Community Policing to Be Expanded : Law enforcement: The pilot program sends veteran officers to work full time with neighborhood groups. Civilian volunteers will join the effort.

Los Angeles police will expand a community-based policing program in which 31 veteran patrol officers in the San Fernando Valley have been assigned full time to work with neighborhood groups and walk foot beats, the Valley’s top-ranking police commander said Tuesday.

During the three-month pilot program, senior officers have been diverted from supervisory patrol duty and have responded only to top-priority radio calls. The deployment shift has not hurt emergency response times and appears to have improved community involvement, Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker said.

Overall, the average response time in the Valley has improved slightly, from 8.22 minutes a year ago to 8.18 minutes this year, Kroeker said.

In a move to further bolster neighborhood involvement in police efforts, 335 civilian volunteers will be selected beginning next month to help coordinate anti-crime activities.

The Valley program reflects the community-based policing philosophy recommended by the Christopher Commission in the aftermath of the police beating of Rodney G. King. The commission urged that officers spend less time responding to calls and more time communicating with residents.

In a novel approach among the city’s four patrol bureaus, each Valley volunteer will represent one crime-reporting district, the police equivalent of a census tract.

“For the first time we will have a community representative representing that piece of geography,” Kroeker said. “In the past, it was sporadic. This block had a neighborhood watch captain and this one didn’t. We are attempting a completely thorough, systematic coverage of the Valley.”

Kroeker said three months is not enough time to measure the effect of the new use of senior lead officers on crime statistics. He said his main concern was that response times to emergency calls would not suffer. He also hesitated to attribute the slight improvement in response times this year directly to the shift, although he said that should be an emerging benefit as police focus on problem locations that produce recurring calls for service.

The new community representatives are expected to strengthen existing neighborhood groups, create new ones and lighten the workload of the senior lead officers, who have been inundated with requests for service since the pilot project began in May.

Several officers said the volunteers will help handle tasks such as providing information on problems from abandoned cars to blighted buildings, issues that do not necessarily require a police officer.

“This has in a sense snowballed,” said Minor Jiminez, a Foothill Division-based senior lead officer in Pacoima. “We are getting swamped with administrative things to do.”

Jiminez has been organizing a first-ever, Spanish-language forum on police procedures scheduled Thursday, passing out thousands of flyers for the event. He oversees a patrol area containing seven reporting districts, which he said are about 15 blocks square.

“We need somebody who can serve as a liaison, like a right-hand man,” he said. “We want to be available, and it helps me to have someone who can disseminate information.”

One volunteer, homeowner Candace Campbell, has been working with Officer William McAlister of the Van Nuys Division to fight gang activity on the fringes of her tract of 131 single-family houses. She said she looks forward to organizing in neighborhoods that are not as active as hers.

“Whether you are a renter or a homeowner, quality of life is quality of life,” she said. “I think it’s not that people are apathetic, but that they feel hopeless and helpless. What we can do is help each other.”

But Campbell, other activists and several police officers said a fundamental obstacle to new initiatives remains: the low number of police officers in Los Angeles contrasted with other big cities.

“That’s the biggest thing I run into,” McAlister said. “People asking for more police.”