QUIET REVOLUTION
dick wagner
press about the LAPD’s Rampart scandal in which some cops attached to a
CRASH unit fabricated evidence and perjured themselves in court to help
convict defendants who were apparently not guilty of the specific crimes
in question.
PUBLIC REACTION: This attention has had at least two results (beyond
selling more newspapers). It has caused a small part of the public to
relate to the situation with a visceral passion. They use the incident
as an external specific to focus anxieties and rage concerning authority
figures that they have harbored in their personalities, all along.
On a broader level, the incident has caused much of the public to be
dissatisfied with their police (and their judicial system that tolerated
the improprieties), and want to see changes for practical reasons. This
larger group does not want to throw out the baby with the bath water;
they still want a suppression of crime and the maintenance of law and
order. But, they also would like believe that cops use their office in
the interest of the community, and not for the expression of their own
psychological needs for superiority, or their private profit.
COPS AS BULLIES: I ran across this latter perspective a week or so ago
when I pulled into the parking garage on the ground floor of a tall
office building in which my dentist is located. Ahead of me, a stylish
young woman jumped out of her late model luxury car, was impatient with
the attendant, and hurried off to the elevators. I was in no hurry
myself, and went through the little ritual at a normal pace. In the
building’s lobby, I ran across the woman, fuming, and waiting
impatiently for the elevator. (Isn’t that always the way? When you are
in a hurry, the elevator is the slowest.) She held a long yellow slip
of paper in her hand, and when we were finally in the elevator alone,
and headed for the top floors, she waved it at me with disgust, "Just
got a traffic ticket."
"Ohh," I comforted. "Bad way to start the day. And, you were already
in a hurry."
"Yes," she seethed. "The awful part is the cop just wanted to make it
worse. I was being nice to him, but he dragged it out, and dragged it
out… You know, I think they just like to show you who is in charge --
throw their weight around. I mean, I know I was speeding, and I deserve
the ticket, but he was absolutely sadistic in finding petty little
excuses to make the process of writing the ticket take longer, and
making me even later. I think they only hire cops who have a compulsion
to be bullies."
"Could be," I shrugged sympathetically, as she got off the elevator. I
had the image from her little anecdote of Furhman’s cocky and "in
charge" personality, and knew exactly what she was talking about.
As I continued the last part of the trip to the dentist’s office alone,
I recalled a scene I saw years earlier in my own neighborhood of a big
burly cop in his tall boots, leather attire, and holstered gun, sternly
writing a ticket, while beside him stood a ten year old girl, trembling
as she clutched her bicycle by the handlebars, and crying. "I think
they only hire cops who have a compulsion to be bullies," the angry
young woman had said. Maybe so.
GRASS ROOTS LEVEL: So, the man on the street -- quite apart from the
Rampart scandal -- has cause for some dissatisfaction with the police.
If having bullies as policemen is the price that must be paid for law
and order, then maybe we will pay it reluctantly. But, we’d rather have
our law and order without bullies, thank you very much.
Even among those who do not have a psychological predisposition to rage
against authority figures -- and for whom not amount of "fixing" would
ever work -- there is dissatisfaction. And, the Rampart scandal just
gives focus to this.
The most discussed remedy is a police review commission of citizens to
oversee the cops. But there is already in L.A. a Police Commission, a
few years ago there was the highly publicized Christopher Commission,
and there have been other such measures tried often and wide. Still we
have "bad cops". But "citizen review" is hyped because it would give
new positions of influence to the friends of politicians, even though it
wouldn’t touch the actual problem.
WHO ARE COPS?: In the Simpson trial we heard the detectives run their
bios when they were on the stand, and we saw that they were often picked
from the armed forces where they may have had training in military
police units. (It made sense that prior experience minimized the amount
of training that the city would have to do.) Fuhrman came to the LAPD
from the Marine Corps, for example. These guys, though, are ready for
retirement, and so what we see in their biographies is the practice of
twenty or more years ago. In the 1980s there became an interest in
"diversity," and under that, women and minorities were aggressively
recruited, and other factors were considered less important than gender
and ethnicity. Perez, of Rampart infamy, got his job under that
mindset. That seems to produce problems of its own that are no better
than the "ex-Marine" recruitment practices.
RECENTLY: I have had a couple of recent experiences that suggest to me
that while the battle about high sounding "solutions" rages in the
press, the law enforcement community themselves really understand the
true problem and are taking effective measures to address it.
There is a young couple who is a friend of our family. The husband is
attractive, bright, and self-confident -- some might even say cocky. He
would like very much to be a sheriff’s deputy, and got himself an
un-sworn job as jailer downtown, which is a first step to such a
career. He applied for the Sheriff’s Academy, and questionnaires came
to some in my family. He was rated high on personality, intelligence,
and many Boy Scout characteristics. But then came questions about his
personality and psychological disposition. Respondents had to answer
truthfully that the young man had an "us vs. them" attitude about other
people, sometimes had a brooding mood, occasionally gave indications
that he might have trouble controlling his anger -- especially if he
were in a position of advantage… And then, the final crushing question
that none of them would have thought to ask themselves, "Would you trust
this person to carry a gun in public into a variety of situations, some
of which were dangerous, and some of which were anger provoking." They
regretfully answered, "No." The young man was later notified that his
application for the academy was rejected, but he was offered anger
management courses, and depending on the outcome of those, perhaps
therapy. He quit his quest to work for the Sheriff’s Department, and is
planning to move to another, less cosmopolitan, state.
A second incident happened a couple of weeks ago. In the afternoon,
while I was working on house cleaning, the doorbell rang. It was a
pleasant young man in a business suit who showed me an ID card (but not
a badge) with the LAPD and said he was investigating an application from
another young man two door down who wanted to be a policeman. He showed
me a photograph of a nice young Latino fellow whom I had never seen
before. I told him that I did not know the applicant, but cautioned him
that in the house between the applicant and me -- where the interviewer
would probably also ask -- there lived an old woman who was
hyper-critical about everybody and everything, and if she was critical
of the applicant, he should discount that opinion some. The woman’s
daughter also lived in the household, and if he could get her
impression, it would be more reliable, I thought.
I don’t expect I will ever hear the disposition of this application,
but I am impressed that in all the years that I have lived in this house
I have never received such an inquiry before. I take this as an
indication that the LAPD is taking more care now to evaluate the
character of their applicants before they hire them.
A CAUSE FOR HOPE: I take these two incidents to be an indication that
while the media, the special interest groups, the paranoid members of
the public, and the politicians who pander to them, rage about Rampart,
the law enforcement officials really do understand the problem, and are
quietly taking effective steps to fix it. I am delighted and
comforted. (I am also cheered to see indications that DA Garcetti, who
tolerated police corruption because it was useful to his office, may
lose his job in November for the lapse.)
--dick wagner