Police Chief Bernard Parks asked the Los Angeles City Council to overturn the Police Commission‘s vote not to grant him a second term and cranked up his long-simmering war with Mayor Jim Hahn. He accused the mayor of prejudgment and virtually of corruption.In his hourlong speech Tuesday, Parks did not admit the slightest professional imperfection in his five years as chief. Instead, he blamed the LAPD’s problems of rising crime, a shrinking force and declining morale on the federal consent decree which followed the 1999 Rampart Division scandal, and was imposed in the wake of Park‘s inability to deliver promised police reform.Parks made his widest-ranging accusations against his two prime antagonists — the Police Protective League (the rank-and-file officers’ union) and Hahn. Parks alluded to “insidious outside pressures” on the LAPD, and compared Hahn‘s opposing his reappointment to 1930s political corruption — “when we had the finest government money could buy.”
Source: So Long, Bernie | L.A. Weekly