Who is James T. Butts Jr.? What makes him want to be mayor of Inglewood and why are entrenched Inglewood officials risking the city’s solvency to stop him?
Butts, who turned 57 last Sunday, ran for a public office for the first time in his life when he sought the truncated Inglewood mayorship in the June primary. At the end of a campaign of less than 58 days, Butts came in second among eight candidates for mayor. He beat out four Inglewood elected officials with a combined tenure of close to 50 years and came within 200 votes of being the outright winner of the contest. If he had another week to campaign, Butts could have easily been the number one vote-getter.
The Inglewood city clerk and city council invalidated Butts‘ candidacy after the election, removed him from the race that had already been run and assigned his 2,471 votes and second place finish to another candidate, Councilwoman Judy Dunlap.
Why? The city clerk maintained after the voting that, because of some kind of paperwork dating controversy, Butts was not qualified to run for mayor, yet, in reality, Butts has a dizzying array of professional qualifications that, frankly, outshines President Barack Obama.
Butts, who has a wife and three children, was born and raised in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw District. He attended 59th Street Elementary, Horace Mann Middle and Crenshaw High schools. From the age of 18, he was firmly embedded in Inglewood, from which he launched a career that is, frankly, phenomenal.
During the period when Inglewood was White and endemic racism was rife, 19-year-old Butts became an Inglewood police cadet and, while obtaining his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration, he became either the fifth or sixth Black police officer hired by the IPD in 1974.
“I had a difficult probation,” Butts said, with a wry smile. “There was a lot of racism in the city to the point that I almost lost my life. I was shot at three times while chasing suspects and was never nominated for an award of valor, and neither was my White partner. But then my partner was shot at during a time when I was not with him, and he was given a valor award.
“That always bothered me, but then, that was what I was dealing with,” he added.
In 1980, the IPD was looking to promote officers into six sergeant positions and Butts applied, aced the written exam and the “outside” oral exam, and his “inside” oral exam was sabotaged by his fellow officers, yet he still scored high enough to be among the six promoted.
“They picked five and when they got to me, they said they had budgetary problems and could not afford to hire six new sergeants,” Butts said.
Annoyed, but undaunted, Butts applied for sergeant the next year and achieved the highest written exam score ever recorded in the IPD, which had eliminated the “inside” oral test, and he and one other brother became the first two Black sergeants in the department. From there, Butts went on to become the first Black lieutenant, first Black motorcycle cop, first Black SWAT team member, first Black captain and only Black deputy chief in the history of the Inglewood Police Department.
When Butts was a lieutenant running special operations for the IPD, he launched a four-month operation to clean up three high crime areas in Inglewood, pursuant to a request of the city’s administrator, so the city would be more amenable to a Raiders football stadium city leaders wanted to lure to Inglewood.
“We had 57 murders in Darby-Dixon (now known as The Bottoms) and we were right in the middle of a violent crack cocaine and gang epidemic,” Butts said. “We sent specialized teams into those communities which acted as ombudsmen for city services and in three months we had arrested 969 people and violent crime had dropped 29 percent in the next quarter.
“Community-based policing kind of resonated after that. The task force and I got an award for that; then I was promoted to captain,” Butts added. In fact, between 1980 and 1990, Butts was promoted five times.
In 1990, Butts was promoted to deputy chief of the IPD and a year later the cities of Santa Monica and Pasadena came calling for him to head their police departments.
“I had never thought of leaving Inglewood,” Butts said. “I had always believed — hoped — I’d be chief of the IPD some day, but I took the test for Santa Monica believing I would never get it because it was a nationwide recruitment for a very sought-after position.”
He took the test. The same week Santa Monica called and told him he was that city’s number one selection, Pasadena called and arranged his final interview for its top cop position.
“I told Santa Monica I would have to think about their offer,” Butts said. “I’d been in Inglewood since I was a 19-year-old cadet and I didn’t want to leave. Inglewood was all I wanted; it was all I knew and I just couldn’t see myself leaving Inglewood.”
After being counseled on his quandary by several friends, including actor Truman Jacques, Butts left Inglewood and started his job as Santa Monica’s first and only African-American chief of police just days after his 30th birthday — which was very young for a police chief.
Santa Monica was a city at a crossroads: it had development projects going and was seeking to sop up some of the cachet and money of Hollywood, yet it had a fierce homelessness problem (to which it turned a blind eye), a murderous cocaine den in its midst called Palisades Park, violent street gangs and a property crime rate that was off the chart — even higher than Inglewood’s.
Butts applied the tactics he used in Inglewood to Santa Monica and 120 days after he got there, his cops arrested 800 people with more than a 90 percent conviction rate and cut the aggregate crime rate by 64 percent to its lowest level since 1954.
Butts was two years past retirement when he left the Santa Monica PD and the city of Los Angeles came knocking at his door. L.A. was shocked about a series of news stories that poked fun at the security of the city’s airports. Los Angeles went to him and said “Please, please, please. Come and beef up the security at our four airports.” Butts said: “OK.”
In less than 3-1/2 years under Butts, the airports went from being a laughingstock in the news to being rated number one in aviation security by the Transportation Security Administration by the time he left at the end of 2009.
In his airports position, Butts handled a $116 million budget, compared to the $88 million general fund budget adopted this fiscal year in Inglewood. He had 1,100 employees on his payroll, compared to the 733 Inglewood has now. As chair of the Airport Security Advisory Committee and as airport security coordinator, Butts had functional control of more than 4,000 security counter terrorism and security assets that protected the airports — customs border protection, Highway Patrol, LAPD, TSA, LAX police, Secret Service, Coast Guard.
Butts’ supporters noted that he was the only person running for mayor who actually ran anything, let alone three complex multimillion dollar organizations in three different cities — two of which are international cities.
“That is why city officials are working so frantically to keep him from running for mayor,” said Charles Gyden, an active 30-year Inglewood resident and president of the 78th Place Block Club. “They know that he is much better qualified then they and they are afraid he will do a much better job then they. They are afraid of his exposing their lack of good administrative skills.
“Because, at this point, the city is going to hell in a hand basket,” said Gyden, who has been in private practice as a physical therapist in Inglewood for 25 years. “No definitive work projects have been initiated by the current city council since Mayor’s Dorn’s forced resignation. They are afraid Butts will change that.”
And that’s why Butts says he wants to become mayor — to change that by giving his hometown the benefits of his vast and proven administrative skills.
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