LAPD: bulking up in tough times

The Los Angeles Police Department is one of about 40 departments in city government, but it’s the largest, and it has never been shy about throwing its weight around at budget time. The LAPD routinely demands more -- more money for officers, more for recruiting, more for equipment, more for technology.

Chief William J. Bratton and other LAPD leaders press their advantage, emphasizing the decline in crime in Los Angeles without noting that crime is down nationwide, especially in big cities, and that it may have as much to do with shifting demographics and other unfathomable trends as with the quality of policing. They underplay, at least during budget season, enormously costly screw-ups such as the 2007 MacArthur Park May Day fiasco that raised questions about how much the department has actually improved. They insist on enlarging the ranks of officers, persuading the mayor and City Council to increase trash collection fees in order to keep police growth steady.

In the midst of a recession, Los Angeles residents have less money to spare, so City Hall has less revenue from sales taxes, property taxes, business-license and documentary-transfer taxes. Services we take for granted must be slashed, including recreation programs, street cleaning, support for the arts. But Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has insisted that he will continue increasing the number of LAPD officers.

The mayor’s decision is the right one, although it may become hard to accept as the months go by and other city services necessarily diminish. It would be a shame to lose the benefit of recent improvements in the city’s Planning Department, or to have to scale back on pothole filling, or to do without the promising innovations aimed at making the city a leader in environmental protection or at least a player in attracting business. Few of the city’s programs operate as efficiently as they could, but few are expendable. Cutting them will hurt.

As administrations come and go, however, so (too often) do their plans for new and better programs. What persists is the city’s ability to pick up trash, and to police -- and its need to increase the ratio of LAPD officers to residents to better serve the city.

For decades, policing followed an unwritten understanding between Los Angeles leaders and the department. The number of officers would remain small, but police would have wide latitude in the streets. Outnumbered and feeling besieged, officers would operate like an occupying force, roaming neighborhoods in patrol cars and emerging only to seize suspects. They were the praetorians of the mostly white middle and upper classes and the scourge of the underclass, leftists, blacks, Latinos and other supposed threats to the status quo. That model was intended to discourage corruption -- it’s hard to engage in graft when one rarely hobnobs with the public -- but it strained race and class relations.

Bratton is by far the most successful of LAPD chiefs to try ending the department’s culture of isolation through smarter management, better training and a change in the LAPD’s confrontational style. That means in part making officers feel less besieged -- which in turn means increasing their ranks and according them breathing room, allowing them not just to protect but also to serve. More officers means an opportunity for more face-to-face contact with residents and greater ability to defuse problems peacefully. Los Angeles will never be policed like Mayberry, but the city can have true community policing.

That doesn’t mean the LAPD always must get everything it wants. The department too often mistakes the consensus for more officers and public support for the police as a free pass on scrutiny. It shouldn’t, nor should Villaraigosa.

The LAPD is no better than other city departments at resource management or efficiency. It has yet to adopt recommendations that could free up hundreds of uniformed officers for patrol duty by giving their current desk jobs to civilians. It likewise is slow in improving its fiscal and technology operations. The single-minded focus on numbers actually undermined crime fighting by diverting resources for necessary lab work.

Meanwhile, neither Bratton nor Villaraigosa has presented a realistic outline for how the growth can be sustained, and for how far into the future. Will the LAPD wind up with every city dollar, with nothing for libraries or street paving? Increasing the ranks of officers remains the best policy, even now, as the recession deepens. Just as expansion comes at a cost to other city programs, though, it must come at a cost to the LAPD -- in stiffer oversight and economizing.