Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

In the LAPD, the Cream Rarely Rises to the Top
Pajamas Media ^ | April 30, 2011 | Jack Dunphy

Posted on 04/30/2011 7:21:31 AM PDT by Kaslin

To Deflect and to Swerve: Inside the not-so-elite ranks of the LAPD's Officers Club.

The next time you watch a movie or television show about the Los Angeles Police Department in which the key figure in an investigation, the real brains of the operation, is depicted as a captain, you’ll know the writer didn’t bother to learn much about the LAPD.

I occasionally receive email from exasperated colleagues in the LAPD. “Dear Jack,” they write, “my commanding officer is . . .” And there then follows one or more descriptive terms from a list that includes the following: a drunk, a philanderer, an egomaniac, a moron, a lunatic.

What suddenly strikes me as I compose this column is that some substantial number of LAPD officers, perhaps even a majority, will read the above and be certain that I am talking about their own commanding officer. And, just as striking, not a single one of the commanding officers who reads it will entertain even a suspicion that I might be talking about him. Self-delusion: it’s not something that’s taught to the LAPD command staff, it just seems to come naturally to most of them.

I am now in the twilight of my police career, having been around longer than only a few dozen of my fellow officers. For reasons I will explain below, I have not risen far in the organization, and from my vantage point near the bottom of the chain of command I have watched as some of my contemporaries and some of those who followed me rose through the ranks to become captains, commanders, and deputy chiefs. I recall with some embarrassment the naïveté I displayed when, as a young cop back in the early ‘80s, I assumed — as you may also — that one had to be possessed of above average intelligence and keen law enforcement skills to ascend to the lofty levels of the department. It didn’t take long before I was disabused of this notion.

I spoke with a colleague not long ago, a man I had worked with in an earlier assignment and whom I knew to be an outstanding police officer and a first-rate field supervisor. He had taken the lieutenant’s exam, and I asked him how he had fared when the final list for promotion was published. “Not well,” he said. “I probably won’t make it on this list.” When I asked him where he thought he had stumbled in the process, he just shrugged and said, “I guess I’m not in the Club.”

“Ah yes,” I said, “the Club.” Within the LAPD, the Club is the informal society to which anyone aspiring to rise into the department’s command ranks must belong. There is no roster of the Club’s members, there is no clubhouse or headquarters, and as far as I know the members do not greet each other with some secret handshake. But, as in any exclusive club, each member knows all of the others, and they take great pains to limit the membership to those who share their views and experiences. Only rarely does some interloper manage to sneak through the various levels of scrutiny to the point that he can join the Club and cause trouble.

If you were to draw a Venn diagram of the Los Angeles Police Department, with a large circle representing the entire department and smaller ones depicting the various entities within, you would see the following: If one of the smaller circles represents the brightest and most capable police officers, detectives, and field supervisors, and another, larger, circle represents the administrative bureaucracy, the members of which in their daily duties have only tangential connection to real police work, you would see that the circles barely, almost imperceptibly intersect. And if another small circle represents the command staff, i.e. the Club, you would see that it broadly intersects with the bureaucrats while barely touching the one containing the best cops.

How can this be, you ask. Doesn’t the cream rise to the top?

No, it doesn’t. Not usually, anyway.

Like most organizations, perhaps like your own workplace, the LAPD is governed by the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the work is performed by 20 percent of the personnel. With only the rarest exception, it is from the other 80 percent that the command officers are produced. The reason for this is simple. The police officers in that 20 percent, the best the department has to offer, enjoy doing police work and prefer to continue doing it for the duration of their careers. And the farther one rises in the command structure, the more removed one becomes from actual police work. Of that hard-working 20 percent, only a very few advance beyond the rank of lieutenant, for it is above that rank that the “climber” completes his inexorable transition from cop to that lowliest species of police fauna, house-mouse. But for the uniform, badge, and gun, he becomes indistinguishable from any other office-bound bureaucrat.

When they graduate from the police academy and have worked the streets for some time, members of the Club learn that they are not and will never be part of that 20 percent, for they simply lack the skills that mark the best police officers. What they find they are skilled at, however, is learning the esoterica of the police bureaucracy and taking tests by which such knowledge is measured. And in the Los Angeles Police Department, the term “esoterica” is stretched to almost unfathomable lengths. For example, there once appeared on an LAPD promotional exam a question about how long the lights should be allowed to be kept on in an unoccupied room. (Yes, there is a section in the LAPD manual that governs such things.) You wouldn’t want to work for the person who got that question right.

Problems inevitably arise when commanding officer positions are filled with people who know everything about when to turn the lights off but very little about how to arrest and prosecute a lawbreaker. The LAPD is broken up into 21 patrol areas and several specialized divisions. Each patrol area has two captains, the area commanding officer and the patrol captain. The specialized divisions each have a single commanding officer. If an area C.O. is one of the truly talented captains on the department, chances are the patrol captain of that division is somehow deficient. The problem is that there aren’t enough outstanding captains to balance out all of the deficient ones, with the sad consequence that some areas are burdened with two lackluster people running the show.

