The arrest last week of the Grim Sleeper serial killer suspect, Lonnie David Franklin Jr., has public officials pouring out of the woodwork to take credit. From Attorney General Jerry Brown, to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, to Councilman Bernard Parks, they’ve all come forward to get a piece of this limelight, which rightfully and solely belongs to the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD got its man; it took 24 years to do it, but the cops did it — and they did it by themselves.

Former Police Chief William Bratton did it because he was so concerned about the serial killing of Black women in South L.A. that he created the Grim Sleeper Task Force on which Capt. Kevin McClure, Det. Dennis Kilcoyne and other LAPD officers devoted their lives to catching this murderer. Chief Charlie Beck did it and he described in November 2009 exactly how he was going to do it: through familial DNA. In a Bottom Line story eight months ago, I wrote that Beck, who spent most of his career in South L.A., took the killings personally.

He said: “We’ve gone all across the country chasing every lead we got and we’re still doing it. We’ve investigated every bit of forensic evidence ... and now we’re doing a ‘familial DNA’ search,” which he described thusly: “The Grim Sleeper’s DNA is not in the database, but now that the database of possible suspects has greatly increased over 24 years, his father’s, son’s or brother’s DNA could be in it.” And lo, as Beck suspected, the DNA of Franklin’s son was in it. Gotcha! The police work didn’t stop there, but went into overdrive, as undercover LAPD officers set about getting the suspect’s actual DNA. They surveilled him and dressed as waiters and went about collecting tableware, napkins, glasses and an incriminating piece of pizza crust at the restaurant he frequented. Gotcha again!!

Brown feels he deserves some credit for this capture because he signed the order authorizing the California Department of Justice to conduct the familial DNA tests. Naw, he doesn’t. As much as I want Brown to be governor, the mere signing of his name on a piece of paper put before him is a routine bureaucratic act and isn’t worthy of being mentioned in comparison to what the LAPD did to bring this suspect in. Parks, in the company of a trio of community activists of dubious distinction, is patting himself on the back for having had a reward issued for the capture of the killer and for having had billboards posted about the killings.

While they are admirable gestures, neither the reward, which grew to an historic $500,000, nor the billboards had anything to do with Franklin’s arrest. Everybody saw that billboard (even the suspect saw it) and nobody recognized him and nobody ratted him out. Even Park’s award motion was not original, as I have an archival photograph taken in 1988 of the late Supervisor Kenneth Hahn holding a news conference at which he is announcing the first reward of $35,000 being offered for information leading to the arrest of the serial killer. Surrounding Hahn in the photo are then-Councilman Bob Farrell, the late Assistant LAPD Chief Jesse Brewer; the late Hahn aide, Jim Cleaver; the late Rev. Charles Mims Jr., pastor of Tabernacle of Faith Baptist Church and several community activists, including Cathy Irish, Norma Johnson of the Justice for Southside Victims group, and a young, fresh-faced Mark Ridley-Thomas, president of SCLC. So, the county was the first to offer money for the killer’s capture, not the city and certainly not Parks. Furthermore, since no individual can claim the reward, I strongly suggest that Parks, who seems obsessed with cutting the LAPD’s funds at every turn, do the right thing by the cops now and make a City Council motion that that unclaimable $500,000 reward he likes to tout be tacked on to the LAPD’s budget. They certainly earned it.

And in conclusion, I have no idea where Villaraigosa gets off even being in the same room with people talking about the Grim Sleeper’s capture. He refused to be in it before — when the community and the victims’ families wanted to meet with him to talk about ratcheting-up the city’s efforts to find the killer. The Black Coalition Fighting Serial Murders held a large informational meeting on the killings at Hamilton AME Church with police and elected officials on Nov. 14, 2009. They asked the mayor to attend, but the group was told the mayor needed 30 days notice for such a request. Margaret Prescod, leader of the coalition, relayed that snub at a subsequent community meeting which I attended and reported on, at which the still visibly outraged Prescod said: “We were insulted, as that showed what the mayor thinks of Black women being murdered in his city!” And I agree. I think the mayor should shut the #@%* up.

NAEJA ON THE CASE — The National Association for Equal Justice in America held a town hall meeting in Culver City last weekend on police brutality in that city. Everybody came — except the Culver City police. A police official is reported in a local newspaper as saying his department decided not to attend because it was not at liberty to answer any questions relating to the police killing of Lejoy Grissom, which is still under investigation. NAEJA’s head, Royce Esters, told Soulvine, “We had no intentions of discussing that case; we know better than that. We wanted to discuss with the Culver City police those items we listed in our fliers announcing the meeting: excessive force, community policing, police department hiring practices, racial profiling and strategies to cut homicides in the city.”

Esters pointed out that the police official publicly offered to meet with the group in a smaller setting, and Esters is holding the department to it. “The Culver City Department is racist and we want to make sure that what they did to Grissom doesn’t happen again. Yeah, we’ll meet ’em,” Esters said.

In another matter, the family of Traveon John Avila, the 15-year-old boy who was shot dead by Bakersfield Police officers Friday night, contacted NAEJA Monday for assistance with that tragedy. Unfortunately, NAEJA’s caseload is increasing.

AND FINALLY — In the 40 years that I’ve been doing what I do, I can’t help but notice that whenever pastors get into disputes with their church members and begin to crash and burn, they stop living the 23th Psalms and start walking through their troubled churches with armed guards to comfort them. A reader reminded me of a neighborhood church where the pastor initiated an actual gunfight in his church before he was sent packing and, when they were not following him around protecting his little body, the Rev. Frederick Murph had his armed guards stationed in the front and back pews when he preached at Brookins AME. He kept it up until he was thrown out of all AME pulpits entirely, guns and all. Comes now the embattled Rev. William Epps, who is reported to have enlisted a contingent of armed goons to prepare a table before him in the presence of his enemies at Second Baptist Church. I thought the Lord was their shepherd. Maybe He is, but just not when they’re in church.