To Serve and Protect?

Is there anyone at the Los Angeles Police Department Katherine Mader hasn’t pissed off? Cops of every rank, police union leaders, the chief, even her own Police Commission bosses at one time or another have been livid with Mader, the LAPD’s first-ever inspector general. Forget those ACLU zealots. Forget that cop-bashing Johnnie Cochran. Mader, with her watchdog status and the power to peek into confidential records, may be the most despised person at the LAPD. * “She’s a cancerous tumor that should be cut out of this place,” says one high-ranking officer. “She makes us sick.”

Perhaps if katherine mader felt more wanted her office wouldn’t look so much like a bunker--an outsider’s outpost. As it is, her windowless digs in Parker Center, the LAPD’s fast-beating heart, are decidedly drab. On the walls are plaques from her days as a district attorney and a picture of actor Danny Kaye in “The Inspector General,” a ‘40s vintage film. The room’s only attention-grabber is a shirt Mader has pinned to a door. It’s emblazoned with the words “Targeted Employee,” and a symbol well-known to all police officers: A bull’s-eye. Mader gives the shirt a nod. “I guess it’s true,” she says.

As is her morning ritual, Mader has plopped a laptop computer on her desk, grabbed a cup of coffee and dug into her duties. Now she pauses to muse. Hostility, she says, is to be expected in a place that still harbors “some Neanderthals.” But Mader, who turned 50 last weekend, is hardly one to cower. “This is not,” she says, “a job for somebody who is thin-skinned.”

The phone rings constantly with people who have a beef. One claims the police called him a “faggot.” Another says police recruits are repeatedly failing training tests and nobody’s doing anything about it. Officers call to snitch on their colleagues or cry that somehow they’ve been treated unfairly. Everyone knows of a cover-up or conspiracy. After two years on the job, Mader has become something of a patron saint to department malcontents and true victims of police misconduct. She’s championed the causes of people whom, she says, never would have had a shot at justice otherwise.

Officer John Francois, for one, was facing professional meltdown last year working for the bomb squad. As the unit’s first permanently assigned black officer, he felt harassed and discriminated against by his colleagues and supervisor. Mader stepped in. The next thing Francois knew, his supervisor was transferred. Francois now sounds like an infomercial for Mader: “She’s invaluable. I thought it was a token office within the LAPD, but it’s not.”

To some, it was another win for Mader and her 12-member staff, which includes commission employees and two police officers. But in the intense zero-sum analysis of her at the department, every victory also deepens her tarnish. As many veteran officers see it, no one who once tried to free the very scum they sought to imprison, who represented a serial killer--Angelo Buono, the accomplice to Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi--should now be judging them. Nor does it help that Mader did time in the district attorney’s office, since part of her job there was prosecuting cops accused of crimes. In many ways, old-school officers see in Mader everything that makes them cringe: an assertive, professional, in-your-face feminist liberal.

With such contempt dripping openly, Mader seems battle-weary. She is far more reserved today, within the staid walls of Parker Center, than she was early in her career, when she was known for her energetic, friendly, even flirtatious courtroom aura. Only among people she trusts--including some police officials--does she drop her guard, become animated, show traces of a charisma that was said to disarm back in the days when she was a defense attorney at Buono’s trial.

Like many police reforms, Mader’s position grew out of the videotape of baton-wielding cops battering Rodney G. King in 1991. Jolted by the beating, L.A. residents demanded additional protection from those who are supposed to protect and serve. A blue-ribbon panel headed by prominent Los Angeles attorney Warren Christopher concluded that the existing civilian police commission was toothless and needed an inspector general to scrutinize the department’s disciplinary system and make sure that wayward officers don’t get away with bullying. Some in law enforcement complained that it was another misguided liberal scheme to hamstring America’s finest. Others, mainly in poor and minority communities, saw a flicker of hope that brutal cops would finally be reined in. In 1996, the Los Angeles Police Commission hired Mader as its inspector general. Her task: To keep the Thin Blue Line in line.

