Pasadena
Councilman John Kennedy’s current quest to get his colleagues interested in
studying creating a police commission for the city has been a lonely one.
He hasn’t been
able to get a single colleague, and there are seven of them on the City
Council, to vote for the study, though he insists that he is currently
interested in just that — looking at the issue — saying he has not made up his
own mind about the wisdom of creating such a body.
But Kennedy has
not even been able to convince two other council members in the city’s Northwest,
where most of the minority community lives and where most of the recent tragic
police shootings and shakedowns by possibly rogue officers have occurred, to
vote for his motion.
Rationally, there
are reasons for skepticism about a new bureaucracy, even when it is a
citizen-driven one.
Big-city police
commission members have a history of unhelpful grandstanding, for instance.
Fellow council members note that their own body has a Public Safety Committee
that oversees policing issues. They warn against having unelected locals not
responsible to the voters, as they are, meddling in law-enforcement affairs.
Then again,
council members could say the same thing about long-standing, powerful bodies
they appoint, including the Planning Commission. Yet they don’t.
City managers
aren’t elected. Police chiefs, for that matter, aren’t elected. They both hold
powerful posts.
And the fact of it
— a fact the Pasadena City Council has not been at all good at acknowledging —
is that there are real problems within the Police Department, especially the
shooting death by officers of young Kendrec McDade and the revelations by this
newspaper of questionable arrests and interrogation tactics by out-of-control
homicide detectives. Sometimes the good intentions of a good and properly
respected police chief such as Phillip Sanchez aren’t enough, because they
can’t be. When you are within an organization, it’s too hard to get an outside
perspective on it.
Responding to the
idea of a police commission, department-watcher Kris Ockerhauser of the local
ACLU has suggested instead creating an office of an inspector general,
independent of all politics. She says her observation of the council’s Public
Safety Committee has been that its members tend to be overly reliant on reports
and judgments from the Police Department itself, rubber-stamping its
recommendations. While creating a new office might be expensive, she notes, it
wouldn’t be as costly as paying out some of the million-dollar judgments the
department has had to pay.
There is a third
possibility that could work even better and cost less. After the Kolts Report
detailed rogue elements in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the
Board of Supervisors appointed the firm of independent policing expert Merrick
Bobb, who happens to live in Altadena, to issue semiannual reports on the
department and its deputies.
Their powerful
insights into department practices have changed policing for the county for the
better. The firm was also hired last year to perform similar watchdog duties
overseeing the Seattle Police Department.
Details could be
different. It might be that biannual rather than twice-yearly reports could be
made. But it’s an idea worth studying.
Are there enough
council votes to do so?