A Close-Up of Community Policing

To understand the value of community policing, I rode the beat with Los Angeles cops John Girard and Stephanie Tisdale.

Girard and Tisdale are senior lead officers in the San Fernando Valley’s community policing program. They spend days and nights organizing civilians to fight crime, forming Neighborhood Watch block clubs, visiting schools, meeting with apartment house owners and managers, and listening to complaints from residents and merchants.

I met Girard before 7 a.m. last Thursday. He’d just arrived at the Devonshire police station and was still wearing faded Levi’s, his pistol sticking out of the back of the pants. “Hold on a minute,” he told me. “I’ll go upstairs and change.”

When he returned, dressed in LAPD blue, his pistol holstered at his side, we headed out on his morning rounds. He stopped by to chat with the head of a Neighborhood Watch group in a neighborhood of well-kept single-family homes.

Girard told me how that particular group helped catch a burglary suspect a few weeks before. He was talking to some of the members when they saw a man driving by. They recognized him as someone they’d recently seen running off with a VCR from a home.

Girard got in his patrol car and chased the man. When the suspect jumped from his car and ran through back yards, neighbors reported his progress by phone to the LAPD. Finally, he was cornered by two fierce neighborhood Rotweiller dogs and gave up.

We drove past big apartment houses on streets east and west of Sepulveda Boulevard and Girard showed me some particular trouble spots. He pointed out a bullet hole in the front door of one, a memento of the day someone took a shot at him.

Such apartment houses occupy much of the senior lead officers’ attention, as I found out when I went on patrol in the West Valley with Police Officer Stephanie Tisdale. Most of the residents are working people, living there until they can afford something better. But the comparatively low rents--$500 to $600 a month--also attract drug dealers and prostitutes.

A manager had told Tisdale that two of the tenants were selling drugs. We climbed the stairs to the second floor and Tisdale knocked on the door. A thin, tired-looking woman in her 20s answered.

Tisdale introduced herself and asked if she could come in. Sure, the woman said. I followed. No, the woman said, she wasn’t selling drugs. She did once, but no more. What about those little pieces of tinfoil on the coffee table, the ones that look like heroin wrappers? From Hershey kisses, she said, showing Tisdale a jar of the candy.

Tisdale looked around the apartment, dark, stuffy, bed unmade, kitchen full of dirty dishes. She thanked the woman, and left. If the woman was selling drugs, she now knew the cops were on to her. And the other residents knew the police were on the job.

How does this differ from traditional policing? Instead of a raid--a task force of cops randomly nailing tenants who might well be innocent--this woman had been given a warning. Tisdale said the other tenants, figuring the LAPD is on their side, would call if there was more trouble.

L.A. police officers have been quietly doing this sort of work for more than 20 years. A major expansion was recommended by the Christopher Commission last year after its investigation of the Rodney G. King beating.

Even before the King arrest, community policing had taken hold in the San Fernando Valley, enthusiastically received by residents of the area’s many subdivisions, condos and apartment houses.

Yet it was here in the Valley where the infamous King beating occurred and where the department itself suffered a blow from which it has not recovered. Since then, Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker, in charge of the Valley cops, has intensified the drive for more community policing.

There seems to be an enormous appetite for community policing. But there also is potential trouble. Residents will be elected to advisory community policing councils. What if a policing council objects to a police tactic? Who prevails, the community policing council or the LAPD commanders?

Another source of potential conflict is the style of many LAPD officers who act as though they’ve seen too many Clint Eastwood movies. They dismiss community policing as social work. Can the cowboy cop culture be changed?

When we talked in his office in the Valley, Kroeker acknowledged these obstacles to community policing. “But I’m optimistic it will prevail now,” he said. “It has to. There’s no turning back.”