Community Policing Nothing New for Area’s Top Cop

Glenn A. Levant, a deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and commanding officer of Operations-West Bureau.

Claim to fame: Earlier this year was put in charge of the four area police divisions: West Los Angeles, Pacific, Wilshire and Hollywood.

Background: Credited with helping initiate community-based policing efforts that are being recommended following the Rodney King beating.

He Also was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to be the city’s drug czar, and has been active in the school program Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE).

Interviewer: Times staff writer Josh Meyer.

Q: As the relatively new top cop on the Westside, what do you see as your charge? What are your plans and strategies?

A: The strategy is basically to provide the best possible police service to everyone who lives and works and passes through the west part of the city of Los Angeles. Obviously the emphasis is going to be on getting the community to work with the police and getting other community-based organizations, service organizations, elected officials and the like to work with the police.

Q: Your plans seem to involve a lot of community-based policing. That’s something of a fairly new idea, isn’t it?

A: Well, the idea may be new to some, but it is not new to the Los Angeles Police Department. Back in 1972, I developed the concept of Neighborhood Watch in the Valley Division and have been very active in the concept for almost 20 years now. But the new emphasis on community policing sure is something that is going to be in the future in the LAPD.

Q: What are the advantages to community-based policing these days?

A: I think the major advantage is that it reinforces the concept that the police are part of the community, not alien to the community or mercenaries. It helps with mutual understanding, it helps with cultural awareness, it helps reduce some barriers between police and some citizens who are unfamiliar with the concept of policing. The police are part of the same people they’re protecting. The only difference being that the people pay the police full time to do what’s every citizen’s responsibility--to maintain order and prevent crime.

Q: What gave you the idea for the Neighborhood Watch program in 1972?

A: It just seemed like a logical extension of the concept of the basic car-plan meetings, to extend them into people’s homes. The city is divided into 150 some-odd basic car-plan districts, for basic deployment. The meetings, back in the ‘60s, took place usually in the elementary school where officers would attend and invite all the people that lived in their basic car-plan district. Some were quite large--300 and 400 people would attend a single meeting, which made interaction between officers and the community a little difficult. So a team of officers would have a host open his home to the neighbors. We generated very positive advantages. We discovered early on that many people had no idea who their neighbors were. It was good for the neighborhoods, it was good for the officers and it was helpful in disseminating specific crime-prevention information. It greatly reduced the burglary problem and various other types of crimes.

Q: Some people say policing should be left to the police. Do you hear that charge often, and what is your response?

A: It’s not an argument that I’ve heard before. People are always looking for involvement opportunities that will benefit their neighborhood and the overall public. Certainly, Neighborhood Watch is basic and good citizenship, and helps to prevent crimes and evil things from happening in people’s neighborhoods. So I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want to be involved in a Neighborhood Watch concept. Taking on a criminal personally--this is where the public hires the police to do that job for them. All we ask, from the Police Department standpoint, is for the citizens to bring suspicious behavior to our attention so that we can look into it and determine if we can prevent a crime from occurring. Because you have to remember, in basic policing, it’s much, much better to prevent a crime from occurring than to react after the crime has occurred and try to solve it.

Q: You’ve also set up more foot patrols and bike patrols, especially in crime hot spots in Hollywood. Do you plan to institute more?

A: I am in the process of implementing several other foot patrols in the West Bureau area, where they are appropriate. Not every location is feasible for foot patrol.

Q: The Christopher Commission has said community-based policing is needed to restore trust and confidence in the department. Has the LAPD lost that trust and confidence?

A: Obviously the beating of Rodney King has resulted in a loss of public confidence in the police and it’s up to the department, contact by contact, incident by incident, telephone call by telephone call, arrest by arrest, in every way, to restore public confidence. I think community-based policing and the re-emphasis of that will help.

Q: As one of the top-ranking police officers in the department, and one who has been somewhat critical of the LAPD in the recent past, how do you think the LAPD should receive the criticisms lodged by the Christopher Commission?

A: From an operational view, I’m in favor of all the recommendations of the Christopher Commission report.

Q: What are your main concerns as a law enforcement officer on the Westside right now?

