POLICING THE POLICE; CHIEF PARKS MUST REALIZE ACCOUNTABILITY IS LINKED TO CIVILIAN REVIEW.

Byline: Heather Carrigan

There is a pattern to police reform in Los Angeles, and it is a pattern that must be broken.

A tragic instance of police brutality - such as the shooting of a handcuffed man at point-blank range by Rampart Division officers - comes to light and public outcry ensues.

Commissions and panels are convened, reports issued, reform recommendations made. So far, so good. But then the reform process comes up against the existing structure and culture of law enforcement - and stumbles and falters and then, finally, stops. It is always the reform process that changes, never the LAPD.

We all suffer as a consequence, citizens and officers alike. Angelenos suffer the unchecked excesses of corrupt police officers and the police force as a whole suffers from a lack of public trust.

There is no more important police reform than civilian review, because there is no other reform with the capability to simultaneously root out police corruption and restore and maintain public confidence in the department. And yet no other reform has met with so much resistance from LAPD management.

Chief Bernard Parks has said that civilian review would not have uncovered the allegations of police brutality and corruption in the Rampart Division any sooner, since the inspector general would have received the same faulty police reports as the department. But this is a conundrum of the department's own making. Police reformers have long fought for more empowered civilian review mechanisms, including the resources to conduct independent investigations rather than simply audit the department's work.

The incidents at Rampart also underscore the need for another long-sought reform: a special prosecutor with the ability to investigate all police corruption and, if necessary, prosecute. We cannot rely on the District Attorney's Office to fulfill this function. District attorneys are often reluctant to bring charges against the same officers they need as witnesses in other cases. Their offices are not set up to do independent investigations, but instead have to rely on police records and investigators.

The crisis unfolding cannot be resolved by merely identifying and disciplining the individual officers implicated by the Rampart scandal; any real resolution requires us to challenge the culture of inviolability inside the LAPD that allowed such severe police misconduct to take place. Clearly, those officers felt their actions never would come under public scrutiny. Since the posture of their chief has been to resist civilian review at every turn, this was perhaps not an unreasonable conclusion. Though no one questions Chief Parks' commitment to rooting out corruption within the ranks of the LAPD, as long as he continues to insist that police can police themselves, he is part of the problem.

In Los Angeles, the usual patterns of police reform have proved no match for the usual patterns of police abuse. If the city is to recover from these latest revelations of police brutality - and here the language of recovery serves us well - there must be intervention into the culture of LAPD, starting with its highest officer. Chief Parks cannot continue to deny that police accountability is vitally linked to public scrutiny, and Mayor Riordan and other officials cannot continue to act as his enablers.

Though the LAPD may relinquish a certain kind of power by shaking off its cloak of secrecy, it will gain another, far more powerful weapon for fighting crime in the process - the support and trust of the people it serves. It is long past time to build more accountability into the structure and culture of law enforcement and implement meaningful civilian review.