestled away the camera after someone told him that a man was taking photos of his daughter. Dornan said he followed Lakin and saw him photographing under a young girl's light-blue dress. He said that when he tackled Lakin, he put his hand on the officer's weapon, which was concealed under his shirt. "The odd thing was when I took him down he never said a word," Dornan said.

Garden Grove police took the gun. Lakin was questioned and released. Police eventually took the camera.





In the midst of news involving the latest LAPD officer to be investigated for potential criminal conduct, Chief William Bratton continued to reorganize his department in the wake of the May Day incident and the multitude of investigations it set in motion.




The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board also asks the question about racism in the Los Angeles Police Department. Is the LAPD still dealing with intrinsic racism or are its current problems including those that led to what the Times called the "May 1 meltdown" coming from elsewhere?

The editorial seemed to blame the department's troubles on a breakdown at the management level and a rush to use force against individuals, the same people those officers were entrusted to protect. That's what the preliminary report on the department's investigations presented by Bratton appeared to show.

The editorial also speaks about a quickly vanishing police culture when it really should know better. If the culture of the LAPD is truly going the way of the dinosaur, then what of the problems that have impacted the department and the neighborhoods it polices in ways beyond just what most of the public and the rest of the world sees occasionally through the lens of a bystander's camcorder?

Sandwiched in between the bungled handling of demonstrations in 2000 and now, 2007 are incidents which have virtually kept the department under the harsh glare of the spotlight even as it crawls its way through a five-year consent decree imposed by federal law enforcement agencies, a reform mandate now going into its seventh year. And it's the department's culture which will keep them happening both in public and in private.

Each time something happens, a new scandal or high-profile excessive force incident happens, investigations are conducted and special panels including at least one blue-ribbon panel are convened. And what happens? The answer is nearly always the same, and that is that the LAPD's culture either hasn't changed a bit or has changed very little and that it's the culture which is still entrenched is in many cases beginning at the top, keeping these investigations from even being successfully completed. Why is this? Because the police culture of the LAPD like that of other agencies frowns on outside investigations and likes to keep its business inhouse which speaks to the isolation and insulation found inside most if not all police departments. It's part and parcel of a police culture to not trust outsiders and to circle the wagons against them when you feel threatened which appears to be nearly all the time.

The latest example of this behavior was documented in a public report issued by the blue-ribbon committee set up to oversee the investigation of the Rampart Division scandal which led to the consent decree being imposed in the first place. That report stated that the factual information it needed to make a decision was being blocked by the police department and that it had appeared that not much had changed at all.

The Times article treats the breakdown of the LAPD on May Day as if it were a separate situation apart from the department's police culture. As if it were the "aberration" that Bratton claimed it to be. Others including a federal monitor assigned to oversee departmental reforms have stated that it could indicate much deeper and pervasive issues inside the agency.

A case could be made that these procedural problems in the police department which had spent five years under a consent decree are symptomatic of a police culture that's probably not much different than it was five years ago and as stated is still alive and well at the management level. Consent decrees by their nature address problems like police cultures through mechanisms addressed at changing and often rewriting a department's policies and procedures in the hopes of instituting major change. But what is crucial to that process being successful is whether or not those changes are embraced or rejected.

That's why the department can spend five years on fixing procedural problems, or even 10 years and still experience a litany of mishaps and larger problems because even while those changes have been made and implemented to varying degrees, there still exists a resistance towards consistently and uniformly making those changes stick until they become acceptable, routine practice.

If there are problems getting the department to fully embrace change, then it's clear that the breakdown in management in the department is an ongoing problem and not just manifested by incidents involving public demonstrations. If this is the case, then the culture particularly at the management level is still resistant to the reforms it's been pushed to accept. The changes only work if they are embraced completely by the entire department with the management level setting the standard that the other officers will follow.


When people think of police culture, they think of racism, homophobia, sexism, White supremacism, patriarchal structures and a general sense of insulation and isolation which manifests itself through an "us vs them" mentality. Then there's the "macho" versus "wuss" categories that are often manifested by a culture that favors "being physical" over other methods of dealing with situations in the field and problems in the department. Officers in the first group are often held up even by management as the success stories while officers in the second group are often ignored or even sissified or ostracized. These behaviors are very difficult to root out and even more difficult to change.

