Bratton Touts a Year of Progress at the LAPD

William J. Bratton arrived here a year ago with an outsized reputation, an ego to match and a bold promise: He would make Los Angeles the safest big city in America.

“I will not fail you. I will not fail this department. And I will not fail this city,” the slightly built Boston native promised as he was pinned with the badge of Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.

But after less than a month on the job, Bratton entertained a rare moment of doubt. There was a surge in killings -- 16 in one five-day stretch in November. Soon, it became clear the department would, that year -- for the first time -- handle more homicides than any other city in the nation.

“I was extraordinarily frustrated,” Bratton recalled in a recent interview. “I was questioning what I had gotten myself into.”

After Rodney King, the riots, the Rampart scandal and years of unflattering portrayals in the media, Bratton, 56, took command of the LAPD confident that he knew what was wrong with the once-vaunted police force.

Arrests were down. Many communities viewed officers with suspicion. Veteran officers had left the force. Gang units were largely dismantled. Most detectives worked day shifts, and were home during the city’s high-crime hours. Sick days were high, and many officers were, as Bratton called it, “missing in action, conscientious objectors.”

A year later, Bratton touts a turnaround from the previous two years, when crime was going up. Homicides are down 23% over the same period last year, with all violent crime down 4.5%. Arrests are up 12%. Complaints against police also have risen by 12% during Bratton’s watch.

Compared with crime statistics of other large American cities, only Los Angeles appears headed toward a significant drop in homicides this year. Although many experts caution against reading too much into any one year of statistics, Bratton differs.

“Crime just doesn’t change on its own,” Bratton said, “particularly when it goes down as dramatically as it has.”

“Other than changes in the Police Department with very strong and specific focus on crime reduction -- particularly gang crime -- you’d be hard-pressed to identify anything else that would have prompted it,” he said.

In his first report card, the civilian-run Police Commission that hired him concluded on Oct. 14 that Bratton’s overall performance “exceeds all standards.” Police Commission President David S. Cunningham, the lone vote last year on the commission to retain former LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks, said Bratton has changed how he thinks about crime.

“I believed increasing crime was largely a matter of socioeconomic issues. But the chief has shown that with good policing, you can reduce crime,” Cunningham said. “He has gotten that message out to the community and in particular in the south part of the city.... Meetings have gone from complaints and griping to people participating and working together to take back the streets.”

The brash East Coast native has suffered missteps, has stepped on toes, failed to win City Hall funding for more officers and lost a public battle with the burglar alarm industry.

Still, in a city with few political stars, Bratton has made a quick mark.

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Hit the Ground Running

Bratton began remaking the department from the start, determined to disprove the widely held opinion that an outsider would not fare well in the insular LAPD family.

The day after the pomp and circumstance of his installation, Bratton called a meeting of the 114 members of his command staff. As they sat in rows in a dark-paneled room at the Police Academy, bouquets of lilies brought from the earlier festivities gave the gathering the look and smell of a wake.

He let those present know he was hearing rumors that some unhappy with his appointment had boasted that they planned to coast into retirement. Bratton said he would not tolerate such attitudes, which he characterized as stealing from the public.

I will make your life miserable, Bratton warned would-be slackers.

Within months, no assistant chiefs and only two deputy chiefs from the previous administration remained; the others retired, were demoted or otherwise moved out.

“In the past, a new chief would come in, but the LAPD administrators would undermine them,” said Sgt. Ron Cato, who is president of a foundation representing African American officers. “By putting in his own people, he was able to push through changes successfully.”

To a large extent, Bratton credits the successes of the past year to the policing methods he brought with him, emphasizing officer responsiveness and accountability through a crime tracking system called Compstat.

Bratton, as did Parks, keeps nearly round-the-clock work hours and demands a brisk pace from those under his command. In late August, a month after Compstat was fully operational, Bratton grilled a detective supervisor about a series of violent holdups near the Blue Line station in Watts. As the supervisor stalled, trying to count the number of crimes that appeared on a screen projecting a map of the area near 103rd Street and Grandee Avenue, Bratton flashed his temper.

“You’ve got a major problem here. Find out what the hell is going on,” he snapped in a voice easily heard by the 200 officers gathered for the weekly crime review meeting.

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East Coast Roots

Bratton came to the West Coast after a lifetime in the East, where he grew up in a working-class Boston Irish Catholic family dreaming of becoming a cop. The wiry man joined the Boston Police Department at age 21.

By the time he and his fourth wife, TV legal analyst Rikki Klieman, moved to Los Angeles last year, Bratton was known more as a regular on the New York night scene than for his hardscrabble roots. He is a sharp dresser with a taste for Hermes ties, monogrammed shirts, cuff links and expensive suits.

Bratton and his old boss, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, had waged a long and public feud over credit for that city’s dramatic downturn in crime that culminated with Bratton’s departure in 1996 after he appeared, solo, on the cover of Time magazine.

He worked as a highly paid security consultant, but the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks got Bratton thinking about returning to police work.

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn, for his part, said he has no problem with the attention Bratton commands. He said his choice for chief has met virtually all the goals he outlined for the candidates who vied for the job last year.

The two men try to meet each week, sometimes going out for lunch, sometimes eating in the mayor’s office.

“I want to keep reminding him that I have a lot riding on him,” Hahn said. “I don’t mind if he is on the front page of the magazine or he’s on TV. Everyone will know that I’m the mayor who picked him. I don’t mind that he likes the spotlight because that puts him on the spot, and he’s the one I need to make the city safer.”

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A Good Start

During his first weeks on the job, Bratton and Hahn traveled around the city, listening to residents’ concerns. At a meeting in Highland Park at the LAPD Historical Museum, Bratton lingered over a display case containing paraphernalia from “Dragnet,” the TV show he watched as a boy.

