Community Policing in L.A. Filled With Uncertainties : Law enforcement: Voguish but vague philosophy could be costly and would require fundamental change.

Los Angeles will need to put hundreds of additional police officers on the street if the city adopts the philosophy of “community-based policing” urged by the Christopher Commission, according to police and elected officials.

But there is disagreement about whether the Los Angeles Police Department will need to hire new officers at a cost of millions of dollars, or whether enough police can be reassigned from desk jobs to patrol duty.

Resolving this disagreement is only one in a series of obstacles to implementing community-based policing in Los Angeles, where 3 million residents are served by a force of only 8,300 officers. Perhaps the biggest obstacle is also the most basic: settling on a firm, tangible definition for what is a voguish but vague law enforcement approach.

“The variety of programs that are described as ‘community policing’ is truly bewildering,” noted a U. S. Justice Department survey. “It has been attached to Neighborhood Watch, mini- and shopfront police stations, liaison with gay communities . . . police-sponsored discos and . . . horse patrols. . . . One police chief created ‘community policing’ by fiat, declaring that every officer was to be known as a ‘community police officer.’ ”

The result is that some of the officials charged with deciding how community policing will be applied in Los Angeles say it is being bandied about as a poorly defined catch phrase. “I don’t have the slightest idea what . . . you mean,” City Councilman Ernani Bernardi told a colleague who used the term at a hearing last week.

Even Warren Christopher, the former deputy secretary of state who headed the commission, acknowledged that he at first thought community policing “might just be a slogan,” although later he became convinced it was “in many respects an attitude” of restraint and mutual respect between the police department and the community.

In an attempt to define it, the Christopher Commission said that, generally, community policing means recognizing that the Los Angeles Police Department’s traditional approach to policing--stopping people deemed suspicious, making arrests and responding to emergencies--has not halted crime and has fostered excessive force and racism by officers.

Community policing, the commission said, would involve de-emphasizing traditional police work in favor of more social work of sorts--having patrol officers find out what is bothering residents, then working with them to clear up problems, whether crack houses, vagrancy, dangerous intersections or abandoned cars and buildings.

As Police Commissioner Jesse Brewer, a former LAPD assistant chief, explained the concept to Bernardi: “The department for years has been giving service to the community that we think they should have, as opposed to trying to determine from the community what they want us to do.”

Still, the Christopher Commission did not go into detail about what sorts of programs it wanted community policing to involve. The commission also did not endorse the approach of any other city that has embraced the concept, including Houston, which along with Los Angeles has the lowest number of police officers per capita among major cities.

“New programs, no matter how worthwhile, will not alone implement community policing,” the commission said. “It requires the most fundamental change in values within the LAPD.”

The result is that the Police Department, the Police Commission, the mayor and the City Council have been left to grope in coming months with ways to get the department to undergo such fundamental change.

Ironically, it was the Los Angeles Police Department that helped pioneer concepts of community-based policing in the 1970s, only to abandon many of them in the 1980s in favor of concerted drives for making arrests and improving the time it takes officers to respond to emergencies.

Department statistics show emergency response times were reduced from nine or more minutes in 1988 to an average of seven minutes citywide now.

Police administrators say they will need to hire 800 more officers--at an estimated cost in salaries alone of $36 million a year--if they are expected to deliver community policing while maintaining the emergency response times that they believe the community also wants.

Computer studies show that such an addition would allow the department to maintain its seven-minute emergency responses and leave patrol officers with half their time free, said Cmdr. Lawrence Fetters, a top administrator in the department’s Office of Operations.

Now, the same studies show, patrol officers have an average of 40% of their time free, but critics say too much time is spent stopping people who look suspicious and trying to catch them in criminal acts, often misdemeanors.

The mayor and the head of the council’s budget committee, however, do not appear receptive to any plan to expand the police force. They say the department can find the extra patrol officers it needs to implement community-based policing by getting more officers out from behind desks and into the neighborhoods.

Mayor Tom Bradley, a Los Angeles police officer from 1940 through 1961, said community-based policing can be accomplished “by requiring officers to devote a certain amount of time to walking a foot beat in the community or visiting a neighborhood event.

“When I served on the police force,” the mayor added, “I made it a point to personally get to know the people who lived and worked in my jurisdiction. I want our police force to take a step back in time and focus on this critical element of police protection. There will be no increase in crime or a need for additional officers. This is a question of how officers are deployed and supervised.”

