L
A POLITICS-The right guy for the job of LA’s Chief of Police will soon be elected Sheriff of Los Angeles County; the wrong guy for Chief of Police will soon get five more years in the job.
Good for the county, bad for the city -- it’s not a close call.
Jim McDonnell (photo left) has the intelligence and managerial experience and skill to clean up the legacy of mismanagement of the Sheriff’s Department that Lee Baca – a man who hopes he won’t be indicted – left behind.
He was Bill Bratton’s right-hand man, the LAPD’s No.2 leader, a position that left him in charge as much as four months a year while America’s “top cop” gallivanted around the world strutting his stuff.
For whatever reasons – no one can ever quite explain the ups and downs -- crime fell sharply during those years and continued inching down under Beck’s leadership.
Suddenly, the trend reversed this year and Beck and his sidekick, Mayor Eric Garcetti, finally came clean this week as they made a coronation tour of the city and put a smiley face on the end of the LA’s decade-long honeymoon from out-of-control violence.
Aggravated assaults up 12 percent this year, violent crime up 2.9 percent – say it ain’t so Charlie.
That is more or less what they said when disclosing the facts as they beat the drum for Beck to get another five-year’s in a job that is clearly over his head unless you think public servant means serving other public servants like the politicians who appoint him better than the public.
What’s startling is that Beck is at a loss to explain the increase despite the daily crime tracking system, Compstat, put in place by Bratton which provides daily reports intended to spot trends and guide officers in where and how to respond.
As the Times reported, Beck said the department was “drilling down” and trying to determine why the rise in aggravated assaults began about two months ago and was “sporadic” across the city.
"Aggravated assaults are the precursors to shootings and homicides, and we're very concerned about this trend," Beck said. "We're looking at it, we're dissecting it ... and we will keep a close eye on this."
Drilling down, sporadic, citywide, keeping a close eye on it – and yet so big an increase that it caused a 12 percent spike for the six-month period, suggesting something like a 36 percent increase in a third of the period assuming violence was down in the first four months of the year.
The mayor without a backbone beneath his oh so very smart brain went so far as to suggest the dramatic two-month spike was a statistical aberration brought on when victims of violence and the cops who write up the reports suddenly started calling every assault of every kind ‘aggravated.’
"It may be up overall," Garcetti said. "But the number that are simple assaults versus aggravated assaults has also shifted, perhaps because of more aggressive reporting."
Say what? They don’t know what is going on throughout the city?
Decreasing crime is just about the only thing that has gone right in the city for the last decade so you would think they would have all those senior lead officers and everyone else out on the streets talking to people, examining the assaults case by case to provide the public real answers instead of public relations deceits.
Isn’t that Beck’s job to know the answers? Isn’t it the mayor’s job to demand real answers?
That isn’t the way City Hall sees problems: cover up the problems, sweep them under the carpet, sell a gullible and ignorant public fantasies.
Or, the way Beck sees problems? The chief whose reappointment seemed to be in question a few months ago after exposure of how he is a lax disciplinarian on excessive force and racist and sexist comments by officers, at least those in his good old boys network.
"When I stepped into this role, I didn't expect that we would be looking for a new police chief, but now we may need to consider it," Police Commissioner Paula Madison told the Times recently, recalling how she felt back in April after a series of problems arose, including the lack of transparency about them.
Even now, she added, "Shoes just keep dropping."
Beck’s response to her concerns and those of other commissioners was to do what he does best: he went on a public relations blitz.
“Beck went to work making amends. He began meeting regularly with each commissioner in private — something he had not done previously — in an effort to build their trust and address their concerns,” the Times Joel Rubin reported this week.
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Of course, it worked because it is a closed system with no tolerance for much independence from commissioners or staff or even Council members.
The most important thing is the survival of the system itself which is why Charlie Beck is Chief and Jim McDonnell went off to straighten out the Long Beach Police Department and now has seized the opportunity to become sheriff, getting just under 50 percent of the vote in the primary and assuring his election in November.
McDonnell is not a hard-ass, nor is he a suckup.
Beck, on the other hand, is the kind of guy that the people in charge of City Hall could love after Bratton, who thought LA was a minor league town with a bunch of 10th rate politicians. He was too slick, too smart, too experienced for them.
They had no control over him so when it came time to name a successor in 2009, they passed over McDonnell and others who were better qualified to pick someone they could trust to faithfully do their bidding on missions personal as much as professional.
The likeable street cop … Charlie Beck … who had learned the language of modern policing fit that bill – and still does.
(Ron Kaye is a lifetime journalist, writer and political observer. He is the former editor of the Daily News and the founder of the Saving LA Project. He writes occasionally for CityWatch and can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
