Citizen Councils at Heart of Community-Based Policing : LAPD: Selection of members is under way and reflects city’s diversity. Groups are to help chart priorities.

Across much of Los Angeles, a vast experiment in civic participation is unfolding to see whether ordinary citizens, meeting in neighborhood groups, can help transform the embattled Los Angeles Police Department.

From San Pedro to the San Fernando Valley, “citizens councils” are being selected to help chart police priorities and restore trust in a department rocked by allegations of racism and brutality. The councils, which will meet regularly with officers, are at the heart of a philosophy called community-based policing and symbolize a new era of law enforcement in Los Angeles.

But as the massive department struggles to put theory into practice, it has found itself on a helter-skelter, mostly uncharted course leading to wide disparities in the way citizens will be represented throughout the city.

The size and number of the councils--and how each group’s members are chosen--vary markedly among the seven police divisions where the program is being launched.

Loose guidelines, developed since January, will enable the makeup of each council, and the process by which it is chosen, to mirror the makeup and concerns of each community throughout Los Angeles. Already, the flexibility of the process has revealed much about the city’s diversity.

In crime-plagued inner-city neighborhoods, where police have long been accused of brutality, citizens are crowding into schools and church halls, making speeches and electing their councils. The boisterous gatherings have an urgency about them as residents talk of rescuing their communities from gang violence and from the simmering distrust between officers and residents.

In contrast, the selection of citizens councils in the Los Angeles Harbor area have been relatively sedate affairs because police and residents enjoy a history of cooperation. Four existing community groups were chosen informally by police to double as citizens councils. One group regularly meets over breakfast. Members sip coffee and swap ideas about how to improve their community.

In the Northeast Division, six councils--each with about a dozen members--are being formed to represent at least as many different communities with varying law enforcement priorities. In Los Feliz, where people are bothered by illegal street vendors and daytime burglaries, the types of complaints are likely to be much different than in Cypress Park, where street vendors are a way of life but where residents worry about gangs and graffiti, said Capt. Keith Bushey.

“It’s clear that what works in one area may not work in another,” said James Q. Wilson, a UCLA management professor who heads a specially appointed blue-ribbon committee that has been helping the Los Angeles Police Department implement the plan. “In some places, there are extremely well-organized communities; in others, creating the basic organization (to bring about citizen involvement) is a challenge.”

Wilson, appointed by Police Chief Daryl F. Gates along with other academicians and private industry personnel experts, called the establishment of the councils “a very large, very long-term task” requiring fundamental changes in the way the 8,300-member Police Department functions. One change, he said, is to remove much of the LAPD’s planning authority from the central hierarchy. Instead, division captains have been free to set up the citizens councils however they see fit.

“You can’t direct this process from the top,” Wilson said, “or else the whole notion that you’re trying to empower officers to work with citizens goes right out the window.”

In theory, the councils will be able to address even potentially divisive issues such as deployment, bringing pressure to bolster patrols in some high-crime neighborhoods. But generally, the groups are expected to concentrate on matters of community concern--where drugs are being sold, where gang members hang out, the kinds of things police want to hear.

Although police say they will be open to suggestions from the councils, they believe that the most useful role of the groups will be to function as a network of tipsters.

Police hope to expand the pilot project to all 18 LAPD divisions, possibly by the end of the year. Until then, the initial target areas are seen as places to get the program moving, even as competing approaches are tested.

“The whole idea here is to have cross-fertilization--we’ll learn from one another and see what works,” said Los Angeles Councilman Marvin Braude, a member of the blue-ribbon committee and chairman of the council’s ad hoc committee to deal with Christopher Commission findings, including community-based policing.

As the selection of the councils moves forward, many issues remain unsettled: What is a council’s optimum size? How should members be selected? How can police ensure that all community factions have a representative voice and that each council remains an independent watchdog?

Privately, some officers fear that councils may end up being too “pro-police,” which would defeat the purpose of the program and raise a backlash of criticism against the department. Or, worse, the councils could become pawns in yet another arena of city politics.

“That would be a disaster,” one LAPD captain said.

The seven divisions selected to initiate the program represent what police consider an ethnic and geographical cross-section of Los Angeles: Foothill Division, spanning 60 square miles of the San Fernando Valley; Hollenbeck Division in heavily Latino East Los Angeles; Harbor Division, with its multitude of activist groups in San Pedro and Wilmington; Pacific Division, extending from Venice to upscale neighborhoods near Marina del Rey; Northeast Division, spanning the densely populated communities of Eagle Rock, Highland Park and Los Feliz; the largely black Southeast Division, covering Watts, and 77th Division in South-Central Los Angeles.

In the 77th Division, where distrust of police is high and where murder rates usually rank first or second in Los Angeles, a series of meetings are under way to allow residents to elect their representatives.

