There’s been a running joke in the Los Angeles Police Department for the past few years: If you want to get promoted, you’d better learn to ride a bike.
Former Chief Michel Moore was an avid cyclist, and enterprising officers rushed to join his riding group, hoping to curry favor with him before the next promotion was announced.
Police officers on bicycles visit the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, DC, on May 12, 2015. Sir.
(Brett Carlson/AP)
Promotion often depends on who you know. But as the city searches for a new chief following Moore’s departure this year, a growing number of department officials are privately lobbying for an outsider who could inject new energy into the organization.
Police executives who did not rise through the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department are more likely to challenge decades of the police force’s way of life — or perceptions of that bias, according to interviews with more than a dozen past and present officers. and other personnel familiar with the inner workings of the department. Some current officials requested anonymity so they could speak candidly without fear of career repercussions.
At the same time, they say it can be difficult for outsiders to navigate the department’s insular, best-known culture. Mayor Karen Bass will select the next chief from nominees provided by the Police Commission and outside recruiting firms. The application deadline closed over the weekend, and first-round candidate interviews are scheduled to begin on Monday. A final decision is not expected until this fall.
Los Angeles Police Department Interim Chief Dominic Choi shakes hands with Mayor Karen Bass after her appointment as mayor at Los Angeles City Hall on February 7, 2024.
(Gina Ferrazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Former Deputy Chief Sharon Papa joined the Los Angeles Police Department as an outsider in 1997, when it was merged into the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s police force. Does she approve of the way the LAPD has been run in recent years: “Is she looking for someone to come in and completely change things from top to bottom?”
Former Houston and Miami police chief Art Acevedo is considered a strong contender — a sign some observers say is indicative of the relative inexperience of some internal candidates. Prominent former police leaders from New York City and Seattle are also rumored to have applied, but the list of candidates has not been made public. The committee also declined to disclose the number of candidates who applied.
Asked recently whether outsiders could successfully navigate the department’s culture, interim Chief Dominic Choi was noncommittal but said he was confident Bass would pick the “most qualified candidates,” wherever they are. Start a career.
Choi said the department “is seeking to conduct an internal assessment of the challenges our officers and command staff believe the organization faces.”
Dominic Choi spoke after his appointment.
(Gina Ferrazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Choi said the feedback will be passed on to new leaders “to give them some roadmap to get started.”
Choi rose to senior positions under Moore, who earned a reputation as a policy wonk who could rattle off the details of running the nation’s third-largest police force and expected the same from his subordinates.
But multiple sources said Moore remained in the department as a $20,000-a-month consultant, and after his first term he became a micromanager who insisted on approving even the smallest decisions. Some believe Moore punished those who directly challenged him, creating a groupthink mentality among command staff that left them unable or unwilling to second-guess the “LAPD way.”
Moore did not respond to a request for comment.
Although the former chief of staff no longer attends command meetings, attendees said his presence can be felt in the buzzwords that circulated during his tenure. Recently, some senior staff began half-jokingly circulating a list of the 50 most commonly overheard expressions, including “push through,” “answer bell” and “multi-pronged approach.”
For decades, the Los Angeles Police Department has hired leaders from within. Chiefs will remain in office until they retire or decide to resign, handing over power to the next leader who rises through the ranks. It is believed that by working in a city as vast and diverse as Los Angeles, officers receive a first-rate education in policing; running a busy department like 77th Street or Newton is seen as akin to leading a small-town police department.
But success in these positions isn’t the only path to senior status. In the LAPD, careers are made or broken by relationships.
Moore’s bike club isn’t unprecedented. Former chief Daryl Gates was an avid jogger, while Ed Davis, who led the department for much of the 1970s, was a golfer hands, which makes their protégés bang on the sidewalk or hit golf balls.
Two of the biggest scandals in the department’s history opened the door to the appointment of chiefs who did not begin their careers with the LAPD: Willie L. Williams and William J. Bratton.
Williams’ erratic tenure is particularly cautionary.
Williams, the city’s first black chief and first outside leader in more than four decades, has stabilized the uprising sparked by the acquittal of four police officers charged in the beating of Rodney King. The Los Angeles Police Department.