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the council’s committee, said that Los Angeles, at 464 square miles, is much too big to patrol on foot, and that he is not sure “what anybody’s talking about when they say community-based policing.”

But he said more officers could be put on patrol, with more time to interact with residents, by reassigning those whose current jobs could just as easily be done by civilians.

Christopher said he too would “start with redeployment . . . before I bought into the concept of the need for additional officers.”

But depending on the department to redistribute its own manpower may be a prescription for failure. The last time the department tried to find more veteran officers to put on patrol, an assignment widely viewed as a career dead end, it got nowhere. During a 1988 manpower audit, the department concluded that the administrators of non-patrol units had justified keeping almost all of their staff.

Those counting on police administrators to redistribute manpower now note that community policing has a limited but growing constituency within the Police Department. The concept, which has been regarded nationally for several years as the leading edge of urban law enforcement strategy, got its biggest boost this year with endorsements by 10 big-city police chiefs and the Christopher Commission, which investigated Los Angeles police policies and practices after the beating of motorist Rodney G. King.

“Two years ago, when I was talking about it, I had people calling me up telling me I was an idiot,” said Ernest Curtsinger, a leading advocate of community policing who left the Los Angeles Police Department recently to become chief in St. Petersburg, Fla. These days, he said, “I get several calls a week (from LAPD middle managers) wanting to know what can they read.”

Despite this support, Curtsinger is convinced that Los Angeles will not be able to implement community policing unless the city gets a charismatic new chief who is deeply committed to the idea and who has the power to demote managers who resist him.

Highly charged office politics in the department’s upper ranks makes it certain that, without such power, the new chief will be sabotaged by subordinates, said Curtsinger, who advised the Christopher Commission on community policing.

But getting the power to demote will not be easy. It requires a City Charter change--one of many recommended by the Christopher Commission that are being considered by the City Council, and will ultimately require voter approval.

Now, because of Civil Service protections, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates has the power to demote only his two top aides--and only from assistant chief to deputy chief.

Gates has said he will retire next year. But until he does, his attitudes toward community policing are key to how far any fresh commitment to it gets off the ground.

Despite many public statements on the subject and a 42-year track record as a police officer, the extent of Gates’ commitment is hard to read.

Gates dismantled what he has called the “ultimate in community-based policing” in the Los Angeles Police Department in 1979. This was an innovation of his predecessor, Ed Davis, called “team policing,” in which responsibility for policing the city was divided among 70 teams, each headed by a lieutenant, who acted as a sort of mini-chief for a geographical area. Gates said he had no choice but to end team policing because of budgetary constraints.

But he said recently in a pep talk to officers that the department does not get enough credit for the community policing it continues to do through a variety of programs, such as youth sport leagues, community booster groups, Neighborhood Watch associations, bicycle patrols, the DARE anti-drug program and Operation Cul-de-Sac, in which some high-crime areas were barricaded and flooded with officers to discourage drug sales and drive-by shootings.

Department officials also point to the little-publicized FALCON program, in which officers can enlist the aide of the city attorney’s office to sue landlords who will not help abate drug problems in their buildings, and PACE, in which officers can fill out forms asking other city agencies to repair broken street lights and haul away the litter and junked cars that blight some neighborhoods.

George Sullivan, an independent police consultant who does work for the Los Angeles Police Department, said the department falls “somewhere in the middle” when its use of community policing techniques is compared to that of other large city departments.

But many of the Los Angeles Police Department’s programs are not used citywide. The extent of their use has depended largely on the inclinations of captains in the 18 district police stations to widen community contacts from the usual array of police booster groups.

The Police Department’s broadest current community policing effort, according to the Christopher Commission, is being made in the Harbor area, commanded by Capt. Joe DeLadurantey.

Joe D, as he is known in the department, is viewed--at least these days--as something of a visionary. Community policing, he said, requires “sitting and talking . . . to the real people in the community--people who wouldn’t show up at a police meeting no matter what. . . . That means involvement with homeowner groups, churches, PTAs, principals, community-based agencies from YMCAs to boys’ and girls’ clubs to teen centers, chambers of commerce and service organizations.”

This is a different approach for many in the Police Department, where good street cops are referred to by their peers as “gunfighters” and the path to career advancement is more often charted through high numbers of arrests than conversations. But the approach may have surprisingly wide appeal.