In any organization, an inspector general tends to be unpopular. At a police department, the job is particularly thankless. And for someone with a resume like Mader’s, the assignment can be nearly impossible. Predictably, she has respect in some City Hall circles, and against all odds is even making a few converts at the LAPD. But that may not be enough. Officials in Mayor Richard Riordan’s administration have done little to disguise their unhappiness, criticizing her “style” and saying that her meddling in the LAPD undercuts Police Chief Bernard C. Parks. Some top LAPD officials say Parks has no use for Mader and is on a quest to undermine her efforts. According to police union sources, Police Commission President Edith Perez gave a union leader the green light to publicly undermine Mader’s reputation. (Parks and Perez have denied such plots.) Adding to the uncertainty is the civilian panel’s newly hired executive director. Once the mayor’s confidant on police matters, he is now Mader’s supervisor.

Political machinations of that kind rattle some outside reformers and Mader’s LAPD supporters. In two years on the job, Mader has helped spur several positive changes, they say--including the way the department handles cops who beat their spouses, tracks citizen complaints and monitors lawsuits against the department. “I wish on occasion she would smooth off her rough edges. But, all in all, the work is good, the insight is good, and her position is beneficial to the department,” says Capt. Daniel Koenig, a well-regarded member of the chief’s command staff.

Still, some observers sense that Mader is doomed. After one contentious public hearing last year, a Times columnist wrote that she may be heading toward a “political execution.” That prospect concerns even some reformers who may not be thrilled with Mader, but fear that if she is ousted, the inspector general position itself, one of the most significant police reforms in decades, will have been neutered.

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Los Angeles’ civilian police commission, by and large, had been a rubber stamp for Police Chiefs Daryl Gates, Ed Davis and their predecessors dating back at least five decades. But voters’ 1992 approval of a sweeping city charter overhaul injected the body with new authority. Willie L. Williams learned that the hard way when he was ousted by the newly empowered commission. Mader, who arrived as inspector general toward the end of Williams’ five-year term, was the commissioners’ darling. They gave her the $95,000-a-year job because of her reputation as a tenacious investigator and her familiarity with the criminal justice system. She dove in immediately.

At that moment, the five-member volunteer commission board--appointed by the mayor and beholden to the City Council for funding of its 80-plus member commission staff--was trying to make a case for getting rid of Williams. Mader became the hammer driving nails into his coffin. In her first year she criticized Williams’ administration for not adequately monitoring citizen complaints, and she participated in a review of the personnel files of transit police trying to join the department under a merger with the LAPD. She helped the city weed out dozens of undesirable cops with records of drug use and excessive force. She also prodded the department to develop and release an unusually self-critical report on former Det. Mark Fuhrman, who had embarrassed the LAPD during the murder trial of O.J. Simpson with allegations of rampant police brutality and misconduct.

“Those were her glory days,” said Gary Fullerton, a member of the police department’s powerful union, which occasionally is at odds with Mader but supports her efforts to bring equity into the discipline process. “She was serving a purpose for the commission.”

Mader’s relationship with her bosses seemed to change when Parks, the commission’s new darling, was sworn into office last August. Three months later, at their very first public face-off, Mader confronted the chief with a report bluntly critical of the way the department finds and tracks officers accused of using excessive force or falsifying reports or lying on the witness stand, or other “integrity related” offenses. Later, the commission would carry out many of Mader’s suggestions. But the chief, his blue uniform lending even more authority to his 6-foot-3-inch frame, responded with hard-edged sarcasm, chiding her “simplistic answers” and reminding her of “a small document called the city charter”--an intricate constitution of sorts, beyond the control of the LAPD, which would make her suggestions difficult to enact.

People who work with Parks describe him as a strict disciplinarian and hands-on manager who doesn’t like an outsider looking over his shoulder. “He doesn’t need Mader in his hair all the time,” says one top official. “He knows what he’s doing. And he understands the department in ways she never will.”

But even a good chief needs oversight, supporters of Mader’s position say. Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, a former commission president, suggested in a recent opinion piece that commissioners are so busy trying to make Parks look good that they have no stomach for pushing a reform agenda or using Mader as their powerful instrument of change. City Controller Rick Tuttle is so concerned that the commission has put a leash on Mader that he’s seeking to change the city’s charter so that the inspector general reports to him. He argues that Mader is not truly an independent watchdog if she has to report to the same commissioners who helped hire the new chief.