But department veterans say the former Philadelphia police chief was never fully accepted in Los Angeles, in large part because of a long list of career blemishes and missteps, including a paid junket to Las Vegas. Lying, making questionable personnel changes, and being slow to respond after an incident.
But in a department that has long prided itself on its crisp, lively appearance, he has also been mocked in roll calls around the city for his weight and appearance in uniform. Others were fed up with his failure to carry a service revolver after failing to fulfill a California peace officer requirement and his insistence on referring to senior officers as “white shirts.”
He served only five years, with the Police Commission denying him re-election, citing his ineffective leadership. Williams died in 2016 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
Papa, the former deputy chief, said the department is not as closed as it once was, but any outside candidate should learn from the experience of Williams, who “had no support network within the department and no one to guide him when he came in.”
As a result, she said, the culture of the LAPD “spit him out.”
Bratton took over the department in 2002 in the wake of the Rampart scandal, in which officers were busted for accepting drug money and falsifying evidence, and he tried to insulate himself from a culture of factionalism and hypercompetition by promoting newcomers to other department positions into key positions Impact.
Bratton “knew he needed someone he trusted and was objective,” Papa said of the former top cop in New York City and Boston.
Bratton has also sought to break down the department’s isolation by pushing for greater involvement of senior staff in major police associations such as the International Police Association. LAPD exceptionalism holds that the department sets the tone for American policing.
“Cross-pollination is important,” Dad said.
After Williams, the next leader of the department came from within. Bernard Parks, who served as police chief from 1997 to 2002, had a reputation as a strict disciplinarian that often put him at odds with the police union.
But Parks has also been criticized for limiting the scope of the Rampart investigation, which longtime civil rights attorney Greg Yates said was typical of the LAPD’s old-school mindset and resistance to outside oversight.
Then-Mayor Richard Riordan and then-Mayor Bernard Parks announced at a press conference that the FBI would assist in the investigation of the Barrier Scandal.
(Rick Meyer/Los Angeles Times)
“He’d be like, you know, that guy [spoke out about misconduct] It’s a rat, it’s a snitch,” said Yates, who has handled many Rampart-related abuse cases.
In a recent interview with The Times, Parks scoffed at suggestions that he didn’t take the scandal — or responsibility more generally — seriously, saying he fired 140 police officers during his tenure before federal officials recommended took the initiative to implement reforms.
“How can you do all of these things and still uphold the negative parts of the LAPD culture?” he said.
Parks said recruiting from outside the LAPD does not guarantee innovation. He argued that despite Bratton’s reputation as a progressive reformer, the former New York City police chief was also responsible for introducing his stop-and-frisk policies that critics said were used to justify over-policing of black and Latino communities. is reasonable.
Attorney Greg Smith said the scandals that plagued the department during Moore’s tenure may be the strongest argument for hiring outsiders. Harassment Lawsuits.
The next chief will “come into a department that is rife with nepotism,” Smith said. “You need an outsider who doesn’t rely on anyone to step in and break this up.”
Art Lopez left the LAPD as deputy chief to take the Oxnard Police Department’s top job, but when he was named a finalist for the position eventually held by Bratton, he was considered Be an outsider.
Lopez said his years away from Los Angeles were enlightening, allowing him to see how far the LAPD was ahead of other departments and how Oxnard was “years ahead” in community policing.
“It’s not just because they have a plan; it’s because they have a plan.” That’s the police philosophy. They are truly part of the community and that’s what we really need in the LAPD,” he said.
Charles Ramsey, the retired police chief of Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., said each big city agency has its own set of idiosyncrasies, but the cultural gap between agencies isn’t as wide as some might think. A career working in Chicago.
Ramsey said he tried various tactics to get his officers to buy into his plan and found one message that worked: “It doesn’t matter whether this person is committed to me personally, committed to the organization, committed to the profession and committed to me personally. .
Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank that helped the city hire Bratton, said police departments can embrace outsiders with the right approach. Bratton endeared himself to officers by attending the department’s training academy, gaining a deep understanding of the LAPD’s historical roots and understanding what traditions were important to officers, he said.
“In order to change the culture, you need to understand the culture, and Bratton didn’t change certain aspects of the LAPD culture,” he said.
“You can’t change a department if you alienate the entire department,” he added. “People come in and think, ‘Oh, I’m going to change this and that’ – that’s not the case. It’s a rookie mistake.