These parts of the overall culture arose from years of what was known as watchman style policing, where police officers came from the outside, lived on the outside and came into communities periodically as occupation forces rather than policing from within through partnerships with the communities.

But even as people argue that racism, sexism, machismo and homophobia are part and parcel of the culture, they are not all of it. And if the culture is slowly changing, then these problems are not suddenly vanishing like the Times editorial seems to believe. It's hard work to address racism, sexism, machismo and homophobia, let alone eliminate them from a policing model that is built on them. Departments spend years denying that these problem exist until they are forced by an outside agency to at least think about it.

And purging a department either through rapid turnover or other methods of its "old guard" officers doesn't mean that the culture is leaving with them because often those who remain behind are moving up in the ranks to management positions because among other reasons, they may be what's left of the senior level of officers after the consent decree generated exodus. It can start anew when new blood is brought into the mix and take hold and impact officers who may have no idea what they are walking into when they are hired by the agency. And that's part of the problem, is that these newer officers aren't told anything about the past sins of the department that now employs them and of the turbulent relationships between that department and the surrounding communities. And if you don't know the history around you, then you're often fated to repeat it without even knowing that is what you are doing.

Hiring more male officers of color and women doesn't eradicate the old culture either, if it remains entrenched at the highest levels, while being flushed out at the lower. It will simply remain in place and in order to integrate or fit in, these officers who are not White and/or male will have a choice to make. Will they embrace this culture themselves or will they complain against it and risk ostracism and worse? The easier and saner choice appears to be to lie low, develop a thick skin and don't make waves, just go with a program that puts your kind on a lower level than others.

After all, how many officers in the LAPD or the Riverside Police Department ever filed litigation involving racism or sexism including harassment and found themselves subjected to having a department's internal affairs division initiate new investigations against them or reopen old ones after they have done so?

That's a department's culture putting them back in their places and trying to resist even individual efforts to challenge its culture and this practice appears universal in many law enforcement agencies.

Police cultures don't just vanish like a mountain in the mist, they slowly change over a period that is decades, not years in duration. Cultural change is generational and even rebuilding a department from the bottom doesn't change that because the officers at the top are still the same and changing the model to one that works with the public rather than apart or against it takes years as well.

Many officers see that themselves, most often as stated when pushed to do so by outside agencies but sometimes on their own as well. And addressing issues like racism, sexism and homophobia in your ranks and inside yourself takes work and it takes courage, a different kind of courage than is often needed in police work. It entails taking risks with the way that you see things and see people, even at their most vulnerable. It puts you at risk of ostracism from those around you that fear that same change from what they've learned to work with and how to do their jobs. But the officers who do this are the ones that are on community members' lips when they express the issue of police officers that they feel make a difference in their communities. A finished polished product isn't what's necessary but the effort to change is important.


Racism exists. Sexism exists. Homophobia exists. They exist outside law enforcement. There's no reason why they wouldn't exist or even be amplified inside it.

A Black LAPD officer said to a woman the other day and said no matter what they tell you, the LAPD is still a racist organization. Then there's the story I heard in the community not long ago about an unidentified Black officer closer to home who feels that he has to look out for his own because the officers of other races do so. If the perceptions of the first officer are true, and the existence of the second officer is real and not an urban legend, then what do either of these things say about the cultures in these two agencies? Meaning where they are today and not yesterday or five years ago?

However, even if racism, sexism and homophobia were disappearing and thus so was the police culture of the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies, poof all gone, there's a fallacy to that argument of the quickly vanishing culture that lies elsewhere and it's in this line.



With state-of-the-art communications technology, why was it so hard for command staff and officers to communicate? With such a strong focus over the last five years on policy and procedure, why were there so many procedural failures?



Because communication isn't just about technology used to facilitate its process, ultimately it comes down to whether those who are doing the communicating even understand each other, let alone trust each other. There are limits to what the best technology including police radios can do if the people manning both ends aren't on good speaking terms or communicating at all. And often it seems in police agencies as if that's the case between police officers who wear uniforms on the street and those who are in management who often do not.

