[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]Attention students of Serious Policing:

Kindly turn to page 1 in your hymnals.

In one of his best-known volumes, My Theories of Relatively Serious Policing, our revered late teacher, Mr. A. Einstein, tells us that repeating the same act while expecting a different outcome is a conventional definition of insanity.

Would the flexible Mr. A. Einstein have adjusted his Relatively Serious theory if he ever had enjoyed the pleasure of meeting the relatively inflexible Sgt. B. Fitzpatrick of the Culver City Police Dept., not to mention the police union, which some people wish we would not mention, Sgt. B. among them?

For 10 or 11 months, four mischievous boys in the Police Dept. with personal gripes toward Chief Don Pedersen have been trying to convince a so far disinterested community that Mr. Pedersen is not up to their professional standards, a floating concept that remains naggingly amorphous.

Boys Will Be Boys?

Sounding at least as petulant as all of those brothers who went before him, Sgt. B was the latest of the Four Mischievous Boys to plead with god burghers of Culver City, “Please, please fire our boss. He ain’t in our class as a cop.”

What does that mean? you may reasonably ask.

I don’t know. Plainly, the ringleaders don’t, either.

They may have a valid complaint against the chief tucked into a very dark corner of their valises?

Surely we haven’t seen the strongest case they can make against the chief, have we?

The longer the Four Mischievous Boys prattle on, the emptier they sound, the more they resemble crusty, ol’ Gloria Allred, who is trying her darnedest to bring down the Whitman for Governor campaign.

All for Allred? Any?

Unlike the Four Mischievous Boys, she may succeed. She knows how to part the waters with a phony case. The Boys don’t.

Since the Boys began publicly blowing smoke two months ago, hoisting the weakest case this side of the accusation that President Bush assassinated Abraham Lincoln, they only have succeeded in fouling the air.

The core problem appears to be that the Four Mischievous Boys thought they could convert their four highly personal gripes into a convincing professional bulldozer that would impress influential people in the community and intimidate Mr. Pedersen out of office.

One area in which Mr. Pedersen has maintained a strong advantage is personal discipline.

While the Four Mischievous Boys have run their mouths like cement mixers that won’t turn off, Mr. Pedersen has calmly looked into their blinking eyes, and said the following:

“Give me your strongest shot, guys. Then let’s return to the business of protecting Culver City.”

Their sizzling tempers have been betraying them while the insouciant Mr. Pedersen has showed them how a chief weathers criticism from employees acting as if they were upstarts.

Last week’s main accusation by the “Police Officers Assn.,” claiming the chief was derelict in his duty because Culver City sustained 12 robberies in August (the chief says the true count was11) while Santa Monica had 9, borders on the laughable.

How can you gain followers without developing at least a vaguely respectable cause they can latch onto?

“Little people,” as Gloria (I Hate My Privacy) Allred is prone to call her clients, learned decades ago that she is their easiest ticket to cheap publicity.

Why, I wonder, wasn’t there one genius among the Four Mischievous Boys who had the foresight to hire Ms. Allred?

If the Four Mischievous Boys had been flanking Goofy Gloria at Tuesday’s press conference instead of that dingbat teary-eyed illegal alien, by this time of the week, Ms. Allred would have been appearing on 91 radio programs a day trying to convince listeners the police chief of Culver City was a closet arsonist, a risk to his officers’ mental health who will make it rain applesauce for 40 consecutive days if he is not promptly canned and thrashed like a naughty schoolboy.