The first meeting was held March 3--by no coincidence, the first anniversary of the Rodney G. King beating--and it drew about 800 people to a school auditorium, where police and city officials outlined the approach with considerable fanfare. Reporters and television crews were invited, and many in the crowd turned out in suits and ties. Subsequent meetings have been held every week, with citizens electing 10 members at a time to a council that will consist of 80 members.

Once that group is in place, its members will help form a smaller, 20-member steering committee to meet monthly and handle the bulk of the work, said Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who fought to have the area included in the plan and who has taken a visible role in the process.

“The important thing here is, there is going to be regular, structured interaction between the department and the community,” Ridley-Thomas said, noting that officer conduct may be a subject of discussion even though the advisory group is not intended as a personnel board. The council will be able to bring conduct problems to the Police Commission and the police chief, he said.

“It is . . . not just some ad hoc committee,” Ridley-Thomas said.

Esquine Pettie, 54, a council member in the 77th Division, is not sure what she will suggest to officers. But a few doors from her home is a suspected “dope house,” she said, and she is afraid to be outdoors after dark.

“At night is when we need a whole lot of police protection,” Pettie said. “I wouldn’t trust it (to walk) from here to the bus stop.”

Another new member, Myrtle City, said she was selected even though she never asked to be put on the ballot. As a longtime captain of her Neighborhood Watch block club, City has worked for years with police and welcomes the councils. Although Neighborhood Watch has reduced the area’s huge crime problem, she said, there is more to be accomplished.

“Break-ins and muggings on the street--that’s come down considerably,” she said, but gang members still congregate on a corner near her home nearly every day. “That’s what gives you the shakes,” she said.

Police captains say it will help to hear where such gatherings occur, or where drugs are openly sold, or where citizens fear to walk. But gearing up for community-based policing has put a strain, at least temporarily, on manpower, some conceded.

In most of the participating divisions, at least six or eight senior lead officers have been assigned full time to community-based policing since January, spreading the word at community meetings and looking for where--and how--to find citizens council members. That has made controlling day-to-day crime more difficult, said Capt. Bob Medina of East Los Angeles’ Hollenbeck Division.

“Our response time (to emergency calls) has probably suffered” by a minute or two, said Medina, who is trying to create three councils--of eight or 10 members each--to represent Boyle Heights, El Sereno and Lincoln Heights.

Although he talked optimistically about the long-range value of the program, Medina predicted that some types of crimes--notably robbery and burglary--may rise in months ahead because there are fewer cops on the street. Other LAPD officials disagreed that crime would escalate, even temporarily, but several acknowledged that getting the program started has been difficult.

“We haven’t had the time (or) the manpower to get it off the ground,” said Sgt. Peter Weinhold of Foothill Division, where King was beaten. Foothill police are trying to determine how to choose participants in an area that includes Sunland-Tujunga, Pacoima, Mission Hills and fast-growing Arleta and Sylmar.

The division’s population--about 200,000--makes even the size of the council “a difficult problem,” Weinhold said. “It has to be a broad base. . . . We’re going to have to draw from chambers of commerce, business people, citizens who have been volunteers throughout the years. It’s not going to be an easy task. And you can only select so many people--if it gets too big, it’s not going to work.”

Nonetheless, Weinhold spoke highly of the plan, as did nearly every LAPD official who was interviewed. Citizens councils are even applauded by some of the department’s harshest critics, including Perry Crouch, 42, a resident of the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts who was bitterly outspoken about the fatal shooting by police of a resident there last fall.

The death of 28-year-old Henry Peco led to several meetings between residents and Southeast Division officers. The meetings--the type of face-to-face encounters that citizens councils are expected to produce--helped to defuse tensions that were running dangerously high at the housing project, according to Crouch, who attended. Since then, he said, “the officers have been treating citizens all right. It’s done some good.”

The whole point of citizens councils, police say, is to weave that kind of candid communication into the fabric of law enforcement. Crouch has agreed to participate as a panel member in Southeast, where police are creating a two-tiered structure: a larger council of several dozen members to meet quarterly, with a core group of 10 or 15 members meeting monthly.

Capt. David Gascon, who has been searching for members among Watts-area churches, civic groups and business organizations, said he hopes for a group willing to challenge the department.

“We think it’s healthy for people to ask us the tough questions,” Gascon said.

Several divisions have the rudiments of community-based policing, and the creation of councils will advance the philosophy a step further, police said. The most notable is Harbor Division, which pioneered the approach three years ago under then-Capt. Joe DeLadurantey, now Torrance’s police chief.

Realizing that “what I was looking for was already in existence,” division Capt. Timothy King said he decided to enlist four existing civic groups as citizens councils. Al Hoagland, a prominent member of one group, said residents are accustomed to helping police. He remembered when they alerted officers to a Wilmington “rock house,” and another time when they informed police of satanic rites that were rumored to be taking place in underground bunkers in San Pedro.

Police not only dealt with the problems, sealing off the bunkers, but they also kept residents informed. “We were not being ignored,” Hoagland said.