“Every police officer comes on this job to help people,” said Sgt. Don Linfield, a so-called gunfighter who became a convert to community policing under Joe D. “If you can help people by doing something other than putting people in jail, most officers would be receptive to that.”

Linfield’s exposure to community policing came when he worked in the Harbor area as a “senior lead officer”--a designation carried over from Chief Davis’ team policing of the 1970s.

Davis divided the city into “basic car” areas--meaning areas for which one police car was to take basic responsibility.

The group of nine officers responsible for staffing each patrol car 24 hours a day, seven days a week was headed by a “senior lead officer” whose duty it was to coordinate their activities and organize meetings with residents to find out what they wanted the police to do.

Senior lead officers reported to a team leader--a lieutenant who was responsible for four or five cars. Detectives, traffic and narcotics officers in the area also reported to him.

Gates dismantled these teams, he said, because Proposition 13 budget cuts and the department’s then-shrinking size meant he needed to commit officers to a higher priority--rapid police responses to emergencies.

He said there was also pressure from edgy politicians who feared the department was making too many friends in the community and using them to lobby for its own political goals.

But Gates kept the “basic car areas” and senior lead officer positions and, over the years, some of these officers--who are paid a 5% bonus--have continued to play limited roles in mobilizing residents to fight crime, mainly through Neighborhood Watch groups.

Now plans are under discussion to free all senior lead officers to work full time on community policing efforts, said Cmdr. Fetters, the administrator in the department’s Office of Operations.

The department is also considering quarterly public surveys to gauge how safe people feel and their opinions of the police.

Gates has invited James Lasley, a Cal State Fullerton professor, to look for private funding for telephone polls in each of the department’s 18 geographical divisions.

The chief also has said he wants to develop a “quality-of-service program to ensure that everyone an officer contacts is treated decently.”

Department officials have been talking to USC business professors and Northrop Corp. officials about adopting models from private industry.

One of the guiding principles in these models is that people should routinely ask those with whom they deal--inside and outside the organization--whether they are satisfied.

Peggy Fulton, who is in charge of Northrop’s program in its aircraft division, said this could be especially difficult inside the Police Department, where she says officers often “believe that one remark can wipe out their careers.”

She said it takes five to seven years for most companies to make workers comfortable enough to speak up about problems.

Although Los Angeles patrol officers now have much of their time free from answering radio calls and doing administrative chores, they are generally encouraged to use their discretionary time to make what are called “observation arrests”--arrests for crimes they have witnessed, typically drug dealing or minor offenses.

This is an important part of the Los Angeles Police Department culture, which was criticized by the Christopher Commission because officers spend too much time riding around in their cars “isolated from the communities and the people they serve.”

In the course of trying to find people to arrest, the commission said, police stop people whom they deem suspicious, and particularly in minority communities, insist that they lie face-down on the ground while officers investigate.

Some officers, enveloped in a culture of “we versus them,” fail to apologize when they stop an innocent person, the commission found. And some innocent people take offense, contributing to a cycle of unnecessary quarrels and violence pitting officers against residents that the commission found plagued the department.

The commission characterized the Los Angeles Police Department as a so-called “professional model” police force--a name used by academics to denote a force that is obsessed with making lots of arrests and responding to emergencies.

But Gates has insisted this is not an accurate label.

He told the commission that, while the Police Department makes more arrests per officer than any other big-city department, it is hardly the slave that some departments are to 911.

Police in some cities respond to every 911 call, Gates said. But the Los Angeles Police Department sends a police car only to one of every three or four calls to the emergency number, depending on operators to screen true emergencies or potentially urgent situations from 911 calls on routine matters that could have been made to non-emergency numbers.

Top department officials, including Gates, have said they would like to have done more community policing over the years but could not because of staffing cutbacks of nearly a thousand officers in the late 1970s and early 1980s--cuts that have only lately been restored.

A Policing Philosophy

Community-based policing is a philosophy that incorporates some ideas of social work and community activism with more conventional crime fighting. It is a term that means different thin g s to different people and has been linked to many programs. In Los Angeles, these have included:

Operation Cul-de-Sac: Police set up barricades on borders of high-crime areas just south of downtown and patrol streets on foot, horse and bicycle.

PACE: Police contact other city agencies to board up abandoned buildings and haul away junked cars.

Neighborhood Watch: Police advise residents who have banded together in a block association on watching one another’s property and reporting crime.

Team Policing: An abandoned concept of the 1970s in which 70 lieutenants served as “mini-police chiefs” for small areas of the city.