“The commission seems to have no desire to have an independent inspector general,” agrees Arthur Sinai, inspector general at the troubled Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who has kept a careful eye on Mader’s situation. “It’s a misnomer to call her current position independent. It’s regrettable that she’s caught in this predicament.”

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As a child, mader was drawn to crime and saw herself as something of a sleuth. “I wanted to be an FBI agent,” she says. “I always wanted to get to the bottom of things and find out right from wrong.”

She grew up in West Los Angeles, the only child of a Ukraine-born chemist father and a mother who was a public-health nurse. Television was prohibited in her home, so Mader kept herself entertained reading Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries. For a class assignment in junior high, she once cornered gangster Mickey Cohen at his sister’s ice cream parlor in West Los Angeles and interviewed him. “I asked totally irrelevant questions,” she recalls, chuckling. “I think I asked him what his favorite color was.”

That encounter, however, helped spark her lifelong interest in detective work, crime and mysteries. One mystery that she never solved, that still haunts her today, is what happened to her European relatives during World War II. Her father barely escaped the Holocaust in Europe, but other family members weren’t as lucky. Mader’s folks rarely talked about the war, but the family’s ordeal left an indelible mark on her. As an adult, Mader traveled to Europe to visit her father’s birthplace and search for clues to the fate of aunts, uncles and other relatives. Even now, she places periodic ads in local Jewish magazines trying to locate relatives who may have survived the Holocaust.

Mader’s own upbringing, on the other hand, was anything but difficult. Her parents were strict but doted on her, encouraging her to take piano lessons to bring out a talent that they believed must have been passed on from composer Felix Mendelssohn--her “great, great, great, great, great, great uncle.” Her interest in the instrument didn’t stick, she says.

Mader’s Palisades High School class was the subject of a book--”What Really Happened to the Class of ‘65”--about the angst and ordeals of that watershed baby boom generation. Mader seemed immune to the obstacles that hobbled many of her peers. After high school, she attended UCLA, majoring in political science. There, at age 19, she met and married Norman Kulla, a tax attorney and investment analyst. Both graduated UC Davis law school.

Mader joined the public defender’s office in Sacramento, where she learned her trade defending child molesters, rapists and arsonists. She also founded a group of female attorneys called Women’s Advocates, who championed women’s rights in all its guises: Once they even dressed up as hookers to protest what they felt was police harassment of prostitutes.

During Jerry Brown’s governorship, Mader went to work for the California Department of Health Services. In a position similar to the one she now occupies, she toured the state’s hospitals investigating substandard care and patient abuse. A year later, the state Legislature cut the job and Mader opened up a private practice. But that, too, didn’t last long. “I hated the politics of trying to schmooze judges,” she says.

Her biggest and most publicized break as a lawyer came in 1980, when Mader and her husband moved back to Los Angeles to be closer to her widowed mother. Mader was told by a friend that defense attorney Gerald Chaleff was looking for an attorney--preferably a woman--to help him defend Angelo Buono in the Hillside Strangler case. Chaleff thought their styles complemented each other. For the next 3 1/2 years, Mader researched and investigated the case, helping uncover that the prosecution’s main witness had been institutionalized as mentally ill and had once impersonated a police officer. “She’s an incredible and dogged investigator,” says Chaleff, who is now one of her bosses on the Police Commission.

Two years before the Buono trial, Mader gave birth to her first child, Julia, now a 20-year-old junior at UC San Diego. Mader soon learned how to juggle diapers and legal briefs, and the career-family balancing act has stuck with her. Mader and her husband have had two more children, David, 13 and Hans, 9. She tries to work from the family’s Pacific Palisades home when possible and makes sure she is there to help her children with their homework and cook them dinner every night. “They’re more important to me than anything,” she says. Being denied television as a child seems to have had a lasting influence, and even now Mader prefers reading and activities such as playing ping-pong with neighborhood kids to passive viewing. Likewise, her vacations usually involve “adventure travel” in such places as Nepal, Tibet, Bulgaria and the Sahara Desert. She also has opened her home to immigrants, whom she’s sponsored from countries such as China and the Ukraine.

