LAPD: Looking for Recruits

I was in high school when I watched the SLA shootout with LAPD officers. After the gunfire ended, a reporter asked a sergeant what the LAPD looked for in police applicants.

“Marines make good candidates,” he said. “Most of them possess the maturity, experience, and intelligence demanded by law enforcement.”

That was 1974.

LA politicians knew this as well. The problem for them was that good cops were harder to buy off. As long as the LAPD enjoyed a close relationship with the community it would be difficult, if not impossible, for corrupt politicians to move easily within City Hall. What then-Mayor Bradley had to do was make it difficult to hire good cops and easier to hire bad ones.

As a former marine who had traveled the world, flew helicopters, and spoke three languages, I barely qualified to enter the LAPD Academy in 1980. Since then, LA politicians deliberately forced the LAPD to accept drug dealers and gang members into our ranks, sidelining highly qualified military veterans because they were the wrong gender and race. Background investigators were forced to turn a blind eye to known criminal applicants.

Rampart, Biggie Smalls, and Deputy Chief Maurice Moore were problems not because LAPD was a corrupt organization, but because corrupt politicians forced drug dealers and gang members onto the LAPD and forced officers like me to ignore them on the job. After a decade of marginal hiring and brutal use-of-force policies, Mayor Bradley’s lawyer, Warren Christopher, convinced LA voters (with a complicit press) that the LAPD had organizational problems that could only be resolved by making the chief of police a mayoral lap dog.

Why is this relevant? Well, today’s LA Times story reports that the LAPD wants to make it easier for military veterans to join the LAPD. Well DUH.

Here are a few reasons for LAPD’s recruitment malaise:

• LAPD doesn’t hire anyone.

That’s the job of civilians in LA’s Personnel Department. The Mayor dictates the gender, race, shape, and age of applicants and the civilian employees at Personnel comply. Quality and suitability are secondary considerations, if considered at all. When insufficient numbers of the “appropriate races and genders” are found, standards are lowered to achieve those goals. LAPD background investigators who spot bad candidates are forced to decide whether to ignore disqualifying evidence, or receive bad ratings and sudden transfers to undesirable assignments.

Either way the candidate gets in. When they graduate from the Academy, training officers are prevented from writing bad ratings to marginal recruits – unless, of course, they are white males.

• LAPD officers are reluctant to refer friends and family as candidates.

Why would I want my children, friends, or relatives to become part of LA’s corrupt landscape? That standards have been lowered over the years is conclusive. My son or daughter might make excellent candidates, but the thought of them being forced to work with someone with a questionable background or that they might get into trouble for reporting criminal behavior is a risk I’d rather not take. Most officers don’t want their friends or relatives to endure that kind of working environment.

• The LAPD Chief of Police is the Mayor’s LAPDog.

When LAPD officers arrested California Senator Kevin Murray with a prostitute in a public park, all charges were dropped because the officers hadn’t booked Murray’s condom. This kind of corruption goes on regularly and, for most good officers, arresting ordinary citizens for things that the mayor lets his friends get away with makes it hard to arrest people who don’t have friends in high places. Equal Protection is one of our fundamental civil rights. Violating those rights for the friends of a councilman, mayor, or prosecutor is as dirty as Murray’s sticky condom.

LAPD command staff understands these issues but is forced to pretend that hiring good applicants is a novel idea. It wasn’t novel back in 1974 and it shouldn’t be novel today. It should be the standard.

Yes, the LAPD needs good people, but the LAPD is only as good as its Mayor. And I wouldn’t trust my friends in a police car with the mayor.