Even before assuming command, Bratton had observed the LAPD as part of the team monitoring the department’s compliance with a series of court-ordered reforms begun after the Rampart corruption scandals. Bratton said the LAPD’s style had grown passive and ridiculed it as “smile and wave.”

LAPD officers, he believed, were more worried about staying out of the department’s disciplinary system or being labeled racist than they were about fighting crime.

In part, Bratton saw it as the fault of a micro-managed department that he believed had become mired in frivolous citizen complaints at the cost of morale. He liked to cite the complaint of one woman, who said she had been abducted by aliens, which took months to resolve, working its way up to the highest levels of police headquarters at Parker Center.

Bratton vowed to pursue “assertive policing” while denouncing the beatings, thefts and evidence-planting that had plagued the Rampart Division’s former gang unit.

“You will not break the law to enforce the law,” he warned repeatedly.

He asked that citizens, too, understand the difference.

He quickly identified Skid Row, MacArthur Park and Hollywood as targets for his belief that attention to minor crime leads to less major crime. Downtown, he enthusiastically joined in sweeps of parolees and homeless people -- and promptly faced a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU, called Bratton a reformer who has “changed the culture of the department somewhat.” Nonetheless, she had strong objections toward his get-tough approach to the homeless.

“He seems to think putting the homeless in jail is the answer,” Ripston said. “We sued the police for not only the way they rounded up the homeless but how they search them without cause, and we won.”

But vocal complaints about the chief are rare. In the San Fernando Valley, where a perceived lack of police services was part of the political impulse in the failed secession movement, Bratton bluntly told audiences that his first priority was fighting crime where it was concentrated, mostly in South and Central L.A.

Police response times citywide have gone from 7.7 minutes in 2000 to 10.5 minutes as of Aug. 1, and longer in the Valley, but the rise has not created problems for the new chief.

In South Los Angeles, which bore the brunt of last year’s spike in homicides, Bratton told residents that they needed to work with the police to make their neighborhoods safer.

Last November, protesters marched in front of Parker Center after LAPD officers, saying they were acting in self-defense, shot at a car that then crashed in South Los Angeles. Two teenage passengers died.

Told the pickets were carrying placards urging him to “control his officers,” Bratton snapped back: “Control your kids.”

He soon redirected personnel to South Los Angeles, increasing from 1,100 to more than 1,300 the number of officers or patrol deployments in the South Bureau as well as deploying specialized gang units.

Najee Ali, executive director of Project Islamic Hope and a frequent LAPD critic in the past, said the chief’s actions so far have won over some skeptics, including him.

“Bratton’s tough talk initially shocked people,” Ali said, noting that Bratton openly labeled gang members “thugs.” “People have never heard a chief tell it like it is. It was the people who could take back the neighborhoods from the gangs. He inspires.”

For the first time in his career, Bratton said, “there is no pointing the finger of blame at the police, and I am fascinated by that ... particularly in this city where there had been so much anger directed at the police over the last 30 years.”

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Revamping Discipline

As he has in other cities before, Bratton began making good-faith gestures to the rank and file. Parks had forbidden the use of a type of leather utility belt because he didn’t care for how it looked. Bratton rescinded the ban.

Officers had long asked to be allowed to carry the lighter and more modern .40-caliber Glock pistols. Bratton obliged.

Most significant, he almost immediately revamped the hated disciplinary system, calling for minor complaints to be addressed quickly by allowing a supervisor to refer such matters for dispute resolution, rather than formal investigation.

Public complaints have risen in the 12 months since Bratton arrived, up from 3,178 to 3,564. Bratton, as did Hahn, said that with a rise in arrests, he expected a rise in complaints. Neither believes it signals an upswing in problems with officer conduct.

Bratton is “the light at the end of the tunnel,” said Bob Baker, president of the Police Protective League, the union representing about 9,000 current officers.

“People outside this department just don’t understand how dark the days had gotten here before his arrival,” said Baker, whose union was openly hostile to Parks. “The man listens ... that’s rare for a chief.”

Despite their good relationship, the union played a role in one of Bratton’s most bitter disappointments, his failure to fund the hiring of 320 more officers.

Asked by Bratton to back his plan, union leaders largely sat out the bruising fight in the City Council, making it known that they were more concerned with upcoming contract negotiations. Not long after the council voted down the plan, citing budgetary constraints, it gave officers a 9% raise over three years.

For Bratton, the May battle marked his first major misstep as chief and a hard lesson in L.A. politics. In a 48-hour media blitz with the mayor, Bratton warned council members that unless they paid for more officers, they might be clearing the way for Osama bin Laden. During his campaign, he likened himself to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower being turned back from Normandy just before D-Day.

The remarks drew strong rebukes from council members, who had approved his appointment, 14 to 1. Bratton said he did not understand what the fuss was all about. He said he would not back down or apologize.

Days later, Bratton softened his brash style, signing a written apology.

Even former LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates, who constantly feuded with politicians, said he knew better than to belittle council members.

Despite Bratton’s sometimes unconventional approach, he has retained support across a wide range of Los Angeles political leaders.

Notably quiet about the new chief’s performance, however, has been Parks, elected last year to the council.

“I think it’s premature and somewhat unfair to judge a chief in so short a time,” he said when asked last week to assess Bratton’s performance.

Bratton, who has entertained the idea of running for public office, insists he will stay for his full five-year term as chief.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Bratton said this summer. “I just bought a $1.5-million home. I get a pension out of this place after five years that’s worth a fortune. My wife has just changed jobs. We happen to like living in Los Angeles. Why would I want to leave?”

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Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein and Jessica Garrison contributed to this report.