Ed Davis’ Influence Still Strong in LAPD

MORRO BAY — Having weathered not one but two careers in the public limelight, Los Angeles police chief turned state senator Edward M. Davis long ago earned his retirement to this coastal California village.

His battles with Mayor Tom Bradley, state Atty. Gen. Evelle Younger and assorted other foes are behind him. And he has holstered his penchant for mischievous public outbursts, a tradition that included his famous prescription for hijackers: Give them a trial, then “hang ‘em at the airport.”

Although Davis’ retirement has removed him from Los Angeles, it has not severed his ties to the city’s politics or its Police Department. In fact, 18 years after he left the LAPD, his influence is profound and growing as a new batch of city leaders--including Mayor Richard Riordan and the chairwoman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee--turns to him for guidance, either directly or through top aides.

His novel policing notions--the same ones that earned him the nickname “Crazy Ed” from his command staff--have been reborn under a new generation of law enforcement leaders. And the 79-year-old ex-chief’s advice, once embraced with trepidation, now is eagerly sought by city officials wrestling with one LAPD leadership quandary after another. Faced with those questions, and reluctant to call upon the controversial Daryl F. Gates, officials instead have turned to Davis.

The result: The white-haired, Spencer-Tracy look-alike quietly has reassumed a place in the leadership of the LAPD he loves, this time as an informal but highly influential elder statesman.

His views are helping guide the LAPD’s move toward community policing; shaping perceptions of policing philosophies by steering city leaders away from the course charted by Gates, and reinforcing critics of Gates’ successor, Willie L. Williams, whose five-year contract is up next year.

“You have to have a vision of yourself and where you want to go,” Davis said of the department, which he ran from 1969 to 1978 before retiring to run unsuccessfully for governor and later to serve three terms in the California Senate. The LAPD “doesn’t seem to have that today. Beyond that, I think, they need to enunciate their creed, their principles. I don’t think they do.”

As for Williams’ role in leading the department, Davis said the current chief seems to lack direction as well as an ability to clearly communicate his goals to the people who work for him. “If the pope doesn’t believe,” Davis said, “what the hell is some yardbird Catholic supposed to do?”

Williams, who only has met Davis once or twice and does not seek out his advice, declined to join him in a debate over today’s LAPD. But he brusquely dismissed his retired predecessor.

“Maybe 20 years from now, I’ll have the same criticism about somebody else,” Williams said. “Twenty years from now, I’ll probably be a little out of tune with what’s going on then, as Mr. Davis is out of tune with what’s going on today. I wish him well. Period.”

Legacy of Influence

Evidence of Davis’ influence abounds.

Bootleg copies of Davis’ book on policing, “Staff One,” are on the shelves of Riordan and other city leaders, its dogeared pages testament to readings and re-readings.

His home with its ocean view is a magnet for politicians and police officers making what some call the “pilgrimage to Morro.” Some have gone seeking his advice on leadership; others pump him for specifics. This month, the commander of the LAPD’s Community Policing Group has scheduled a session with Davis to discuss the department’s history and to solicit his ideas.

In 1991, the blue-ribbon Christopher Commission and its chairman, now-Secretary of State Warren Christopher, turned to Davis for suggestions on police reform and found him not only receptive but enthusiastically supportive. He proposed term limits for the chief, an idea the commission recommended and voters approved.

Councilwoman Laura Chick, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, calls him “my tutor.” Riordan, who has sparred with Chick in recent months, nonetheless shares her admiration for Davis, and plucked one of his top aides, Joe Gunn, from Davis’ coterie.

Most strikingly, his legacy endures in the men who learned under his tutelage and now occupy positions of influence in city government. Gunn once served as Davis’ liaison to the City Council and Sacramento; now he is Riordan’s special advisor on police matters. Eric Rose learned politics and policing from Davis, who regards him almost as a son; Rose advises Chick on law enforcement issues.

“His ideas and concepts of policing,” Rose said, “will be around for the next hundred years.”

And at the LAPD, the upper ranks are swollen with the men whose careers were shaped, in part, by Davis.

Among them: Assistant Chief Bayan Lewis, who is reinvigorating one of Davis’ long-dormant policing programs; Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker, who inherited Davis’ devotion to community policing and commitment to leadership; Deputy Chief David J. Gascon, who studied Davis’ use of the media and his blend of policing styles, and Deputy Chief Bernard Parks, who personifies Davis’ stern administrative style and strict attention to the details of organizational management.

“When he gave me my sergeant’s badge in 1970, he spoke about what it was to be a leader,” said Kroeker, who--along with Gascon and Parks--is sometimes floated as a successor to Williams. “To this day, I can still remember his words . . . He very profoundly affected my vision of what a leader should be.”

Davis, added Parks, “was the epitome of leadership.”

In 1940, Ed Davis stepped out of a Police Academy class that included another future Los Angeles luminary, Tom Bradley, and became a cop.

