Deja Vu

If Bill Bratton didn't realize it before, he sure knows it now: Running the NYPD was like heading up a country club compared to trying to keep the LAPD under control.

As this week's incident indicates, the LAPD is just waiting to explode. The department is still too small to handle a city the size of Los Angeles. It's still reeling from a scandal-plagued decade. It has to contend with a public that has pretty much turned a blind eye to the city's gang crisis. And it still hasn't found a way to rehabilitate its sorry image.

If I were KABC general manager Arnie Kleiner, I'd seriously consider asking ABC News if the station could re-air Peter Jenning's recent hour-long report on the LAPD (which I wrote about here).

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Meanwhile, you gotta admit you've been feeling a sense of deja vu this week. Bill Clinton's in the headlines, the media's about to feed on a juicy celebrity trial, we're coming off a war in Iraq and Los Angeles is reeling from a video of LAPD officers beating an unarmed black man. I half expect to turn on the radio and hear some grunge: It's the early 1990s all over again!