Public Trust in Officials Goes Down for the Count

Sins of omission. Sins of commission. Sins of mission.

In two big buildings on the civic landscape, some big bad doings.

In the first, a series of blunt blows has knocked Parker Center to its knees:

A judge has done the unprecedented, doing prosecutors’ bidding and ordering a man released from prison, three years after two LAPD cops allegedly shot him in the head and then planted a rifle on him to make it look like he was gunning for them. Bam.

A veteran cop who romanced a bank employee and then connived to steal nearly three-quarters of a million dollars was found guilty. Bam.

A cop is convicted of making off with about eight pounds of coke from an evidence locker, and then offers to tell all he knows about bad, bad things going on over at Rampart Division. Bam, bam.

The police chief fires one officer and relieves 11 others from duty. They will, whatever happens, be thought of hereafter as “the dirty dozen.” Bambambambambam.

The FBI has gotten a whiff of cover-up and is following the scent into the LAPD’s house to look under the beds and lift the carpet edges, checking for dirt. Bam bada bam bam. (Even as it wades into the LAPD’s muck, the FBI is failing its own smell test on the Waco conflagration. Flash-bang.) This is the LAPD, the department that was supposed to squeak, as clean as the shine on its shoes.

The department where one police chief put dimes in the parking meter for his official car so no one would think he was taking advantage.

The department of which Johnny Carson used to joke that, unlike cops he had encountered back East, this one didn’t take tips--a fifty wrapped around a driver’s license to make a speeding ticket go away.

The department that spent years hosing itself clean after 1930s scandals of shakedowns and goon squads and kickbacks, of cops more interested in profiting from crime than suppressing it, until they finally blew up the home of the incorruptible cafeteria owner who was gathering dirt on the department, and the civic roof fell in on them too.

“It’s not,” said a disconsolate Chief Parks, on a day he had spent handing out 18 Medal of Valor awards to the best of his troops, “a good day.”

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Another big civic building in downtown, one that stands on old Ft. Moore Hill, is feeling its foundations rumble as well.

In a report whose tone ranged from scolding to scorching, the new chief investigator for the Los Angeles schools takes at least nine district bigwigs to the woodshed--and sounds as if he’d like to send someone to the pokey too.

The kindest thing that Don Mullinax had to say about the supervision of the Belmont Bomb--the appallingly expensive, appallingly polluted proposed site of the snazziest high school in California--was that the former school board that so eagerly approved it was “uninformed . . . and generally rudderless.”

The board and its agents, Mullinax found, broke state law in going forward on the project without diligent attention to the fact that the 35 acres--not far from the site where oil was first discovered in Los Angeles--are steeped in methane and hydrogen sulfide, the compound that smells like rotten eggs, which isn’t all that smells rotten about the Belmont Learning Center project.

On the strength of that report, the new school board is filing a malpractice suit against the biggest white-shoe law firm in town for what it did and didn’t do. Its own superintendent will be out of the loop when the time comes to discipline staff.

Sins of omission. Sins of commission. Sins of mission.

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As you read this this morning, about 4,000 schoolkids are riding buses out to the San Fernando Valley, kids who by now should have been attending a new neighborhood state-of-the-art high school called the Belmont Learning Complex.

All they have learned from Belmont is that too many of the people entrusted to make big decisions about their lives either don’t know what they’re doing or, if they do, might be up to no good.

From Rampart Division to Ft. Moore Hill, such accusations drip and drip and drip into the civic mind, like acid eating through steel, corroding the public’s confidence in the very people who are paid to do it right on everyone’s behalf.

The flow of damning words has already begun, reports and depositions and transcripts, but kids, who can smell out hypocrisy like chocolate bars in a sealed bag, have a simple, contemptuous schoolyard phrase for it: Do as I say, not as I do.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is [email protected]