It was at the academy that Davis also first met William Parker, later to become a legendary chief of the LAPD and the man who would pull the department under his yoke for 16 years. That meeting--during which Parker warned the young recruits that if they fell prey to corruption, they would get a one-way trip to San Quentin--was the first of many in a long, contentious and complicated relationship that forged Davis’ vision of police leadership.

Over the years, as Davis became a director of the police and fire union and rose through the LAPD ranks, Parker periodically would rage at his subordinate for challenging him, then just as quickly ask Davis to undertake some of the department’s most sensitive tasks.

Despite their clashes, Davis said Parker heeded his advice during the 1965 riots--when Davis suggested that the police, who had been avoiding confrontation, needed to make large scale arrests to quell the unrest. The chief had Davis write the first LAPD policy and procedure manual. Davis would later supplement it with his 20 principles of policing, which still hang on LAPD station walls.

From Parker, Davis inherited a vision of integrity and stern professionalism. To Parker’s example, he added an openness to his officers and a firm belief that the community must participate in its own law enforcement--ideas that are at the forefront of his legacy and that partly explain Davis’ influence today.

Community Policing

On Aug. 29, 1969, Davis became Los Angeles’ 46th chief of police. What unfolded was the first American experiment in community policing--an example that the LAPD is studying again today as it tries to find its way back down the path that Davis broke.

Davis’ innovations started with the Basic Car Plan. Like most of his creations, it grew out of his voracious reading; in this case, a work on the animal instinct to protect territory. The plan divided Los Angeles into small districts and assigned officers to each. Their job was to protect their turf against crime.

About the same time, Davis introduced Neighborhood Watch, which was intended to bring residents together and officers into their homes. In theory, police would meet with residents over coffee and seek neighbors’ suggestions on crime-fighting. At a department molded in the image of Parker, the program at first was regarded with suspicion.

“I’m sure Bill would have crowned that a crazy idea,” said Davis, chuckling. “I think Parker would have turned me down absolutely. He would have thought I was insane. In fact, a lot of people did think I was insane.”

But Davis was unrelenting. He demanded that subordinates carry out the program and rode herd on those who dawdled. Underlings desperately tried to keep up with Davis’ reading, scurrying out to buy a copy of whatever he seemed to be quoting at the moment.

Gunn, who worked closely with Davis for about four years, recalled that the chief sent notes to senior officers warning them that they were expected to move the department forward or get out of the way.

The tone was biting, aggressive, sometimes sarcastic, Gunn said. “They would say things like: ‘What’s the matter? Police work today too modern for you? Maybe you should visit the pension department.’ ”

What’s more, the notes were on attention-grabbing blue paper and were hand-delivered--without envelopes--by junior officers. Within hours of any note being sent, its contents were being discussed throughout the department.

“He was,” Gunn said of Davis, “the smartest politician I have ever been around.”

Outside the LAPD, Davis was almost as well known for his public broadsides as he was for his ideas about policing or police management. He insulted the abilities of women officers and gays. He blasted political rivals. Once, when hit with a gag order, he stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth and invited reporters to ask him questions.

His grandiose antics were one thing. But under him the department also had a reputation for political ruthlessness and empire-building--notions he did little to discourage.

“People in those days, particularly politicians, were somewhat scared of the Police Department,” said U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a longtime Los Angeles political figure and now one of the nation’s most prominent liberal judges. “There was a negative to the way Ed Davis conducted himself. It made people suspicious . . . and to some extent he may have undermined his objectives.”

Davis dismisses the criticism, saying that some of his remarks were misinterpreted but that most were strategic.

“I learned how to play the media as you would play a musical instrument,” he said. “Anyone can do it. It’s rather simple.”

*

In 1973, Davis put his political and policing skills to their toughest test, unveiling a sweeping program for managing the city’s police. “Team 28” represented the experimental vanguard of a larger effort that came to be known as “Team Policing.”

Team Policing represented an extension of the Basic Car Plan, and it revolutionized the way the LAPD tackled its mission. Each area of the city was assigned not just to a couple of patrol officers, but to a lieutenant, detectives--who were renamed “investigators”--juvenile officers and even traffic cops. All were directed to solve community problems and to fight crime in their areas with the community’s support.

It was the most ambitious community policing program of its time, perhaps of all time.

According to LAPD leaders, it soon produced its share of administrative headaches.

Critics said teams in one area competed with neighboring areas, reducing the cooperative spirit among the police divisions; detectives were so tied to their areas that their expertise was diluted, and traffic officers’ effectiveness was limited by geographic boundaries.

All those problems were formidable, said Lewis, now the LAPD’s director of operations. But they have not stopped him from recently launching a program to reinvigorate Team Policing. Attempting to learn from the past, he has tinkered with the idea to avoid the management problems.

