WHEN DOING THE RIGHT THINGS ISN'T THE RIGHT THING

There are good reasons why nothing new came out of the Los Angeles
mayor's first public Q&A on Rampart last week, good reasons why, by
the last question, even the heckler from the Brown Berets looked as if
he wanted a nap. Over lunch with a ballroom full of civic types, in
remarks broadcast live all over Southern California, Richard Riordan,
the business mayor, stuck assiduously to the corporatespeak homilies
that have become the Muzak of this unspeakable scandal.

Blah blah "culture of mediocrity" blah blah "tougher managers" blah
blah "learn from adversity" blah blah. Zzzzzzzzz.

But there were reasons.

And--though false convictions are being unearthed by the score
now--reasons why Riordan made it from salad to cheesecake without
apologizing by name to anyone who actually has been wronged by the
LAPD. Good, pragmatic reasons.

Sound, fiscal reasons. Reasons of liability and municipal
exposure.

And yet, for all that, there was the sense that the business mayor had
just failed at the only item of business that mattered, that he had
just talked for an hour without saying the only important thing.

Maybe that sense rose in part from the growing roster of victims, from
the stories of people like Julia Chavez and her daughter, Veronica,
who threw their outrage onto the pile last week. The Chavez story
isn't the first or the worst to come out of Rampart, but its details,
so typical of this scandal, and yet so poignant, seemed to accentuate
the city's loss for words as the last unanswered question-- "How bad
was it?"--has been answered again and again.

It was, to recap court declarations, this bad: In 1997, seven Rampart
cops are alleged to have burst, guns drawn, into the Chavez home while
Julia Chavez, who was ill, was throwing up in the bathroom; to have
handcuffed the mother and daughter, tossed the apartment and stolen
their meager life savings of $6,800; to have berated and threatened to
deport them until they produced citizenship papers; to have
strong-armed Veronica Chavez in an attempt to use her in a vendetta
against her brother, a reformed gangbanger who had gotten out of
prison two years before.

When the daughter refused, the Chavezes say, Rafael Perez, the ex-cop
at the hub of Rampart, told his compadres to plant rock cocaine on
them. Veronica Chavez pleaded no contest to the trumped-up charge
because her public defender told her, accurately, that no jury would
buy the word of an ex-con's sister over that of the LAPD. She was
forced to undergo and pay for court-ordered drug treatment that she
allegedly didn't need and was left with a criminal record she
allegedly didn't deserve.

Six months later, the city attorney used the drug conviction to force
the landlord to evict the family.

That--according to court papers filed by the public defender's office
in a petition to overturn Veronica Chavez's conviction--is how bad it
was for the typical Rampart victim.

But almost as bad has been the city's official reaction, a response
that, for so many very good reasons, falls far short of what the
Chavezes and so many others deserve.

People have been terrorized, financially ruined, deported, killed in
this matter.

Police have been left to drown in a sea of temptation because we, the
people, were stoned on the rhetoric of "getting tough." Rampart was a
systemic tragedy of our own making, a matter worthy of the deepest
moral and psychological introspection. But--for reasons having to do
with municipal finance and potential litigation and, maybe, just the
sheer enormity of what happened--L.A.'s leaders have willfully reduced
it to a kind of management case study, a public relations problem, a
thing for some vice president of human relations.

A question of "mediocrity" and "tougher managers" and "learning from
adversity." And blah, blah, blah.

It's bigger than that, however doggedly the city's leaders insist upon
squeezing this debate into its smallest framework.

Los Angeles should be leading a nationwide dialogue about the nature
of authority and the temptations of power, should be considering the
entire criminal justice system--should, at the very least, be
apologizing to victims, publicly and by name. Someone should say to
the Chavez women and the many like them: Yes, we understand you'll
sue, because this is America and that's what people do here. But it is
important for you to know we are sorry anyway.

Of course, there are many reasons--good reasons--why this will never,
can never, happen.

But that doesn't make the omission any less regrettable. There is more
to leading a great city than the tending of its checkbook. There is
also the business of a city's soul.