LAPD Face Test in DNC Convention
July 26 -- In some ways, things couldn’t be worse for the Los Angeles Police Department as it prepares for next month’s Democratic National Convention.
The city’s crime rate and gang activity is rising. Two years into a corruption probe of the downtown Rampart division, four officers face criminal charges and 85 convictions have so far been thrown out due to tainted police testimony. The federal government is threatening to intercede for the department’s “pattern or practice of excessive force, false arrests, and unreasonable search and seizures.”
So it should be no surprise that morale is reportedly low and attrition is rising at the LAPD.
The convention will be held at the downtown Staples Center, the spot where the Lakers won the national championship June 19 and where revelers outside the hall torched cars, set bonfires and looted businesses. Police Chief Bernard Parks, who was at the game in plainclothes, has been criticized for failing to send in his officers sooner to quell the disruption. Critics say he feared that another televised altercation would make his force look bad.
“Everybody’s looking at the LAPD,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a leading political analyst and professor at the Claremont Graduate University.
The threat of federal intervention in the department “without question” played in the department decision to give the Lakers revelers room to rampage after the victory, Jeffe said. The question now is whether the same will happen at the convention. At issue, she said, is “whether or not everything hanging over the department … will create some hesitation.”
The test for the LAPD is how it will handle the upcoming confrontation.
‘No-Win Situation’“It’s a no-win situation for the police,” Geoffrey Garfield, the spokesman for the officers union, the Police Protective League, said of the upcoming convention. “They’re damned if they do and they’re damned if they don’t.”
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