For despite the difficulties in managing them, Team Policing, Neighborhood Watch and the Basic Car Plan together managed to produce a potent record. Take two key areas:

* Crime in the nation rose 55% from 1969 to 1978, the years of Davis’ tenure. It also skyrocketed in Southern California. In Los Angeles, the crime rate fell 1%.

* Community relations also improved, producing fewer flare-ups for the LAPD and giving the city a hiatus from its most-terrifying spectacles. Although buffeted by smaller confrontations during the turbulent 1970s, Davis’ administration saw no major riots on the scale of 1965 or 1992.

Rift With Gates

The most striking monument of the Davis administration, Team Policing, was undone by his successor.

Gates and Davis agree on that much. But not much else.

Today, their once-friendly relationship has disintegrated into a vitriolic debate. Their disputes are partly personal, but they also reflect fundamentally different notions about police management. As a result, the argument between the LAPD’s two most prominent former chiefs highlights the choices confronting today’s leaders as they try to decide what kind of LAPD they want.

Gates had faithfully carried out Davis’ ideas while serving as an assistant chief under him. But once given the reins, he steered the department in a new direction.

Team Policing was abolished, and Neighborhood Watch was scaled back. Detectives were removed from the units, and over time the concept withered. Gates cited budget and political pressures.

“I lost all the CROs [community-relations officers],” said Gates. “I lost captains. I lost chiefs. I lost a whole bunch of people. It was an impossible situation.”

Davis acknowledges that Proposition 13, which he supported, took a toll. But he angrily argues that dismantling Team Policing was a mistake.

According to Davis, it was not the budget but a shift in attitude, away from caring for the community and toward what Davis calls “the kicking-ass philosophy of police work,” that led Gates to take apart Team Policing.

That shift, Davis said, ultimately was responsible for the breakdown of the LAPD’s relationship with the communities it served and for the 1992 riots. What’s more, Davis believes that Gates’ failure to promptly challenge rioters then--as well as in 1965, when both men were high-ranking LAPD officers--reflected a fundamental character flaw. Gates, according to Davis, was a coward and a failed chief.

“Not only did they let their community relations deteriorate to the point that [the 1992 riots were] probable,” Davis said, “but they were not prepared to cope with something like that when it happened, at a terrible cost to the city and to the reputation of the city.”

That incenses Gates, who blames Davis for undermining the office of the chief by supporting term limits on the job--Davis “screwed the department,” Gates fumes, adding that Davis lacked the field skills to understand either riot. He also says Davis is wrong when he says Gates dismantled Team Policing because of a shift in philosophy. The real reason was money, Gates says.

“He doesn’t know how bad we were hit,” Gates said.

Whatever the reason, where Davis emphasized the vitality of community relations, Gates adopted a more militaristic model. Today, Gates acknowledges Davis as the father of American community-based policing, but he argues that Davis’ programs were unwieldy and that they succeeded only because Gates, as his assistant, ran them for the visionary chief.

History, at least in recent years, has tended to side with Davis. As a result, his works are consulted and his advice sought. Gates these days has a hard time getting a phone call returned from the Police Commission.

Critical of Williams

Today, Davis manages family investments, works on his health and studies the Catholic faith he once abandoned. He and his wife, Bobbie, enjoy a thimbleful of single-malt Scotch before bed and a glass of wine with dinner. Their doormat proclaims, “Life Is a Cabernet.” They entertain graciously. They discuss politics with passion. They laugh easily and often.

With all that, Davis said, he would like to retreat into retirement. But he has found it difficult to turn away.

“I’m not seeking anything, but people do call me up,” he said. “People in political office, officers in the department, former officers. . . . I don’t encourage it, but I’m happy to talk with anyone who wants to travel 200 miles north, even put them up overnight and serve them good food.”

So they come, bearing stories and warnings, seeking advice.

“I hear enough to make me uneasy about what has failed to happen,” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be any movement forward. There seems to be too much tolerance of what’s wrong.”

As always, Davis is thoroughly intolerant of what he believes is wrong. In his view, reforms approved in 1991 have taken too long to be implemented, morale has been allowed to lapse, consent decrees governing the hiring of minorities and women have created inequities and dissatisfaction.

And Davis says Williams is a disappointment. Although he reserves his sharpest criticism for Gates, he accuses Williams of failing to communicate a vision of community policing that integrates police work and community relations. Under Williams, the ex-chief argues, the LAPD has become lost.

Characteristically, Davis recommends swift action: “They should buy up his contract and have a new examination for chief of police.”

Williams refuses to debate his predecessor about his leadership of the department and disagrees with him about his assessment of the LAPD. “The majority of the people in this organization understand that this department is moving in a community-oriented, community-based mode,” Williams said.

Davis is unconvinced. And the ex-chief with the ascendant legacy and the respect of many city leaders argues that the time for change in the LAPD is overdue.

“In Bill Parker’s time and in my time, we were considered an outstanding example of what a good police department should be,” Davis said. “That’s no longer true.”