Despite the fact that the Compton City Council voted Tuesday to break ties with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and re-establish its own municipal police force, the law enforcement and administrative expert hired to shepherd the city toward such a move has serious misgivings about the council’s action.

By a 3-2 vote, the city council ended the controversy Tuesday night that has been raging in Compton for 10 years — ever since officials disbanded their own troubled-plagued Compton Police Department and replaced it with contracted services from the Sheriff’s Department. Some city residents, officials, and particularly Mayor Eric Perrodin, have been straining at the bit to dump the sheriff‘s deputies and return their own Compton cops to the streets. But most of the people of Compton are opposed to the proposition, as noted by the defeat in 2004 of Measure D, a ballot initiative calling for the revival of the CPD. The measure was overwhelmingly rejected by voters, with 67.8 percent voting against it.

Perrodin and the persistent minority pressed on and hired Joseph Rouzan Jr. in 2008 to conduct a study as to the feasibility of restoring the Compton Police Department. Rouzan is no sleaze when it comes to this kind of work. A New Orleans native who grew up in Los Angeles, Rouzan was an LAPD officer of many years whom then-Chief Ed Davis appointed to supervise the recruitment of minorities and women to the force, and he was also made the commanding officer of the Police Commission. Mayor Tom Bradley pegged Rouzan to succeed then-Chief Darryl Gates and when Gates wouldn’t leave, Bradley appointed Rouzan the first executive director of the Police Commission.

Rouzan subsequently served as chief of police for Compton and for Inglewood. He was Compton’s city manager and later Inglewood’s city administrator, and he became the first head of the Citizen Police Complaint Commission created by Long Beach voters in the wake of a highly publicized incident of alleged police misconduct. In 2001, Gov. Gray Davis appointed Rouzan to the State Bar Board of Governors. Rouzan had a consulting firm which won a contract to reorganize the Police Bureau of the Los Angeles Department of Airports.

This is the man Perrodin et al. hired to study and advise them on their quest for a police force of their own. In Rouzan’s considered opinion, the council’s action Tuesday was at least two years premature. “The council had a lot of work to do before they could reach a point of actually voting the issue up or down. They needed to be voting on a plan,” Rouzan said.

“They hired me to answer three questions,” Rouzan continued. “One: Is the re-establishment of the CPD feasible? I found that it was feasible in terms of the availability of officers they could recruit since so many other police departments are cutting back and making more available to them to choose from.

“Two: Do you have the money to it? I don’t believe they do. They keep talking about having $18 to $20 million for the project and that is not enough, especially when they have not considered what kind of police force they want. Do they want a full-service department with a narcotics unit and gang unit and such? Compton certainly needs one. But from day one or year five? Is the amount of money they say they have enough to buy the policing they need? I think not. In comparison, the Inglewood PD costs $100 million.”

“Three: Do they have the political will to do this?” Rouzan said, “My answer would be, based on what they did last night, even that is questionable. They got the votes, but they got no consensus among them.” (The three “yes” votes for a CPD were cast by Perrodin, and council members Lillie Dobson and Barbara Calhoun. Council members Willie Jones and Yvonne Arceneaux voted against it.)

Rouzan said he submitted his report on these three questions and his study findings to the council in January and it has never been discussed. “Oh, individual council members have come up to me and said, ‘Yeah, I think we should do it’ or ‘No, I don’t think we should do it,’ but the whole body has not dissected the document and shown any insight into exactly what it is they are doing,” Rouzan said.

“What they should have been voting on Tuesday night were elements of staffing, budget, planning, deployment, time lines,” Rouzan said. “They needed to be voting on the question, “What do we really want?”

Charles Evans, the city manager, is the person directed by the city council Tuesday to actually create a new Compton PD. Rouzan said he got a call from the city manager Wednesday morning asking if he’d be available to meet Monday to talk about strategy, time lines, budget, and personnel — the crucial fine points the council ignored. “I told him, yeah, I’d meet with him,” a rueful Rouzan responded.