Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: April 10, 2019 05:20PM
My first job was working for the City of Los Angeles in the Civil Service Department (the department which does most of the hiring for City of Los Angeles civil service positions, from gardener and maintenance worker, through Chief of Police).
Much of my working time then was administrating civil service examinations (mostly the "orals," which means: "interviews"), and in this capacity, I spent a large percentage of my working time at Parker Center (across the street from L.A. City Hall, which was, at that time, headquarters of the LAPD), administering civil service exams, from entrance-level police officer through, in my case, Deputy Chief of Police. (The Deputy Chief of Police written exam was FASCINATING! I read it through like it was a novel!)
I have always been interested in government issues (my first real ambition, as a high school student, was to follow Rosalind Wyman into Los Angeles City Council), and while I was working for the City, I took several local government classes, and several police science (taught by veteran police officers of all ranks) classes, from Los Angeles Community College and....
....taking advantage of my City employee/Parker Center access, I also spent a great deal of my free time in the Police Library, which allowed me access to considerable reference material not generally available to the public.
Later in my life, years after I no longer worked for the City, I worked for Mayor Tom Bradley (grandson of slaves, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, who served as the Mayor of Los Angeles for twenty years), who had begun his government career as an LAPD officer, and became, as I remember, the first black officer to achieve the rank of LAPD Lieutenant.
He taught me a great deal I needed to learn....and he taught me more than he realized I WAS learning--some of it nuance on the much earlier, immensely needed and undisputed, improvements that Chief William Parker had made to the LAPD during Parker's long tenure (1950-1966).
In essence, I learned things from ALL of these experienced sources that I did not anticipate, and that I did not want to know.
In Los Angeles, applicants for entry level police jobs have to pass a psych test, to weed out those who should not have police jobs. (This is also true for the fire department, where there are specific concerns about the mental health of some applicants for specifically fire department jobs which must always be kept in mind and guarded against.)
One of the things I learned from administering these psych tests is that psych tests do not necessarily screen out everyone who SHOULD be screened out.
I learned (from a memorable LACC class I took on Vice Control, taught by a vice officer with many decades of experience) that police officers can come in many different shades of moral and ethical understanding. There is, indeed, a line, but the line shifts--and often these shifts have to do with differentials regarding race or ethnicity of those who are being policed by police officers.
I learned that not all LAPD officers are the heroes I once believed they were (Chief William Parker's historic, clean-out-the-corruption regime, and the still enormously influential TV show "Dragnet" (1967-1970), notwithstanding).
I think Los Angeles is still ranked at or near the top of the nation's "cleanest" police departments for overall ethics, but this doesn't mean that, either during the Parker era, or post-Parker, everything was, or is, hunky-dory.
There are still "hidden corners" which need to be cleaned out, and some of them (in some ways) go back to the beginnings of the LAPD in 1869....
....while others are increasingly fairly obvious "corners," especially in this new century of omnipresent information.
My life lesson: Law enforcement attracts many applicants who should not be police officers, but some of the percentage who should not be police officers are, in fact, selected to be police officers.
Sometimes police officers (or pre-officers, during their initial training) are not able to withstand peer pressure, or perhaps do not even realize that they are the victims of peer pressure. Their ethics and morality at the beginning of training are gradually overcome by the social pressure of both their peers and their superiors during the years they serve--plus: there is usually a practical financial need for individual officers to keep their jobs.
When this occurs, they learn to "go along to get along," while--year by year--they devolve, inside, under peer pressure.
Sometimes, as these officers hit retirement age, they have changed quite a bit (in negative ways) from the people they once were.
Even in a comparatively good police force like LAPD, things that "are," are not the way they are really supposed to be.
Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 04/10/2019 09:24PM by Tevai.