More Police and Better Policing : L.A. City Prop. N would trigger a double payoff

Last June the people of Los Angeles boldly and decisively began the great effort to take back their police department. Next month they have the opportunity to complete their part of the job.

Proposition N on the Nov. 3 ballot would add 1,000 police officers. If voters enact it, the LAPD would increase by more than 10% and its new police chief would be in a position to execute one of the main mandates of last June’s Charter Amendment F, which got 70% of the vote.

That mandate was to reorganize the LAPD into a community-policing department serving the people in an alliance for progress. That mandate was an explicit rejection of the philosophy of former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, who preferred a more centralized and aloof policing style.

Proposition N would require a slight increase in the property tax--in the range of $100 a year per average property-tax bill. But it would yield an enormous payoff--and provide Gates’ successor, former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Willie Williams, with a force level more appropriate for community policing.

In truth, Daryl Gates was always right about one thing: Community policing isn’t cheap, and it can’t be done unless there are enough officers to spread around. The only problem with Gates is that one had the sense that even if he had enough officers, community policing was not what he had in mind.

Chief Williams, by contrast, has said repeatedly that community policing is, in part, a state of mind. The officer has to think of the community not as alien occupied territory but as a home base with the citizens as allies. But Williams will be at a severe disadvantage if he does not get 1,000 new officers. He will not, and of course should not, say that he cannot implement the new philosophy without that force increase; that might be read as heavy-handed blackmail. But Los Angeles owes it to Williams to help him get off on the right foot by approving N.

Williams, in an interview to be published Sunday in The Times’ Opinion section, says: “We can make it work (if N fails) but it’s going to be more difficult . . . . We’re still going to move ahead in community policing . . . . But in terms of the increased visibility, that’s going to be very difficult to do without lessening the services and the message I get right now is that people want more service, not less.”

That is indeed the message. Guns are a street epidemic in Los Angeles; people have reason to want more policing. Rarely do voters so clearly have destiny in their own hands. They can make their communities and their city safer. They can make the LAPD better. They can give Chief Williams the chance to do great things. All they have to do is vote yes on N.