Bernard Parks’ decision last spring to run for mayor of Los Angeles brought echoes of Tom Bradley.
Parks, like Bradley, rose up through the Police Department before entering public office. Parks rose to chief, was ousted and then reinvented himself on the Los Angeles City Council. But with four weeks to go before the March 8 primary, hopes are fading for those wanting to see him become L.A.’s second African-American mayor.
The campaign has been wracked by turnover and an inability to raise funds, and Parks has been unable to expand his support outside his South L.A. base, as Bradley was able to do 30 years ago.
“He’s got great credentials, he’s articulate, he’s got so much ability and he knows this city better than anybody running for mayor,” said L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a close friend. “But with all these ingredients, he’s been unable to gather any momentum, to put it all together.”
While there’s still time for his new grass-roots campaign to gel, Parks faces long odds against three better-financed opponents including his nemesis, incumbent Mayor James Hahn. And his campaign is shadowed by the inescapable fact that his successor as police chief, William Bratton, is more popular than he ever was.
Parks is no stranger to adversity. He joined LAPD just six months before the 1965 Watts riots broke out and had to fend off the department’s notorious racism. “What he went through to move through the ranks had a defining impact on him,” said another friend, Carol Schatz, president of the Central City Association. “He just kept pushing and pushing and he wasn’t going to give up.”
‘By the book’
Early on, Parks stood out for his attention to detail, his thoroughness and his by-the-book approach to policing.
“He was the true definition of a professional cop,” said Stanley Haveriland, a Firestone tire dealer in the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw area and a longtime Parks friend and supporter. “You never went to ask him for any favors, because you knew he was by-the-book.”
That included coaching 9- and 10-year-olds in football. “He would not tolerate any nonsense from the kids. They played hard for him,” Haveriland said.
His wife, Bobbi, had three daughters before he met her; he raised them as his own. The two later had a son, Bernard Jr., who now serves as Parks’ chief spokesman.
“Bobbi has the same steely determination as her husband,” said L.A. City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski. “They have been of one mind in pursuit of his career.”
As a young precinct captain on L.A.’s Westside, Parks demonstrated an ability to reach out to local politicians. Yaroslavsky, then a neophyte councilman, first met him nearly 30 years ago.
“On Saturday nights, I’d go out with Bernie on these ride-alongs all over the Westside, the Eastside and the Southside,” Yaroslavsky said. “I learned more about policing and how a police department works on those trips than all the reading and testimony I’ve seen since.”
Cultivating political friendships as he rose up the ranks, Parks became someone to watch. After the Rodney King riots forced out Police Chief Daryl Gates, Parks applied for the post, but city leaders came under intense pressure to hire an outsider to shake up the department. Parks lost out by one police commission vote to Willie Williams, the police commissioner of Philadelphia.
Williams was not a good fit. The police union never accepted him, and neither did then L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan. Williams also resisted attempts by the police commission and others to implement reforms recommended by the Christopher Commission. In September 1994, Williams shuffled his top staff, in the process demoting Parks from assistant chief to deputy chief.
“Bernie became the fall guy for all the problems Willie Williams was having managing the department,” said Yaroslavsky, who persuaded the City Council to intervene on Parks’ behalf. They could not rescind the demotion, but they did restore his old pay grade.
From that point on, Parks became the darling of the local political establishment. Williams, meanwhile, ran into trouble for accepting free rooms in Las Vegas in violation of LAPD policy and then trying to cover it up.
By 1997, the police commission voted not to renew Williams’ contract, opening up the chief’s spot once again. Parks reapplied for the post, but faced competition from then-deputy chief Mark Kroeker, who was the top choice of the police union. The powerful union was wary of Parks’ reputation for discipline.
This time, however, Parks prevailed, becoming the first black officer to rise within the ranks of the LAPD to become chief.
Cordial with council
Like Williams before him, however, Parks couldn’t win over the police union. They clashed on two major fronts: the discipline of officers which the union regarded as harsh and arbitrary and the union’s push for a three-day, 12-hour-a-day workweek. Parks said and still maintains that a 3-12 schedule takes too many officers off the streets.
“There was a constant tension between Parks doing what he felt was good for policing the city and what the police union wanted for individual officers,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles.
Nonetheless, Parks enjoyed more cordial relations with the City Council and other constituencies that were looking to him to implement the Christopher Commission reforms of police behavior.
Then, in late 1998, came the Rampart scandal. Officer Rafael Perez, who was being prosecuted on charges of stealing cocaine from a police evidence locker, told prosecutors that a group of corrupt officers was operating out of the Rampart Division, planting evidence to frame criminal suspects among other transgressions.
Parks mishandled the fallout, even though much of the activity is said to have occurred before he became chief. While immediately launching an internal investigation, he refused any attempts by outside agencies especially the police commission to conduct their own inquiries. He also opposed federal oversight of the department in the form of a judicial consent decree.
“This was the turning point in terms of public perception of him as a police chief,” Yaroslavsky said. “He was acting more like a supervisor of a police department than as a leader of a large public organization responsible to several constituencies. He failed to realize that when you’re the chief, you’re the face of the department to the public. It’s more of a political role.”
Indeed, following the Rodney King beating L.A. voters approved Proposition F, which stripped the police chief of civil service protection, thus making the post more political than it was in the days of William Parker and Ed Davis.
What’s more, the nature of policing had changed over the years. Instead of being just about getting the bad guys off the streets, the department found itself answering to different constituencies, especially civil rights activists.
To this day, Parks decries this “politicization” of the police chief role, as he calls it. Politics, he says, needs to be taken out of the picture.
