Perfection Is Unattainable

I certainly believe it’s an isolated incident, based on my 27 years of experience in Los Angeles. We’ve certainly had other incidents of misconduct during pursuits. I don’t know how many, but we took disciplinary action. This is not what I’d call a pattern of conduct. And I don’t believe we’ve ever had anything approaching this in terms of severity of misconduct.

The Police Commission is a review board. They review disciplinary action. They review use-of-deadly-force incidents. They are the head of the department. There is a built-in civilian review process that serves the city of Los Angeles very, very well.

Daryl Gates has been chief of police a long time. I think he’s going to continue to be chief for a long time. When you have an organization of about 10,000 people, you are going to have some people who do things they shouldn’t do. And it’s more likely to occur in the police department just because of the nature of the work we do.

No one, not a civilian review board, can guarantee you that those events won’t happen. The important thing to focus on is that the LAPD has aggressively sought out acts of misconduct. It has aggressively investigated any allegations and taken very severe disciplinary actions when an officer is found guilty of serious misconduct.