Hard as she works to “have a life,” though, her ingrained work ethic seems to pull relentlessly. During the Buono trial she went to court the day after her mother died because she didn’t want to disrupt the proceedings. Nor did she take time off after suffering a miscarriage. As the Buono case wore on, Mader’s fascination with crime intensified. She was particularly intrigued by field trips the jury took to various crimes scenes. That interest led her to freelance writer Marvin J. Wolf. Together they wrote about big-city crimes in several books, including “Fallen Angels: Chronicles of L.A. Crime and Mystery” and “Rotten Apples: Chronicles of New York Crime and Mystery.” While Mader’s passion for crime remained keen, after Buono, “everything else seemed kind of boring,” she says. In a move that’s rarely made, she went from defending suspected criminals to prosecuting them--joining the Los Angeles district attorney’s office.

As a deputy D.A., Mader had an impressive, high-profile career. She obtained death sentences for two of the nine women on California’s death row. She prosecuted prominent Los Angeles Councilman Arthur Snyder in a political fund-raising conspiracy case. And she stood up to her bosses, questioning the practice of using jailhouse informants who had documented credibility problems. Perhaps most notably, though, she went after a couple of cops. In a racially charged case that some saw as a symbolic, post-Rodney King test of the system, she prosecuted LAPD Officer Douglas Iverson, who had shot and killed a tow truck driver in South-Central Los Angeles when the man failed to stop at his command.

The case provides insight into Mader’s relentless, single-minded focus when she’s after somebody she believes did wrong. Instead of seeking a lesser charge of manslaughter, which some court observers thought she could have won easily, the district attorney’s office went for a murder conviction. Twice Mader tried to persuade juries to find Iverson guilty of murder, but neither panel could agree on a verdict. Mader wanted to try a third time, but a judge finally dismissed the charges. She wound up with nothing.

To Mader’s critics, her determined pursuit of officers such as Iverson is evidence of questionable judgment and proof she hates cops. “She is the last person in the world who should be in that job,” says one attorney who knows her.

Mark Geragos, an attorney who represented Snyder, sees it another way. “Kathy is extremely tenacious and leaves no stone unturned. She’s zealous in her pursuit of somebody when she thinks they are wrong [and] maybe her zeal clouds her judgment sometimes. She’s not a very politic person and she’s going to step on toes. She’s got a personality that will rub people the wrong way. That’s her biggest downside. But she’s a necessary irritant. I can’t think of anybody better for that job.”

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As inspector general, mader’s zeal and judgment are subject to more scrutiny than at any time in her career. Last year, after a judge agreed to reduce an officer’s domestic-violence-related conviction, Mader faxed him the officer’s confidential personnel records. The documents showed that after his conviction, the officer had been investigated for a similar offense, which Mader construed as a violation of his probation. The police union demanded that the commission investigate

Mader for breaching confidentiality. Mader further infuriated the top brass by appearing on an “NBC Dateline” report covering that case and the issue of domestic violence. Her bosses admonished her not to release such documents again without their approval.

Mader landed in her biggest mess last November when she started

Investigating Chief Parks for allegedly telling an officer to hold off on serving an arrest warrant to a sergeant accused of violating a court restraining order. The sergeant had pleaded guilty to stalking his ex-girlfriend and been ordered to keep away from her. He allegedly violated that order when he showed up one day at Parker Center, where she worked--also as a cop. Parks balked at having the sergeant arrested because he had invited the officer to headquarters to discuss his future--unaware, Parks said, of the court’s order.

When news of Mader’s investigation surfaced, Perez, the commission president, held a press conference saying the inspector general was not investigating the chief. In a direct rebuttal--and not-so-subtle reference to the chief--Mader issued a statement saying that she was looking at complaints concerning “the possible failure of department members to protect the interests of all employees.” The statement added: “It is my duty to these complainants as well as to the integrity of the office of the inspector general to pursue the questions raised until they are satisfactorily answered.”

