[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]Upon reflection, and evidence to the contrary, it may be time to vacate my once enthusiastic support of a recently approved
federally mandated directive forcing select members of the LAPD to submit full financial disclosure statements.
Private submissions from veterans after years on the job would be a tough objective to achieve at the Freddy Friendly Loan Co., let alone a police department where, as we shall see, the egos are more fragile than in other workplaces.
Seems Reasonable
I based my backing of the ferociously controversial — still not implemented — matter on two foundations:
The fundamental fairness of the proposition and the target of the directive.
As a result of the late 1990s discovery of worse-than-usual corruption in the LAPD, it was determined near the turn of the century that the 9,000-member department would be governed by a gadget known as a “federal consent decree” for a decade, until next year.
One of the lower-rung provisions of the decree mandates that officers working the anti-gang and drug units will disclose fully their financial holdings and those of all immediate family members.
Union Goes to the Whip
With the hot-talking president of the union, the Protective League, driving the resistance — the only reason some union leaders exist — the 500 affected LAPD officers promptly and volubly declared their resentment of a “privacy invasion.” Never mind that the disclosure clause is routine in other areas of the LAPD.
With union president Tim Sands egging them on from the sidelines, the 500 officers chestily announced, as a body, they would walk away from the LAPD if forced to comply.
How mature.
The ethnicity-driven mental moonshiners on the Los Angeles City Council, espying a chance to polish some little red apples, quickly jumped in on the side of the resisting cops.
But consider this. We are not talking about traffic officers or desk sergeants.
Who Could Resist?
The bullseye is on absolutely the most vulnerable officers. No cop anywhere in any department, we are told, has more tempting swag waved under his nose every day than the drug and gang unit cops who are exposed to oceans of drugs and dollars. A significant number — in Culver City and in many other departments — have put a mask over their souls and stuffed such goods into their pockets and other hiding places.
Common sense tells you that the officers working these beats should be examined, should be watched much more closely than their fellow officers.
The protesting cops say, “Don’t you trust us?” The obvious correct answer is “No.”
For a partial explanation of the protestors’ resistance, we paraphrase an 80-year-old observation by the late literary critic Dorothy Parker: Police officers are different from you and me.
Not clearer, not cloudier in their thinking, but more oblique. This distinction is crucial to understanding the disclosure issue.
Which of Us Are Special?
Just as many journalists regard themselves as a class separate from the masses of the unwashed, many cops feel the same. When standing in line at the bank, at the supermarket, at the movies, there is a feeling of specialness. Maybe people are looking at you. If not, they should be.
Dear friend. Chances are you and your plumber share a number of common views. With your barber. With your dry cleaner.
But police officers, in my experience, will think differently from you in many cases, because of the nature of their work, which breeds the same feeling of specialness that journalists enjoy. Only the cops have a paycheck and financial portfolio to justify their feeling. We wretches do not.
I digress.
From the Other Side
This morning at patterico.com, an LAPD officer who blogs, anonymously, on pajamasmedia.com, produced the most persuasive argument I have yet heard for dissing the mandate. The officer, writing under the pseudonym Jack Dunphy,
argues physicality more than philosophy. Framed with elaborate but measured evidential latticework, he cites what he and others have described as LAPD’s notoriously sloppy record-keeping as the central culprit.
With important, supposedly confidential, papers and boxes strewn about the various police facilities, some stacked carelessly, openly, in corridors, available for anyone to filch, this can lead, and has led, he maintains, to fatal circumstances.
Check it out.
Should Mr. Dunphy’s reasoning give the vulnerable officers — no more or less honest than you or I — a free pass?
His well mounted argument, at the least, forces us to step back and re-think our support of the mandate.
