The ‘Times’ prints their story

As some people have already mentioned, the L.A. Times today printed their story on the Burbank Police Department. It’s right here.

A quick read of it and the first thing that pops out is that they just focused on the department itself and conveniently left out most of the civilians. There is very little detail of the discrimination lawsuits at all, only that they had been filed by some of the “Portos” guys, and nothing much about the many employee claims of official retaliation.

There’s also nothing in detail about the Guatemalan beating case, only a reference to a “friend” of the Chief’s. The surprise here is that this case and the related internal burglary is reportedly the subject of an FBI investigation. The article also buys into the description of the one-million dollar Gibson Dunn fee as a consultancy rather than what it really is, which is their desperate, high-priced legal defense, or to put it better, a down payment retainer on it. You can bet that there’s a lot more strategizing going on with that money than any handwringing concern over what went wrong in the past, or deep sociological scrutiny about how to make things better. Those kind of things don’t get budgeted for a mil.

The article also relies way too much on Dahlia’s charges about Portos, but leaves out his “we’re just letting off steam” racial comments in the recent deposition– the ones that inadvertently slam the whole departmental ethos and only adds fuel to the plaintiff’s fire.

All in all– the Times told a limited and restricted version of the story. They left out most of the details from the lawsuits and the later depositions, and they seemed to think that the occasional beating of a Mexican or a supposedly recent tradition of police brutality is the biggest problem we have down there.

Notice how the article also makes it appear as if these big problems are post-Portos, rather than being the final public manifestation of a long-festering political culture. If anything, things were worse for Mexicans 25 years ago!

The rumors that this article was cut down in fear of Burbank’s wrath is not an idle one. It happened before. About 10 years ago the city called a meeting down at the News Press headquarters in Glendale, and made it clear to the staff that if they didn’t tone down their pro-gadfly coverage in light of the airport issue, then the city would be taking all of its lucrative public notices elsewhere– such as maybe the Daily News.

It worked, too– from that point on you didn’t see too many quotations from vocal critics like Mike Nolan or David Pirolli, which you had before.

The Times had done this same wimp-out act a few years earlier, right after they bought the old paper in the early 90s. The schools reporter at the time had been doing a great job with a long series of BUSD-bashing articles that detailed ad nauseum their many ethnic relations problems and the reactions of local critics. But within a week of their purchase she was suddenly being assigned to write puff-pieces about the exciting Burroughs cheerleading squad and how wonderful the girls were. There was no more bad publicity for quite awhile, and that was no coincidence.

Any theories on what the topic was of Mayor Gary Bric’s luncheon last week with the managing editor of the Leader? Bric reported out at the council meeting that they had a good talk.

By the way, how does the Times know that “Federal Investigations” have revealed anything about Burbank? Are they in yet? (not that we know of). And what role did the two authors of this article play? Writer and … editor?

Any ideas about what the Times cut out from their original story? Anyone interviewed about a topic that wasn’t mentioned?