Opinion: Before Los Angeles gets a new police chief, here's what we need to know
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The next chief of the Los Angeles Police Department will need to be a turnaround wizard. But she or he is unlikely to be handed what a turnaround chief needs on Day One: a PET scan of LAPD’s serious problems.
The city’s Police Commission chose 28-year LAPD-veteran Dominic Choi to take the reins when Chief Michel Moore retires at the end of February. As several LAPD experts have noted, Choi is an insider in the current administration and an ally of Moore's. He is more likely to sustain the LAPD’s vexed status quo than to inspect its inner turmoil.
This means Mayor Karen Bass is unlikely to see a competent assessment of the deepest challenges that await a new permanent chief, which will only make it harder for her to tap the right candidate.
For more than 35 years, as a civil rights attorney I have sued, investigated, worked with and observed the LAPD. Having dealt with nine LAPD chiefs, scores of command staff and officers, more than 30 members of the commission, four inspectors general and six Los Angeles mayors, I've seen the best of the department and the worst.
I wish I could say that in 2024, the LAPD was on the right track. I cannot.
As this newspaper has documented, the department in just the past few years has been buffeted by misconduct and leadership scandals — from its flawed response to the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests, to record awards to civilians for police abuses, to allegations of sexism and misogyny in the ranks and in promotions, to recent claims of theft and other corruption among gang-unit officers.
Many officers have described to me problems that include "kill the messenger" management that quashes bad news, as well as dangerous supervision lapses, watered-down policing standards and policing-knowledge gaps.
As serious as these claims are, there is another dire issue that goes to the heart of public trust. Numerous Black officers contend that current LAPD leadership has repeatedly failed to defuse a resurgence of anti-Black racism in the ranks. As an African American veteran with more than 22 years as a department supervisor summed it up to me in 2023:
“We’ve gone back to where it was after Rodney King — rancid and hostile. Black officers feel unsafe. … I’ve heard racist comments like ‘We should do like the old days and sick the K-9s on them.’ But it’s worse now, because it’s not just the MAGA white guys; there’s a faction of anti-Black Latino officers too.”
Qualitative, if preliminary, studies by independent researchers suggest that this view demands examination.
A 2022 "work climate" study, conducted by the UCLA Anderson School of Management for all city agencies, found that Black and Asian workers at the LAPD, and those with liberal political attitudes, reported "comparatively negative" assessments of their workplace. The researchers tell me that in focus groups and interviews, Black officers cited a racially hostile work climate that exposed them to questions about their loyalty, challenges to their authority and even expressions of racial hatred. Worse than the racial transgressions was the refusal of their supervisors and LAPD's top leaders to address their plight because doing so would harm morale.
In 2020, the Hydra Foundation, an international first responders' consultant group, assessed racial view in an LAPD specialized division. It found officer responses "shockingly defensive" and "dismissive," and noted "an unhealthy antagonism" to questions related to systemic or implicit bias. The consultants concluded that there was "an urgent need for education on different forms of racism," and recommended hiring experts who know how to overcome binary racial thinking.
That same year, in a survey conducted by the Oscar Joel Bryant Foundation, which represents Black LAPD officers, most members surveyed said they had seen colleagues’ anti-Black and anti-Black Lives Matter comments on LAPD social media, including jokes about George Floyd’s police murder. Officers reported that the department’s response was to hold small “dialogue sessions” which an assistant chief directed to exclude race because it was “too divisive” and “would hurt morale.”
The LAPD is not alone in failing to counter surging bias in the ranks. In 2022 the California State Auditor found evidence in five other urban California law enforcement agencies of officer bias and “hateful statements” toward people of color, immigrants, women and the LGBTQ+ community. The auditor concluded that the state's law enforcement agencies have inadequate safeguards against such attitudes and an inability to investigate or address them.
I am in touch with countless LAPD officers. In my experience, the vast majority of Los Angeles police do not share these toxic attitudes. What is required is leadership willing to expertly engage with the corrosive factions that do.
Read more: Bias, far-right sympathies among California law enforcement going unchecked, audit finds
Mayor Bass and the Police Commission must appoint a permanent LAPD chief who will have the courage, strategic know-how and intra-human IQ to be able to drain bias from the department and build a culture of safety and dignity for all officers. Instead of a status quo transition at the LAPD, the city needs an analysis of the police department's deepest defects, so the information can inform the selection of the next chief.
Make no mistake, today’s LAPD is not your grandfather’s police department. It improved in the wake of the Christopher Commission investigation of the 1992 civil unrest and advanced significantly during the federal consent decree imposed after the Rampart gang-unit corruption scandal and under the leadership of Chiefs William J. Bratton and Charlie Beck.
But 33 years after the beating of Rodney King, the LAPD is not where it should be. Let’s hope a new chief can do better.
Attorney Connie Rice, a member of President Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, headed the blue-ribbon panel that reviewed the LAPD's response to the Rampart scandal.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