A: The primary police problem, not only on the Westside, but throughout the entire city of Los Angeles, if not the entire United States, is drug abuse. Drug abuse knows no boundaries, there are no demographic factors involved, so it’s a great misconception to say that drug abuse is an inner-city problem. Drugs are prevalent everywhere. Narcotics abuse can be directly linked to roughly 90% of our property crime, and narcotics are involved with approximately 70% of our violent crimes. The costs are staggering by any measure: in economic costs, pain and suffering, the inability of our country to compete in the world markets, absenteeism in factories, public safety. It is just as big a problem on the Westside as it is everywhere else.

Q: You have a lot of experience in the area of drug enforcement. How do you plan to continue those anti-drug efforts on the Westside?

A: My true love has been the DARE Program, which I’m still very active and involved in. I was assigned to help develop the program when it began in Los Angeles in 1983. It’s an educational program in which specially trained police officers deliver a curriculum prepared with help from educational specialists in the L.A. Unified School District. Since the program started, it’s been replicated in all 50 states. We have 5 million kids in the program right now; 20 million kids have been impacted. The program is effective because it is based on positive role models that help kids resist negative peer pressure to get involved with drugs and alcohol. I’m very proud of that. By preventing drug abuse, we’re ultimately preventing crime and moving toward a solution to the narcotics epidemic in this country.

Q: Are you cooperating with other police on the Westside--Santa Monica, Culver City, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills?

A: Yes, we have regular meetings to discuss mutual problems because, as in drug abuse, crime has no boundaries. We can’t have a myopic view of the problem; we can’t have a view that crime prevention and policing problems are solely the job of the police. You have to be adept at involving all governmental agencies, all community-based service organizations.

Q: How successful have police been in cracking down on drug-related crime and drug dealing?

A: There’s not a conspicuous problem remaining in the West Los Angeles area, but there remains a minimal number of drug-dealing hot spots in the Pacific area and to a larger extent in the Hollywood and Wilshire areas. But all of them remain addressed by a variety of tactics that will keep the pressure on drug dealers until the DARE program has an opportunity to eliminate the marketplace for drugs, which is a generation-long approach. So, it’s a total, comprehensive strategy to deal with the problem. There’s no quick-fix solution.

Q: How bad is the gang problem on the Westside?

A: I’ve come to the conclusion that the word gang has been greatly overused. It’s my opinion that gang members are opportunists, people that live in the same general neighborhood and are approximately the same age group. They will participate in often leaderless, opportunistic crimes. If you were to ask what is the greatest myth about the gang problem, it is that there is an organized army of gang members in this country, when in fact that’s simply not the case. Q: What are some of the particular crimes affecting certain Westside areas?

A: One of the many types that have concerned me is crimes involving elderly victims. There is a certain class of criminals that like to prey upon the elderly, and this is manifested in beatings and vicious purse snatches that result in hospitalization of the victims. I don’t wish to alarm the community by focusing on it, but it is happening in areas where there is a concentration of foot traffic with seniors. For example in the Pico-Robertson area, in the Fairfax district, in Westwood Village, in the Oakwood community, in the Pacific area and certain parts of Hollywood.

Q: Does the varied ethnic mix on the Westside cause problems, or pose special challenges, for police?

A: We have 95 languages that are spoken in the Westside, which can cause problems in an emergency. If someone is a victim of a crime, if someone is calling for help, they have a tendency to revert to their mother tongue. When you’re confronted with an emergency, time is of the essence. If you don’t know what language the victim or the witness is attempting to communicate in, you are at a great disadvantage. By the time the situation is stabilized, your suspect could be miles and miles away, or your victim could be unable to get immediate medical attention. So it is imperative that we be able to provide translation services to the officers, to the paramedics, to the Fire Department. Within the last six months we’ve been doing so.

Q: You also have to patrol the shoreline, most notably Venice Beach, one of the largest tourist meccas in Southern California. What is that like?

A: We have the most beaches in West Bureau of any place in the city of Los Angeles. There’s Venice Beach, and we have a portion of city beach in West Los Angeles. By having a special patrol at the beach, we are able to prevent problems from occurring and maintain public order. We’ve been very successful this year, and not every place in the state of California has been. Our deployment is designed to prevent violence, to prevent crime from occurring.