The recent ejection of Inspector General Katherine Mader by the minions of LAPD Chief Bernard Parks was perhaps the department’s most retrograde move since the beating of Rodney King. I say this even though I never thought Mader showed extraordinary aptitude in the job she acquired two and a half years ago. But all she had to do to look good was to be better than the people she worked for.Mader’s missteps — which included some particularly inept politicking — were outweighed by her proddings and probings of an agency whose close-ranked culture concealed practices such as spousal abuse on the part of officers. This sort of thing failed to ingratiate her with Police Commission President Edith Perez and commission Executive Director Joe Gunn.Whatever Mader’s style, it’s difficult to see that it changed between the months in which she criticized Willie Williams’ operation and those in which she reproached the administration of Parks. But Williams was a mayoral scapegrace, Parks a mayoral anointee. If Gunn’s excuse for Mader’s ouster — faulty paperwork and inattention to detail — were true, then she should have been fired early last year. But only when she queried the way Parks did things did she fall from favor.
Source: Next Up for Mader | L.A. Weekly