Chief William Bratton Wins Quote of the Day

There's a battle going on in Los Angeles between the Chief of Police and the City Council over new laws designed to rein in unruly paparazzi. The Chief thinks he knows why the city has had so many problems and why those incidents are on the decline:

LOS ANGELES -- A Thursday morning Today in LA report previewing a 10 a.m. City Hall meeting about proposed new restrictions on paparazzi became a showdown between the man behind the hearing -- Councilman Dennis Zine -- and LAPD Chief William Bratton, who opposes new legislation.

Bratton showed up at KNBC reporter Robert Kovacik's side for Kovacik's 6 a.m. report because he said Kovacik's previous live interview with Zine about the paparazzi issue aggravated him so much that he decided to leave his morning workout to go on KNBC and "set the record straight."

Bratton has consistently opposed new legislation that would further restrict and penalize aggressive paparazzi photographers. Thursday morning, he laid the blame for paparazzi problems on former bad-girl celebrities Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.

"I figured I'd come over and straighten out -- we have no intention of participating in today's hearing. It's a total waste of time. We have sufficent laws on the books that we enforce to deal with this issue," Bratton said, still sweaty from his workout and with a towel hanging around his neck.

"If you notice, since Britney started wearing clothes and behaving; Paris is out of town not bothering anybody, thank god; and, evidently, Lindsay Lohan has gone gay, we don't seem to have much of an issue.

"If the ones that attract the paparazzi behave in the first place, like we expect of anybody, that solves about 90 percent of the problem. The rest of it we can deal with.

"So as far as all this grandstanding and foolishness, waste of city time on this issue -- and the fact that I felt aggravated enough about it to interrupt my workout to come over and set the record straight, LAPD has no intention of participating in this farce."

Chief Bratton's statement reminds me of the good old days of Chief Daryl Gates who had a pretty low tolerance for nonsense. Let me start the movement: Chief Bratton for Governor!