What does a police officer see when he or she is looking at the area commander, or the division captain or the deputy chief? What do those in higher ranking positions see when they are looking at their officers?

Do they see friend or foe? Do they see authoritative figure or teacher? Do those in charge see recalcitrant children or students? Someone looking after them or someone looking over their shoulder?

And as the paramilitary hierarchy gives way slowly to a more customer-service driven business-like culture, do these titles and their relationships change or remain the same? How do those in management embrace change imposed during and in the aftermath of a program of mandated reforms? Do they uniformly embrace it, or in piecemeal? How does management's embrace of change impact those that they manage or supervise in terms of how they embrace or reject change?

What if you're an officer who's been working for years under one system and then that system changes each day to something else? What do you do? Do you bend in favor of what's new or resist in favor of what's familiar? Do you see those you work with bend or resist around you? At some juncture in the reform process, that's a decision that has to be made for everyone.


In recent audits involving the LAPD and the Riverside Police Department, both showed that there wasn't a uniform forward movement at the management level. Meaning that some at the top of the command structure embraced change and others didn't. In the case of the LAPD, the monitor believed that the problems involved in the May Day incident may have stemmed from the problems with management's inability to uniformly implement changes in how it conducted the business of supervising and training its officers. In Riverside, there was no single critical incident, more like a series of missteps that took place some time after the dissolution of the stipulated judgment last year with some personnel in management working the program and some apparently not.

Riverside got back on track so to speak in part because once again, it was subjected to outside scrutiny, albeit of a different sort than it received from 2001-2006. It remains to be seen and it must be watched closely to see if it can internally drive its own forward movement, which it will need to do so to become a successfully reformed agency. That critical test lies ahead.

Some argue that even a police culture is not a monolith but is divided into subsections.

The police culture itself is actually split in half, not by numbers but by dynamics. Management in police departments has its own subculture that is separate from that of the other, as surely as the chasm between the two exists between those who manage, those who supervise and those who are managed and supervised. And most reform processes enforced on law enforcement agencies try to focus on changing the culture of the management level in hopes of thus changing the cultures at the rank and file level, almost through a trickle down mechanism. But both subcultures are part of a larger culture as well because all of them arose from the rank and file level and share characteristics. Is that kind of process ultimately effective? Do the changes made at the management level reach those who are being managed by these individuals? Because as shown, rewriting the bottom levels of the chain of command don't necessarily institute cultural change on their own.

Given that few consent decrees and other mandated reform programs have been completed, the jury is probably still out on that one. But it seems clear that if you have some members of management embracing change and others resistant to it, not only does that negatively impact forward movement of a law enforcement agency among those individuals but everyone around them because everyone is interdependent on one another. Not to mention the mixed message that management sends to others who may wonder why they have to do something if management isn't willing to do it.


In this portion of its editorial, the Times Board explains its position.


(excerpt)



THE LAPD'S PRELIMINARY report on what went wrong May 1 in MacArthur Park reinforces deep concern about the culture and capability of the department. Despite the emphasis placed on "agitators" who police say attacked them with rocks and bottles, this week's presentations to the Police Commission and the City Council underscored a shocking breakdown in managing and protecting the crowd of about 6,000 people gathered in the park for an immigration rights rally. With state-of-the-art communications technology, why was it so hard for command staff and officers to communicate? With such a strong focus over the last five years on policy and procedure, why were there so many procedural failures?

There is plenty of room for constructive debate about how best to keep the LAPD on the road toward reforming its culture and improving its service. But the criticism leveled at the department over the last month — allegations of racist cops, contempt toward the news media — may be part of a dated critique, targeting a now-vanishing police culture while tragically missing the persistent problems that plague today's department.



But what the editorial board should have realized is that separating these "persistent problems" from the so-called "now-vanishing police culture" shows that it is also tragically missing the point.

As has been stated for both the LAPD and Riverside's own police department, the true test lies ahead and unfortunately, it's pass or fail.