Rampart fallout
Ultimately, the Rampart scandal resulted in the overturning of dozens of criminal convictions on the basis of faulty evidence, costing the city tens of millions of dollars in civil damages. It also resulted in the federal consent decree Parks so fiercely resisted, and cost him the political support of the City Council.
“His board of inquiry didn’t address the problems of the culture of the department,” said Miscikowski, who chaired the council’s public safety committee. “We knew we had to address that as part of the consent decree.”
Rampart also deepened an existing rift with Hahn, who was then city attorney and had previously sided with the police union in its attempt to get a 3-12 workweek. In late 1999, Hahn began pushing for implementation of a consent decree to head off what could have been a very costly federal lawsuit.
Many close to Parks say that Rampart publicly exposed one of his primary weaknesses: stubbornness. Even as the political winds were moving towards federal oversight of the department and broader investigations were moving up the chain of command, Parks refused to yield. While he saw this as adhering strongly to principle, others saw rigidity.
“He was a by-the-book principled person. At times, he demonstrated a lack of flexibility,” Miscikowski said.
In the aftermath of Rampart, morale plunged among LAPD officers. Hundreds of officers left the agency and placed the blame squarely on Parks. While the negative environment created by Rampart may have been partly to blame, the police union said the departures were spurred more by Parks’ refusal to implement the 3-12 workweek and disciplinary policies they regarded as arbitrary.
Parks acknowledged that morale was low, but said at the time that it was the result of higher salaries and pensions available at other police departments, as well as the tougher hiring policies he had instituted.
Parks, like most of black leaders, supported Hahn’s 2001 mayoral bid despite the tension between them. Six months later, Hahn stunned the local political world by deciding not to support renewing Parks’ contract and urging him to resign.
Hahn said that his decision was driven by the need to raise morale and stop what he called an exodus of police officers. In typical fashion, Parks refused to step aside. He said Hahn was paying back the police union for their support during the campaign by seeking to have him removed.
Predictably, Hahn’s decision was met with outrage among black leaders. But the police commission upheld Hahn and the City Council refused to intervene. Parks’ five-year tenure as police chief was at an end.
Council run
Few expected Parks to fade quietly into the night. Even during the tumultuous weeks he fought to keep his job, speculation mounted that he would seek revenge by running for mayor.
He first set his sights on an easier target: the eighth council district that was being vacated by Mark Ridley-Thomas, who was running for state Assembly. After a few months out of the limelight, Parks moved his residence a few blocks from Windsor Hills in unincorporated L.A. County to Baldwin Hills and filed to run.
Within a few days, most of the other candidates pulled out. Parks won the election handily.
As he took the oath of office, speculation at City Hall was centered on two fronts: how he might complicate Hahn’s life and the trouble he would have adjusting to a body of 15 equals after decades in the hierarchical LAPD.
Parks surprised many with an early display of political skill. He cast what proved to be the deciding vote for Alex Padilla as council president; in return, he sought and received the chairmanship of the powerful budget committee. He quickly established himself as a budget hawk even refusing extra funding for more cops.
What’s more, he proved able to navigate complex issues that had little to do with policing. In this, he had the benefit of years of seeing how the council operates. “A lot of folks, including me, wondered how he would make the transition,” Yaroslavsky said. “He’s done that well and shown a great amount of skill.”
That opinion was echoed by Miscikowski (who is endorsing Hahn for mayor): “It was a very pleasant surprise to see how he adapted to the way the council operates.”
Mayoral campaign
As many suspected, Parks’ council stint has served as a warm-up for the mayor’s post. After announcing his candidacy last year, he used every opportunity to garner media attention by opposing Hahn initiatives most notably the mayor’s $11 billion plan to overhaul Los Angeles International Airport.
The strategy won Parks early recognition, but masked larger problems with the campaign. From the outset, Parks was having trouble raising funds and support among major black sports, entertainment and religious figures, although Bill Cosby and L.A. County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke are among his backers.
Part of the problem is time. It’s been three years since Hahn’s rejection of Parks and the initial anger among African-Americans has cooled. Hahn himself has worked hard to keep his black support by making key appointments and reaching out to community leaders. And, just as important, Parks’ successor, William Bratton, has not ruffled many feathers in the black community.
Even if Parks can capture the lion’s share of the black vote, it won’t be enough to get into the May runoff. To do that, he would need to reassemble the African-American/San Fernando Valley coalition that Hahn used to win the 2001 general election. Parks has been trying to burnish his pro-business and fiscally conservative credentials to appeal to the more conservative voters in the Valley, but he’s battling former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg for those votes.
Meanwhile, the campaign has had a stream of internal troubles. In just eight months, he’s been through four campaign managers, hindering his ability to put out a consistent message. Longtime friends say he’s placing too much trust in his wife and not enough in his paid advisors.
“He trusts Bobbi, and that’s a good thing. But he needs more advisors than just his wife. There are many people in L.A. who have good political judgment and those people should be consulted,” Yaroslavsky said.
Parks attributes his staff problems to a lack of funds; as of Jan. 22, the campaign had $437,000 cash on hand, compared with $2.5 million for Hahn, $1.6 million for Hertzberg and $1.7 million for Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa.
But as he has shown throughout his career, Parks has staying power. He believes he can connect with enough voters in South L.A., in the Valley and on the Westside to squeak into the runoff. Few are willing to write him off entirely.
“He’s an articulate, poised and attractive candidate who is a household name,” said Guerra. “He’s also surprised many by showing he can play politics as well as anybody.”
