Bradley OKs Ordinances Beefing Up LAPD

Mayor Tom Bradley approved a 150-officer boost in the Los Angeles Police Department on Wednesday but carefully avoided taking sides in the debate over whether some parts of the city receive better police protection than others.

Bradley said he has not read a controversial consultant’s study indicating that response time in the city’s poorer, minority areas is slower than in certain affluent sections. He added that the Police Commission will examine the report closely and act appropriately on it.

A 20-year veteran of the LAPD before entering politics in the early 1960s, Bradley said he has “always insisted that we ought to have a fair allocation of police personnel so that no section of this city is denied . . . treated like a stepchild. . . .”

“Every section of this city ought to have its fair share of whatever police resources we--the City Council and I--are able to provide for them,” Bradley said.

The mayor signed two ordinances, passed by the City Council in recent days, both designed to reinforce the LAPD’s uniformed staff.

One boosted the department’s authorized strength to a record 7,500 officers at a cost of about $300,000 by the end of the current fiscal year and as much as $9 million during the fiscal year beginning July 1.

The other ordinance created a new deputy chief position to assist in fighting drug-related gang activity. Both the new anti-drug effort and the addition of 150 officers will be financed by a federal program that funnels cash seized in drug raids to local law enforcement efforts, Bradley said.

Bradley added that no current city services will have to be cut to pay for the new officer positions.

The deployment issue, meanwhile, remains unresolved. It has pitted the department brass, including Chief Daryl F. Gates, against leaders of minority groups since the deployment study was made public late last week.

Ordered by the Police Commission last year, the study concluded, among other things, that in the city’s heavily minority South-Central area, LAPD units are slower in responding to emergency calls than in more affluent areas in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside.

Gates, who joined Bradley at Wednesday’s City Hall ceremony, repeated assertions he had made Tuesday that the consultant’s study was based on outdated data and does not fully reflect the current response times. Gates also accused the news media of failing to grasp the complexity of the report, particularly how it relates to differences between deployment in various sections of the city.

Gates called for an end to what he said was “divisiveness” over the deployment issue, adding that the news media ought to focus more attention on the “miserable little SOB’s” who are preying on the city’s neighborhoods.

Smattering of Politics

The signing ceremony involved a smattering of mayoral politics, with Bradley’s chief rival, Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, joining the news conference as one of the key sponsors of the 150-officer boost.

Bradley, asked whether his support of the officer increase removed the issue of more police from next year’s mayoral election, responded:

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. So far as I’m concerned, there never was an issue in the race for mayor on that matter.”

Yaroslavsky, asked the same question, deadpanned: “What race for mayor?”