Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT LAW ENFORCEMENT AND A DETERIORATING CITY : ‘Officers Are Concerned About Not Getting in Trouble’

This is a city where law-abiding taxpayers no longer feel safe; they don’t feel safe going to Hollywood, they don’t feel safe going shopping. You’ve got big shopping centers spending all that extra money to have private security. People have to alarm their homes, their cars, they have to have personal protection, and now we have car-jacking. Look at the escalation of the criminal element that seems totally out of control. Los Angeles County is going to start releasing prisoners because we don’t have money to keep them in jail, and the taxpayer wants to know who’s protecting them. Who’s trying to provide a quality of life for them and their families?

When we talk about crime, to me, that is what is going to reflect a city’s attitude toward law-abiding people. When I see a pregnant lady at an ATM stabbed and killed or a senior citizen, purchasing gas in the middle of the afternoon, shot in a car-jacking, that rippling effect, affects the entire community. At one time, the San Fernando Valley was a nice bedroom community. It has become extremely violent--13,000 gang members.

The Police Department has been shrinking, year after year. They’ve passed mandated programs like domestic violence. Domestic violence is now a felony and we’re required to arrest the assailant. We have all the other social problems, plus these to deal with, with a continual shrinking force, and they keep passing law, after law, after law. Then we have police pursuits in which innocent victims, sometimes, are affected when a collision occurs. So now they put more restraint on the police pursuits, so the criminal says, I can rob the bank, I can kill people, get away and the cops are going to be the bad guys. The ultimate is when the officer doesn’t feel secure in doing his or her job. Arrest have plummeted, we find that officers are so concerned about not getting in trouble, not to get indicted, not to get a personnel complaint, not to get a civil-rights case filed against them, not to lose their home, so they run afraid to do their job. Until we establish a safe city, where you can run a business without being vandalized and victimized, where we don’t have to worry about a trial that’s going to explode into a riot, where your business may be burned or looted, until that day comes, we’re going to continue to decline in Los Angeles, and that tears me apart.

Then we have immigration; I have no problem with people coming here from all over the world, but what I do require or request is that they adapt to our way of life. It’s not a matter of racism or bigotry, it’s a matter of a lifestyle that we have come to enjoy in Los Angeles and the United States. When people used to go (through) Ellis Island, they’d learn the customs, they’d learn the language, they would assimilate. We have so many different people who don’t want to do that and we make it so easy for them not to do that. The rest of us sit here in amazement and ask why are things falling apart, why is it that the whole community is going through this continuing deterioration?

The city attorney needs to defend police officers. I’m not talking about an officer who is stealing or selling narcotics, I’m talking about an officer who uses force against an individual who is under arrest and who is combative. The law says that when you’re placed under arrest, you’re supposed to submit peacefully. Unfortunately, people don’t submit peacefully, then the officer has to resort to force. Because of that, lawsuits are being filed and the officer’s a bad guy. The city attorney walks away and says I’m not going to defend you because that’s not what we’re going to do in this case. So the Police Protective League, the union, has to dole out some money to defend the actions of the officers. When you start adding these issues together, it tells the cop on the beat, wait a minute, I show up for work, I do what I have to do, I get home safely, I get my retirement. So many of the younger officers are looking toward other cities to work, they don’t want to work in Los Angeles anymore.

When I came on the force, when you got involved in a situation, you would have backing from society. You don’t go out and brutalize people, but if you had to use force, you’d use it in a appropriate manner, and that’s the way it was. Look at the tools; the baton that was used on Rodney King is still used in the field today. I refer to that baton as a barbaric tool. In the cave man days, they beat their prey with a club. That is what you (officers) use with a combative suspect. There are non-lethal devices on the market, but it depends on how responsive the city is. I’m not talking about Chief (Willie) Williams or the police command staff, I’m talking about where the dollars come from. Every dollar we get comes from the City Council or the mayor. As we continue to decline, we’ll find another broken community. You can only have so many Bunker Hill projects, like they had in downtown L.A. Bunker Hill, with the (City Redevelopment Agency ) CRA, helped that area, but it’s done nothing for South-Central L.A. I used to work in South-Central L.A., those people need jobs, those people need some positive motivation. We don’t see that happening. People no longer have confidence in the Police Department or government to protect them, that’s why they went out and bought guns in the great numbers that they did. They fear for themselves and their families. I’ve been to businesses where these people have guns under the counter and they’re so frightened. They say, we know you officers would like to help us, but there’s not enough of you, because of that we have to protect ourselves, our families and our businesses. That’s just not a mentality of a civilized society.