Civil Rights Award to Parks?
maggie knowles (maggie@vgn.com)
Sun, 07 Nov 1999 06:18:01 -0800
November 4, 1999
A Puzzling Award for Chief Parks
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
LAPD Chief Bernard Parks is much admired for his many years of dedicated
and conscientious public service with the LAPD. During his two years as
LAPD chief crime rates in Los Angeles have plunged. He has avoided the
scandals that marred the short-lived tenure of Willie Williams and the
inflammatory rhetoric that blighted the much-to-long tenure of Daryl
Gates. And he has taken modest steps to discipline officers for certain
types of misconduct. He deserves to be showered with awards from civic,
religious, and business groups for his public service accomplishments.
But being handed a premier award from the nation’s oldest civil rights
group for his contributions to the cause of civil rights and civil
liberties is puzzling. Yet on November 17, the Los Angeles branch of the
NAACP will bestow on Parks the H. Claude Hudson award at its annual
freedom fund dinner.
There are several pieces to the puzzle of why Parks was chosen for this
particular award. The first is the namesake of the award. H. Claude
Hudson was the grand patriarch of civil rights in Los Angeles. For
decades he waged titanic battles against housing and job discrimination,
economic inequality, poorly funded and segregated schools. And most
importantly he fought vigorously against police abuse. In the fighting
spirit of Hudson, the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP on numerous
occasions has also waged tough battles against police abuse. The
presumption is that the award should go to someone who followed in
Hudson’s giant footsteps and fought the same tough battles against
discrimination AND police abuse.
The second piece of the award puzzle is Roy Wilkins. The L.A. NAACP
dinner is billed as an event to celebrate the achievements and
contributions of Wilkins who served as NAACP executive secretary for
more than two decades. But Wilkins passionately spoke out against the
corrosive and divisive affect on African-American communities and the
nation of police abuse. Following the Detroit riots in 1943 in which
blacks were brutally assaulted and killed by police, an outraged Wilkins
made one of the bluntest statements ever by an NAACP official against
police misconduct. He accused some police officers of using the
disturbance as an “excuse to murder Negroes in cold blood.” But Wilkins
reserved his harshest blast for police officials who refused to take
action against the officers who used deadly force against blacks. He saw
their inaction as tacitly condoning the violence.
The third piece of the award puzzle are the still deeply troubling
questions about the LAPD. They include:
•The still much disputed shooting by an LAPD officer of Margaret Laverne
Mitchell, a middle-aged homeless woman. The possible exoneration by
Parks of the officer involved in the shooting casts a huge cloud over
department policies and practices on the use of deadly force.
•Despite repeated admonitions from the L.A City Council, Parks continues
to resist full civilian oversight over the LAPD mandated by the
Christopher Commission in 1991.
•Parks has repeatedly denied that the LAPD uses racial profiles to
target blacks and Latinos. The one possible way to prove if he’s right
is to collect data on unwarranted traffic stops. However, he opposed a
recent bill passed overwhelmingly by the state legislature that would
have required the CHP to collect the stats and strongly recommended that
local police agencies do the same.
•The grotesque allegations that some police officers at the Ramparts
division routinely beat, shoot, plant evidence, and give perjured
testimony against mostly black and Latino suspects. There’s the even
worse possibility that some officers may engage in the same horrid
practices at other stations.
These are hardly shining examples of civil rights and civil liberties
protections.
The fourth piece of the award puzzle is the NAACP itself. NAACP
president Kweisi Mfume in three separate policy statements in 1999 made
it clear that the issue of police abuse and misconduct is a top priority
of the group. In February, he implored police officials nationally to
implement firm policies within their departments to deal with abuse and
the use of excessive force. In March, he met with Attorney General Janet
Reno and insisted that the Justice Department monitor police practices
in every city and withhold federal funds from police departments that
are guilty of abuse. In April, he demanded that Congress pass
legislation requiring that the Justice Department compile stats on
traffic stops by police departments to determine how widespread is the
practice of racial profiling. And in a vision statement, Mfume listed
the NAACP’s number one goal as “the protection of civil rights and civil
liberties for all people.”
In future years Parks may add his name to the eminent list of the
guardians of civil rights and civil liberties. But while these troubling
questions about the LAPD and police abuse still dangle in the air, the
choice for this year’s H. Claude Hudson freedom award is puzzling.
Express Your Opinion To:
L.A. NAACP
3910 W. King Bl.
L.A. 90008
323-296-2630