It was very simple, as Chief Bernard Parks explained it last week. The Los Angeles Police Department is undermined by mediocrity, slipshod performance, bad management, and insidious and inappropriate cultures. These problems led to the Rampart scandal.Accordingly, this mediocrity-riddled LAPD should be left to clean itself up. This, essentially, was what the long-awaited 362-page LAPD Board of Inquiry report said. We were all expected to believe this. Almost no reporters did, and I wouldn‘t vouch for the listeners in uniform, either.The ”mediocrity“ tag was secondhand from a 1996 national police conference, in which someone blamed ”the lack of integrity in American police forces on mediocrity.“ Funny: Lots of other people might say the cause is lousy leadership. But leadership quality — at least top-level leadership quality — is scarcely addressed in the report, whose every stipulation was approved by the department’s leader.