LOS ANGELES TIMES
By Joel Rubin
October 23, 2012
A decade ago, Charlie Beck
watched as William J. Bratton arrived in Los Angeles and
began rebuilding a department deeply tarnished by the Rodney
King beating, riots and corruption scandals. Bratton made
many changes as chief, but Beck was particularly taken by
his aggressive effort to rebuild the LAPD's broken
relationship with the African American community, which over
and over Bratton said was a cornerstone to his success.
Beck carried the lesson
with him when he replaced Bratton three years ago as chief
of the nation's second-largest police force. With nearly
half of the city's population Hispanic and the federal
government's aggressive efforts to identify and deport
illegal immigrants sowing fear in immigrant communities,
Beck believed that his success or failure as chief rested
heavily on whether he could replicate Bratton's success —
but this time with Latinos.
His actions have made him a
lightning rod for criticism, even from some of his own
police officers. But they have also established Beck as a
forceful national voice for a more restrained approach to
illegal immigration, a high-profile counterpoint to
hard-liners like Sheriff Joseph Arpaio in Arizona's Maricopa
County.
His first move made it
easier for unlicensed drivers — a group dominated by illegal
immigrants — to avoid having their cars impounded. He then
spoke in favor of issuing driver's licenses to illegal
immigrants. Last month, he took that stance a large step
further, announcing that suspected illegal immigrants
arrested for low-level crimes would no longer be turned over
to federal authorities for deportation.
In an interview, Beck said
he was driven to act on some level by his sense that he can
and should help level the playing field for illegal
immigrants, whom he said have suffered unfairly from crude
federal immigration laws. But Beck said those personal views
were not as important as his more practical belief that
extending an olive branch to immigrants in Los Angeles was
vital to the LAPD's crime-fighting efforts.
"It's not so much that I am
a dove on immigration," he said. "It's that I'm a realist. I
recognize that this is the population that I police. If I
can take steps — legal steps — to make them a better
population to police then I will…. I do have sympathy for
their plight, but my actions are not based mainly on that.
It makes absolute law enforcement sense. Any one of these
things I've done is directly tied to public safety."
Beck's shift has won wide
support at City Hall and among immigration advocates. But he
has also endured loud criticism that he is going soft on
criminals and is out of line by picking and choosing the
people who should be subject to the nation's immigration
laws.
Some of the harshest
attacks came on the issue of relaxing car impound rules. The
L.A. police union accused Beck of overstepping his legal
authority and filed suit to block the plan.
Others warned that the
chief would have "blood on his hands" because the rules
would allow unlicensed drivers back on the roads more
quickly, where they could cause accidents.
His other initiatives have
received similar blowback: The chief is encouraging
lawbreakers by easing pressure on illegal immigrants and
needlessly politicizing the Police Department in the
process.
Beck strongly denies any
political motives. In fact, he says his position as chief
gives him a certain cover to address these hot-button issues
outside the political arena.
"I will never run for
elected office — I have a unique opportunity to do things
that are right. I don't have to base my decision on what job
I want next, because I don't want any job next. And I have a
boss, the mayor, who didn't tell me to do this but certainly
is supportive," he said.
The LAPD has long been a
leader in dealing with illegal immigrants. It was Chief
Daryl Gates, whose tenure was marked by tense relations with
minority communities, who took the first major step.
Many of Beck's ideas and
decisions regarding the city's roughly 400,000 illegal
immigrants are rooted in Special Order 40 — a landmark
policy put in place more than three decades ago that forbids
LAPD officers from stopping a person for the sole purpose of
determining his or her immigration status. Officials at the
time believed that the new rule was needed to reassure
illegal immigrants that they could report crimes and provide
information about suspects without fear of being questioned
about their immigration status.
Beck is one of only a few
officers still active who joined the department before
Special Order 40 was implemented. He recalled being a rookie
and seeing his training officer take Latinos into custody
simply because he believed they might be in the country
illegally and then hand them over to federal immigration
officials.
"I had no idea who or what
or why we were doing it," Beck said. "But in retrospect you
realize just how much fear that would put in the community —
just to be able to randomly pick someone up like that."
The immigrant landscape
that Beck oversees today has grown more complicated than the
one of the 1970s and 1980s — and, in his eyes, has required
him to take the steps beyond Special Order 40. Most notably,
Beck must contend with Secure Communities, a controversial
program through which local law enforcement agencies send
the fingerprints of everyone arrested to federal immigration
officials. In turn, federal officials use the prints to
identify suspected illegal immigrants and frequently request
police departments to keep them locked up for up to 48 hours
until immigration officials can take custody of them and
begin deportation proceedings.
The program, Beck said, and
the federal government's failure to distinguish between
serious, violent criminals and those who commit petty
crimes, has given rise to widespread fear among immigrants
of any encounter with police. He said his recent
announcement that the LAPD would no longer honor these
so-called detainer requests from federal officials in cases
in which the suspect was arrested for a minor crime and has
no violent criminal past was meant as a counterweight. He
hopes that the move will persuade immigrants that the LAPD
is not an arm of the federal Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agency.
His first major foray into
the immigration debate occurred in March 2011 when he
announced that unlicensed drivers stopped at sobriety
checkpoints would be allowed to call someone with a license
to drive their vehicle away to avoid having it impounded. At
the time, he said, the move was meant to assist illegal
immigrants, who cannot receive driver's licenses in most
states.
Near the end of the year,
he broadened the impound rules to apply to regular traffic
stops. And then, months later, he announced his support for
issuing licenses to illegal immigrants in California. More
recently, new battle lines were drawn around the Trust Act,
a far-reaching piece of legislation approved by state
lawmakers that forbids police departments from honoring
detainer requests in many types of crimes. When the law,
which Beck felt went too far, was vetoed by Gov. Jerry
Brown, the chief took advantage of the vacuum to announce
his more moderate version of the plan for the LAPD.
It's too early to tell what
effect his immigration policies, if any, will have on L.A.'s
crime rate, which has been in decline for more than a
decade. But Beck sees the changes as part of his legacy as
chief.
"At least once in our
history, we tore a community apart here and I never want to
do that again," Beck said, referring to the 1992 riots that
followed the LAPD beating of King. "It has always been my
belief that we can be more effective than we are at building
community. There may be other things I'll do that I think
will help build that community and keep people safer."
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