Spare LAPD from the budget knife

The Los Angeles Police Department is the city’s largest cost center and has been growing, as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has worked to increase the numbers of officers. Fiscal reality last year forced police hiring to be scaled back to simply keep pace with attrition. Now, as Villaraigosa and the City Council are confronted by revenues falling even further behind projections, it’s understandable that some would consider letting the total number of officers fall backward, at least in the short term. But depleting the ranks of the LAPD must remain, if not a last resort, close to last.

The mayor’s critics like to claim that he has jeopardized the city’s fiscal health by maintaining police hiring in order to boast that he succeeded where earlier mayors failed, bringing the department to the magic number of 10,000 officers. A larger LAPD, though, has little to do with magic numbers. Villaraigosa’s program of police hiring, in an era when new officers better represent the city’s population -- a program he reiterated earlier this week -- has helped transform the department from a combative force feared and resented by much of the city to one respected, embraced and far more likely to defuse potentially explosive situations than to spark them. Meanwhile, crime in Los Angeles has steadily decreased, and although the reasons include broader societal changes and, perhaps, just plain good luck, the LAPD has been a driver, not a bystander. The department has a long way to go, and numbers alone won’t get it there. But numbers help.

City Hall must set priorities, and there should be little question that public safety should top the list. No jobs or transportation program will be of much use if the city is gripped by crime or undermined by mistrust between residents and law enforcement.

But fiscal responsibility shares the top spot on the priority list. There is little point in expanding the Police Department if doing so drives City Hall into bankruptcy. A bankrupt city can’t pay its cops, and therefore can’t keep them.

City officials will be tempted to argue that given the current budget situation, police hiring is irresponsible. And if the choice were really between temporarily depleting the LAPD’s ranks and fiscal collapse, they’d be right. There’s a good chance, though, that what they really mean is that the choice is between depleting the LAPD’s ranks and, perhaps, eliminating a favorite city program, or cutting a politically supportive contractor, or laying off members of a union that contributes funds to their campaigns. The facts of life are that many city programs that do some good are unaffordable and must be cut. City leaders must not try to shelter such programs by undermining the continuing transformation, and success, of the LAPD.