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Chief Beck's challenge
Shooting in Westlake tests new Chief Charlie Beck and the community policing that a reformed LAPD practices
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police had to deal with several days of protests after shooting		  

Chief Beck's challenge

Shooting in Westlake tests new Chief Charlie Beck and the community policing that a reformed LAPD practices

by Joe Domanick

September 24, 2010


Not that long ago, I joked with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck about his success in keeping the department out of the headlines — always an accomplishment for a big-city chief. Then came the Sept. 5 officer-involved shooting death of Manuel Jamines in Westlake, just west of downtown. The police say the 37-year-old Guatemalan day laborer was drunk and wielding a knife. An investigation is underway.
 
The shooting triggered three nights of violent protests, and the intensity of that localized community anger has been a test of Beck and of a newly reformed Los Angeles Police Department. What has the crisis taught us about "community policing" under Beck, and about the new chief?

Beck is a protege of former Chief William J. Bratton, a master of community relations and the media message. One reason Beck got the chief's job was because he's seen as a smart and successful practitioner of community policing in his own right. He commanded the troubled Rampart Division in 2002, transforming MacArthur Park from a dangerous drug bazaar into a safe, vital community resource. In 2007, when he commanded the South Bureau — that sprawling section of black and Latino L.A. — he told me: "People here have started cooperating with us because we aren't just talking nice to them, we are building collateral. These folks … have been marginalized for years. A lot of it is open dialog, and treating them like equals and not like some lower species you're guarding at the zoo, which is definitely the way we [the LAPD] did it in the past."

Yet Beck and the reformed LAPD seemed to have little of that kind of collateral to call on in Westlake. A big piece of community policing is informational give-and-take between cops and the neighborhood people they police. Beck has admitted that the LAPD was surprised by the anger in Westlake, caused in part by aggressive ticketing of unlicensed street vendors, many of whom received $250 tickets while subsisting on $10 a day from their street sales. Beck needs to examine why the department seemed so clueless, especially about the mood of the people in an area of the city that has given us both the 1999 Rampart scandal and the May Day 2007 police attack on peaceful demonstrators and the media in MacArthur Park.

After the shooting, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa didn't help matters. He guaranteed that the investigation would prove that the officers involved were "heroes." That kind of talk is reminiscent of the old pre-Bratton LAPD declaring an officer innocent before an investigation had been completed.

Beck stumbled too. He blamed "outside agitators" for the Westlake protests. Provocateurs from the Revolutionary Communist Workers Party were on the scene, but they couldn't spark a fire without combustible fuel. Moreover, the label "outside agitators" is a red flag to minorities, used in the past to delegitimize protestors. In L.A., it puts the blame for community/police unease on a third party.

But to his credit, Beck quickly began to offer more informed, thoughtful, nuanced, wide-ranging explanations for the protest (unlike the Police Protective League, which hammered away at this one issue).

"This is a community of entry-level immigrants having an extremely difficult time making a living in a difficult time," Beck told me about a week after the shooting. "Many depend on day-laboring, which has been severely impacted by the economy in a huge way, and this has forced them into street vending [without a license]. This is not just an issue of the Los Angeles Police Department and a shooting; this is much more about the greater issue of survival."

In the aftermath of the May Day 2007 MacArthur Park police attacks, Bratton sought to "make a positive out of a negative." He described the Metropolitan Division, whose officers were the perpetrators of the attacks, as "the heart of an LAPD culture that people complain about: the insensitivity, the brutality, the idea that they could use force without consequence." He decided to use the incident to "break the back of the [division's] culture," and he succeeded.

In the same vein, Beck has embarked on a plan to ease the police/community tension in Westlake by addressing the issue of unlicensed vendors. He's identifying community leaders, setting up moderated forums with street vendors, working with Central American counsel generals, all in an effort to accommodate competing interests.

"You don't fix these kinds of problems overnight," he says. "But I know what has to be done, and we're already working on it."

Westlake is L.A.'s first police crisis since Bratton's retirement. Beck is by necessity still mastering his job. And yet, most of the lessons we learned about him were no surprise: his thoughtfulness, his ability to see the big picture and — remarkably for a former hard-nosed street cop — his empathy for the most powerless among us. He isn't returning to the old LAPD response of clamping down and trying to arrest its way out of a complex situation.

But the LAPD has work to do. It must concentrate on keeping its ear closer to the ground to avoid the next potential crisis in a troubled community. The chief, not to mention the mayor, has to be more careful about his message and the words he chooses before going public.

However the Westlake investigation turns out, the violence following Jamines' death is evidence of a failure on the part of the LAPD and the preventive police work that is the key to community policing. But fixing a hole in community policing shouldn't be a problem for a leader of Beck's caliber. Keeping the peace in a combustible part of the city in an extraordinarily stressful time will be his real challenge.

Joe Domanick is the associate director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.