Such an arrangement might not result in disaster if the area’s lieutenants, sergeants, and senior detectives are squared away. But if two ineffectual captains are left in place for too long, their most talented subordinates seek transfers to more desirable assignments. And when all the good mid-level supervisors have gone, the cops on the street, even the 20-percenters, take it in the neck and start begging for transfers too. So what ends up happening is that the weakest captains get shuffled around quite a bit, seldom remaining in one place long enough to cause lasting damage to morale.

Another way the LAPD tries to minimize the impact of incompetent leadership is by placing some of the weakest captains in specialized divisions, where lieutenants and senior detectives in effect run the operation while doing their best to ignore the current drunk, philanderer, egomaniac, moron, or lunatic who happens to occupy the C.O.’s office. The lower-ranking personnel at these divisions, many of whom have devoted years and years to their specialization, are more inclined to suffer fools gladly (or at least silently), so they are less likely to bring about the disruptions that accompany mass requests for transfers. You can hear these people muttering to themselves in the hallways: “This too shall pass.”

Many years ago I was offered an opportunity to join the Club, the acceptance of which would have required me to work in some dank cubicle on the 6th floor of Parker Center, the old LAPD headquarters building, where I would have daily contact with all the departments mucky-mucks. Had I accepted the offer I might be a mucky-muck myself today, a captain or even higher, but I turned it down. I have no regrets. I liked being a cop, and I still do.


TOPICS: Government
KEYWORDS: lacops

1 posted on 04/30/2011 7:21:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: Kaslin
That can easily be said about the officer ranks of the US Military as well. I have seen the effect of "politically correct" office climbers on troop readiness and moral.


It will get even worse with the enforced acceptance of the gay lifestyle...these are dangerous times...

2 posted on 04/30/2011 7:35:23 AM PDT by Nat Turner (I can see NOVEMBER 2012 from my house....)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

THIS IS TRUE OF EVERY GOVERNMENT AGENCY I HAVE WORKED FOR

(and as a computer software contractor, I have seen a lot more than most people)

The 80/20 rule even has a name “Perrato’s Law”


3 posted on 04/30/2011 7:36:04 AM PDT by Mr. K (this administration is WEARING OUT MY CAPSLOCK KEY~!! [Palin/Bachman 2012])
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Nat Turner
Political Correctness in the Military's Highest Ranks
4 posted on 04/30/2011 7:48:07 AM PDT by Future Snake Eater (Don't stop. Keep moving!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

the way of the world in cops and the military and in most public service. The bigger the idiot screw up the farther up the ranks they go. When I worked for Brown & Root, if you were not a Mason, you did not have a chance.


5 posted on 04/30/2011 8:04:40 AM PDT by winston65
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

” [Jerry] Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. . . . The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.”


6 posted on 04/30/2011 8:06:55 AM PDT by Strident (< null >)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Nat Turner

When I retired a few years ago, the Army was arguing about whether it was OK to put an Officer’s tactical mistakes on his OER. They thought that was too harsh. So, you can be a dumbass and lead your unit into an ambush even Stevie Wonder could see coming, and you were fine. Well, as long as you could run two miles in 12 minutes.


7 posted on 04/30/2011 8:26:11 AM PDT by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer")
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: blueunicorn6
Thanks for your service Blue!


The Army is an amazing and resilient institution but I fear that 20+ years of political correctness is wearing it down. Our forces need to be on the border of Mexico NOT Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq (we either need to Win or get out! not fight endlessly and fruitlessly), but you will never hear the toads in DC speak THAT truth to power.


Most of the so called WOT is motivated by liberal idealism and rampant political correctness. This is embodied in the concept of a Dept of Homeland Security. We could better use 100,000 more Marines and Troopers than minimum wage mental midgets groping folks at airports or government drones not protecting our borders then prosecuting states that try to protect themselves when the feds FAILED!!

8 posted on 04/30/2011 8:34:42 AM PDT by Nat Turner (I can see NOVEMBER 2012 from my house....)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 7 | View Replies]

To: Mr. K
THIS IS TRUE OF EVERY GOVERNMENT AGENCY I HAVE WORKED FOR

At every level of government, at that. Federal, state, local? None are immune to this, and it becomes even more telling the more that government entities try to expand their purviews, which is what they always seek to do...

the infowarrior

9 posted on 04/30/2011 8:42:52 AM PDT by infowarrior
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Cream rises to the top, so does scum...


10 posted on 04/30/2011 8:45:40 AM PDT by goat granny
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: goat granny

LOL. Well put, Granny.


11 posted on 04/30/2011 8:49:58 AM PDT by Lurker (The avalanche has begun. The pebbles no longer have a vote.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

It’s really very simple: Who rises depends upon their fealty to PC. Salute it, mouth it, enforce it or YOU DON’T RISE. PC is a conditioning process that ensures, over time, that the operator will follow orders without question.


12 posted on 04/30/2011 9:02:31 AM PDT by TalBlack ( Evil doesn't have a day job.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Kaslin

Joe Wambaugh was writing about this sort of thing thirty years ago. It’s not a new story but the author tells it well.


13 posted on 04/30/2011 10:03:09 AM PDT by tlb
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Bloggers & Personal
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson