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Political Sabotage: The LAPD Experience - Attitudes Toward Understanding Police Use of Force

by Richard Melville Holbrook

640 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0976; ISBN 1-4120-0607-4; US$41.95, C$53.00, EUR34.45, £25.50

Explore the social attitudes toward the use of police force, police culture, the police 'code of silence,' and their effects in the war against crime and violence in America.

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About the Book      About the Author      Excerpt      Catalogue Info

About the Book While Political Sabotage cannot be the answer for all in understanding social crime and violence, or police use of force to control it, it does attempt to provide a focus and single source toward that goal. What facts and experience create the subtleties and, to some, "the mystique of police culture?" Is a true unprofessional "code of silence" part of it, and is that culture an intentionally closed club for those wearing the badge of authority in the Los Angeles Police Department? Were that "culture" and the use of force in the attempt to control crime and violence responsible for its downfall? And does diversity and affirmative action exist as co-conspirators? Or will it all remain as the unknown result of the influence and impact of the emotional and ideological attitudes found in our American society and its sometimes politicized, attorney dominated, and unjust justice system? What part did political sabotage play in orchestrating what some in their academic isolation and a supporting media then label as, "the ineffective administration of a corrupt LAPD?" And what led that leadership, through a moderate level of hesitation and silence to a federal consent decree and various "commission investigations," and to every activist and media embellished blame, to forgo concerted effort to retain the best parts of what had once made the LAPD the most innovative, respected, effective and efficient police organization in America? These questions have long had more truthful answers and more complete explanations.

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About the Author Richard Melville Holbrook was born in 1937 on the family farm ten miles outside North Platte, Nebraska. He soon moved with his parents to Brentwood, a community on the west side of Los Angeles, California. After graduating from San Fernando High School in a San Fernando Valley suburb, he spent four years in the Strategic Air Command of the United States Air Force, educated and assigned as a Medical Service Specialist, trained as a medical and surgical emergency room technician, spending an additional two years in obstetrics assisting with deliveries, and formally trained in the care and treatment of premature infants. At the age of 23, and as all new police recruits were required to undergo at that time, he passed the more stringent background, mental and physical tests and was hired by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), retiring as a Lieutenant II after a 30-year career that saw him working in six of LAPD's 18 field divisions. For eight years he was assigned to divisional vice units and Administrative Vice Division in citywide organized crime enforcement. An additional four years of his career were spent in charge of the Specialized Instruction and Coordination Unit at the Police Academy. Other assignments included Community Relations, Internal Affairs, Planning and Research, and Scientific Investigation divisions. In addition to Bachelor of Public Management and Master of Public Administration degrees from Pepperdine University, the author is a graduate of advanced law enforcement courses such as Special Weapons and Tactics, and Costing Police Services. During ten years of his career, he taught management and supervision, decision making, and was an instructor for policy and law in the use of force. After retiring from the LAPD, he held corporate investigative and management positions in private security, ending his career as the General Manager of Operations for Southern California in a worldwide security firm with over 3,000 security officers and their supervisors under his management responsibility, deployed in over 23 private security services contracts. He lives in Sylmar at the Northeast corner of Los Angeles, California, with his wife, Debbie, and daughters Stephanie and Lisa.

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Excerpt

From page 114 of Political Sabotage; in Chapter 2, "Are the Police Privileged?", from the section, "Political Innocence":

In regard to this Rampart problem, grossly over-classified as "organizational corruption" and an "LAPD gone bad," and rather than repeat the same problems and their directly related solutions that this book already addresses, it is sufficient to simply affirm here that the main cause to officers' misconduct, not only in the Rampart event of Officer Rafael Perez stealing narcotics from a police evidence system and planting additional evidence on already criminal suspects, was in great part the result of the mix of politically mandated lax hiring standards, ushered in for affirmative action in the hiring of police recruits, its cumulating and negative affect on effective and timely supervision, and subsequently the lack of a full and effective politically incorrect training program which in mitigation might have been tailored to assure that all of the resulting substandard personnel receive a substantially higher level of attention through an enhanced and targeted kind of supervision that would have early on either corrected or washed out officers like Perez. The public has a right to at least that much police administrative effort in shoring up causative political malfeasance.

The inherent problem in professing that, is, of course, that in order to assure that this kind of response to political misconduct - needing extra internal policing of substandard officers by supervision - is funded and employs personnel with the requisite abilities, it must be first explained and accepted through the political process. Maybe that was tried, but probably not in any forceful way. In any event, it wasn't effective, and there still exists good reason why effective "reform" of the political process isn't near and will continue to plague the LAPD for some time. Future chiefs of the LAPD will be stonewalled in achieving the reform mandated itself by politicians who in great part created the core problem then escaped blame by acquiescing to a federal consent decree that purports to solve a problem while denying the cause.

There would and will be substantial political pressure or censure on the police administrator who had the temerity to point to poor hiring standards and resulting substandard officers who were hired under the directions of the same political body that would now be called upon to help correct what they in great part had caused. And as these conditions continue to plague the LAPD, so does the tap-and-dance of political denial.

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Catalogue Information

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