[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]

Yesterday our host posted his own thoughts on the Los Angeles Times‘s shameful editorial reflecting on former LAPD Chief Daryl Gate’s life and death. I submitted my reaction to Pajamas Media, where it was posted today.

Just when I thought that paper couldn’t possibly sink any lower, it once again explored new depths.

–Jack Dunphy

UPDATE BY PATTERICO: I hope Jack will not mind if I excerpt a couple of paragraphs to whet your appetite:

Former Los Angeles Police Department Chief Daryl Gates died of cancer on Friday at the age of 83. A long-running theme in his life was the deep mutual antipathy he shared with many — but by no means all — writers and editors at the Los Angeles Times. The Times published a 1,500-word editorial on the occasion of his passing, and one is not surprised to see they were no kinder to him in death than they were in life. He probably would have been disappointed had it been otherwise.

. . . .

And as to the Times’s contention that it was Gates’s desire that cops “stay in their patrol cars rather than fraternize with the enemy, to focus on arrests and sweeps rather than crime prevention,” this too is ahistorical. . . . Far from being hostile to community-based policing, Gates encouraged it, but any success the program might have had was precluded by a chronic lack of manpower. I recall having to excuse myself from a community meeting in South Los Angeles when a man was shot just down the street. Such occurrences were fairly typical during the 1980s and early 1990s, yet few people outside the affected neighborhoods and LAPD seemed to care.

Dunphy also takes on the editors’ notion that the Rampart scandal flowed from a failure to implement recommendations from the Christopher Commission — a problem, editors claim, that was rectified by Bill Bratton, who (editors claim) turned LAPD into “far more diverse, professional organization with vastly improved community relations.” Actually, Dunphy says, a quest for “diversity” was actually part of the problem:

Inconveniently for the Los Angeles Times, the Rampart scandal can just as easily be blamed on the LAPD’s quest for a level of “diversity” within the department that the Christopher Commission found lacking. Rectifying this came at the price of hiring minority applicants whose questionable backgrounds would have otherwise disqualified them from employment as police officers.

This is not debatable to anyone familiar with the facts — but I don’t include L.A. Times editors in that group.

Now that your interest is hopefully piqued, go read the whole thing.