No Way to Run a City : Gates’ endorsement in City Council race is a bad practice

In a letter on personal though not departmental stationary, Daryl Gates recently endorsed incumbent City Councilman Hal Bernson for reelection. Bernson, a 3-term incumbent, is fighting for his political life against feisty challenger Julie Korenstein in the San Fernando Valley district. Gates’ endorsement should certainly help; he is popular in many parts of the Valley. But his political intervention won’t help Los Angeles. In fact it hurts.

To be sure, political endorsements by the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department are nothing new in this town and are not unique to Gates; the chief’s predecessor Ed Davis liked to throw his weight around, too. But a practice rich in precedent is hardly the same thing as one imbued with prudence and civic virtue.

It’s plainly unwise for the top cop of this city to politicize his office by intervening in electoral politics. No other city department head endorses political candidates; and other major cities don’t allow such a heavy-handed practice. That splendid standard--nonintervention by a police chief in politics--ought to be observed by the LAPD as well.

The unseemly practice is particularly regrettable at this time. Tensions are high in the city after the beating of Rodney King by police. Wise heads have called on everyone to cool it. Chief Gates himself has said that politics ought not to intrude on policing. And he is absolutely right. Then why should the head of a police agency intrude on politics?

The backing of a sitting member of the City Council is singularly inappropriate. As Judge Ronald Sohigian recently suggested in his ruling, the ultimate master of the Police Department apparently is not the Police Commission, as people had heretofore thought and hoped, but the City Council. Gates is thus poking his nose into the composition of the very body that controls the purse strings of the LAPD and may wind up regulating the department. Such a situation makes for very poor government indeed.