Mader’s investigation, which she forwarded to the commission, found that top department brass, including the chief, should be subjected to further scrutiny. In the end, neither Parks nor the other officials were charged with any misconduct, and a jury acquitted the sergeant of violating the court order.

The episode changed Mader’s relationship with the commission president. Before the incident, Perez had said of the inspector general: “It is refreshing to have someone call it like it is. She is very direct and honest about shortcomings of the department.” But after the clash, union sources say that one of their members came to them saying he had met with Perez, and that she had let it be known she would not stand in the way if union operatives wanted to dirty Mader’s reputation with any information they could find. Perez denies it. Asked recently if she supports Mader, Perez says only that she supports “the position.”

While many top LAPD officials wait for Mader to slip up again, others have started using her as a resource or a sounding board on issues. She says she’s developed an extensive network of officers from every rank who tip her off about things to investigate. Even some command officers sing her praises. There are, however, others who voice support in her company but delight in stabbing her in the back. Mader offers a long list of people she considers supporters. But when they are contacted for this article, many eagerly trash her, calling her naive about how the city works and too eager to go for the jugular. Some of them say that she gets mired in internal squabbles while neglecting matters that affect the public more directly.

Mader says she is rarely concerned with the political ramifications of her actions and understands why even people she has cultivated as department sources view her with caution. At any moment she may need to investigate someone she considers a friend, she says. That happened last year. A captain she was friendly with one day was accused the next of helping two deputy chiefs get raises they didn’t deserve. “I have to do what I think is right regardless of whether I like the person or not,” Mader says. Her investigation forced the captain into a disciplinary hearing. He was eventually vindicated.

At the same time, Mader is beginning to realize that since commissioners serve only part time, she needs to be more selective in her causes. “In the beginning, I brought too many issues to their attention instead of evaluating which issues would have the biggest long-term impact and justify their time. The whole notion of picking one’s battles is something I’ve learned more and more about.”

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In downtown’s stately california Club last February, Mader gave a speech about her job to a group of lawyers--among them former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, the wizened namesake of the commission that created her position. “There is no school for inspector generals,” she told the audience gathered in the wood-paneled room. “This is an amorphous position that the Police Commission and I are constantly working to define. My effectiveness depends upon the quality of my relationships with not only the Police Commission but the department. That’s how things get done.”

The Washington, D.C.-based organization Human Rights Watch has hailed Los Angeles’ willingness to put a civilian overseer into its police force and calls the position Mader holds a model for other law-enforcement agencies. But local police reformers are nervous as they watch what is happening with this inspector general, fearing that the job remains at risk and entangled in politics.

Mader’s associates say even she has privately begun to question whether her bosses will let her fulfill her mandate. The relationships she says are crucial to her success--with the department, with the commission--are clearly troubled and limiting her effectiveness.

“I’m supposed to have complete and unrestricted access to records in this department,” Mader says, annoyed, “and at times that concept has not been honored.”

“Kathy tries to stick her nose in and it gets bitten off every time,” says Fullerton, the union leader. “It’s a shame. Our members ask me all the time, ‘How can you support that bitch? She’s death to us.’ I tell them, You’ve got to look at the big picture.’ I defend her when I can.”

But even Chaleff, her strongest supporter on the commission, can’t bring himself to gush. Sometimes, he says, she does great work. “And sometimes she does things that I don’t agree with.”

As she wrapped up her speech at the luncheon, Mader struck an upbeat tone. “It would be difficult for any organization to accept an outsider living in their midst, particularly an outsider who is perceived to be there to play ‘Gotcha,’ ” she said. “Yet many people at the department at all levels have been welcoming and helpful and I appreciate it very much.”

When she finished, the attorneys applauded. Several went to shake her hand. One outstretched hand belonged to Christopher. Far more than most people in the room, Christopher has reason to root for Mader. Her success, after all, would advance the crusade his commission launched, further protecting Angelenos from brutal cops.

He said he was glad something had come of his recommendations. He wished her luck.