As Week III begins in the police union’s ginned-up campaign to drive Police Chief Don Pedersen out of town, a Police Dept. source predicted today that “it is about to get down and ugly around here.”
With the results of last week’s three-day-long no-confidence vote by the Police Officers Assn. still muted and Chief Pedersen still firmly embedded in his second-floor office, the department employee believes that the veteran-led rebellion may reach back to the Ted Cooke Era for a tested tactic:
Playing a shrewd game of chess with fungible crime data.
In spite of the fact that every law enforcement officer in Los Angeles knows that Culver City is about as safe as Disneyland most of the time, data can be transposed to show that crime has become a worsening problem during the pretty relaxed four-year term of Mr. Pedersen.
“It is possible to take the moving parts of the data you want to ‘adjust’ and prove that we have trouble in unaddressed areas that has grown steadily,” said a department insider, who laid out a lengthy illustration. “The data is like playdough. It can take on any form you want it to take.
“Five years ago, many of the same cops who are presently trying to get rid of Pedersen did the same things to John Montanio (Mr. Cooke’s successor) when they wanted him gone.
“Let me give you an example,” she said, “of how this used to work for Cooke. It was a foolproof way for him to achieve what he wanted. Cooke wanted more motor officers. The City Council said we couldn’t afford them. But he was determined, as usual, they were not going to outflank him. So Cooke ordered all the motor officers to stop writing tickets.
“Not only that, Cooke had spread the word through the entire department. Stop writing tickets unless it was a really major violation. We were flatly told not to write ordinary tickets.
“It took two or three months, but Cooke was a patient man when he had to be.
“The next time he went before the Council, he confronted them with damning statistics.
“‘See how the number of parking violations has dropped dramatically,’ he said. ‘I need more motor officers. Otherwise, we are not going to get the revenue. If you give me the motor officers I need, they will write enough tickets to pay for themselves. In fact, I promise you they will double the amount of tickets they are writing now.’
“You can guess the outcome,” said the employee. “The Council approved the number of hires Cooke wanted, and parking revenue doubled, just as he had predicted. The only thing that happened was, everybody went back to writing tickets. Except now he had even more people on the street writing tickets.
“The city never caught on.”
