Long Beach to Put 70 More Officers on Street Patrols

In response to the continuing rise of crime in Long Beach, city management is putting 70 more police officers on the streets for the next two months.

Instead of showing a respite from 1989’s dramatic jump in crime, statistics for the first three months of this year compiled by the Police Department brought more bad news. Compared with the same period last year, serious crimes were up 13.3% citywide.

Saying he was “shocked and angry” about the figures, Mayor Ernie Kell announced at a Monday press conference that the Police Department was reassigning about 70 officers to patrol duties. Half will work patrol on an overtime basis and the rest will be taken off traffic, detective and administrative beats.

Police Chief Lawrence Binkley said the extra patrol officers will be assigned throughout the city in response to crime flare-ups. “What they’ll be doing is looking for the real bad people,” Binkley said at the press conference, explaining that the 70 officers will spend their time dealing with drug and gang problems and pursuing repeat offenders.

Officials said the city could afford to field the officers for about two months at a cost of about $325,000 but would have to cut city services to maintain the program beyond that point.

In using overtime and beat reassignments to beef up the city’s understaffed patrol units, city management is following precisely the formula suggested by some City Council candidates in this spring’s races. Kell said the steps were not taken earlier because the city was engaged in contentious labor negotiations with the police union.

“It was difficult to institute a program like this until we had settled the labor dispute,” Kell said.

Kell added that he had hoped the staffing changes undertaken as part of the new police union contract would drive crime down. “It obviously is not enough; we hoped it would be,” Kell said of the 20 additional patrol cars that the Police Department has sent out on a daily basis as a result of contract changes allowing management to assign more officers to one-officer cars at night.

But as one council member pointed out, the first-quarter crime figures do not show the effect of the staffing changes, since the new work rules were not put in place until the end of March.

Although Kell said he asked the city manager and police chief Friday to devise a program for fighting crime after learning of the latest crime increase, the plan for more patrols was apparently already in the works. Binkley said last Thursday that he had spent the day in a staff meeting discussing ways of dealing with the crime rate and would release the details on Monday.

In a report to the mayor and City Council on the quarterly crime statistics, City Manager James Hankla said patrol officers have responded more quickly to emergency calls this year than last, when the department was under constant criticism for taking too long to answer 911 calls. During the first three months of this year, police responded to 52% of serious emergency calls within five minutes, compared to 45% last year, according to Hankla.

Long Beach last year experienced the largest jump in major crimes of any of California’s large cities. Violent crimes were up 39%, while murder increased nearly 47%.

The grim figures have shaped political debate and prompted the council to place an initiative on this June’s ballot that would create a new property tax levy to add another 75 police officers to the department, now budgeted for 677 officers. An additional $44 would be added to the property tax for a typical single-family home.

Although Kell announced the increased street patrols a month before his runoff election with Councilman Tom Clark, Kell denied that the timing was in any way political. “This is not a political issue,” he declared.

Clark, saying he supports “anything we can do to increase the number of officers on patrol,” nonetheless noted that “the timing is obviously in the middle of a campaign.” Clark called the new patrol assignments “more of a Band-Aid solution than a long-term solution,” saying the city needs to permanently expand the police force.

Both Kell and Clark support the ballot proposal for more officers, although both have been too embroiled in their campaigns to actively promote it.

Compared with the first three months of 1989, there was no citywide increase in either murder or manslaughter this year. But reported rapes were up nearly 18%, residential burglaries increased 25% and auto theft rose 17%.

All but two council districts experienced crime increases, ranging from a 7% rise in the 7th District to a 24% jump in the 2nd District. In the 3rd District, overall crime fell by nearly 2%, while it decreased by more than 5% in the 5th District.

Overtime patrols already have been used effectively earlier this year. In the city manager’s report, Hankla noted that when an overtime task force was assigned to certain targeted areas in recent months, serious crimes declined significantly in those neighborhoods.

“There’s no doubt you’ll have a major impact on crime,” Binkley said of the extra patrol shifts.

In another staffing matter, Hankla said the city will soon start filling police force vacancies as they occur rather than waiting for enough vacancies to accumulate to fill a class at the Long Beach Police Academy. Instead of sending recruits to the local academy, the city will send them to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for training, allowing the department to hire new officers on a regular basis.