Prometheus 6

LAPD's vicious cycles
From the Christopher Commission to the May Day report.
October 11, 2007 

The life of the Los Angeles Police Department is seasonal: There is the period of stability that gives way to rising tension that erupts in calamity that is followed by self-evaluation that produces reform; reform fixes some problems and helps restore stability until new tensions produce new catastrophes. And so on. That has been the case at least since the late 1980s, when rising racial tensions crested in the beating of Rodney King, which gave us the Christopher Commission report and its landmark recommendations -- some of the most significant and lasting in the department's history. Then the riots of 1992 upended the LAPD again; the Webster report analyzed that event and produced another round of reform. The Rampart scandal of the mid-1990s started the cycle all over again.

So it can only be with a sense of weariness that any L.A. veteran pages through the LAPD's latest self-examination, this one of police actions during this year's May Day demonstration in MacArthur Park. Here again comes the LAPD to announce that it has looked hard at itself, identified its shortcomings and is, at last, prepared to improve.