One Man’s Quest to Dissolve L.A.’s Split Personality

Two objects rest on the circular conference table in Mark A. Kroeker’s Van Nuys office. One is the Mini World Atlas. The other is one of those little kaleidoscope-like gizmos with a prism that refracts an image a dozen different ways.

They are there for a purpose. Mark Kroeker, deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department’s vast San Fernando Valley Bureau, frequently refers to them when encountering visitors with a Valley-centric point of view.

Sometimes, these people don’t even want to admit that they live in Los Angeles.

“That little S-word comes up sometimes,” Kroeker explains.

The S-word?

“Secession.”

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Really?

“Oh, I don’t think they’re really serious,” he adds. “They blow off steam because the reality is that people at City Hall do sometimes forget about the Valley.”

Such empathetic comments have helped make Mark Kroeker an unusually popular man in the Valley. He’s a tall, rangy cop who took over the 220-square-mile Valley Bureau more than two years ago, just a matter of days after four Valley police officers were caught on videotape beating a black man. Before that, Kroeker commanded the LAPD’s South Bureau, an oddly shaped territory that includes such disparate areas as San Pedro, South-Central and Baldwin Hills.

So Kroeker, with 28 years with the LAPD, knows the city from end to end. And more than most people, Kroeker understands the city’s split personality. L.A., the thinking goes, is really more like two mutually antagonistic realms: the City and the Valley.

This is, of course, a broad-brush generality, at once factual and fallacious. South of the mountains, people look through their prism and see the Valley as home to unsophisticated, penny-pinching, mostly white provincials who fled to the suburbs in fear of the city’s urban troubles and don’t appreciate their own good fortune. Up in Riordan Country, Valleyites see the City as a enormous sponge that unfairly sucks up hard-earned tax dollars and offers little in return.

Such sentiments, one reason for the movement to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District, inspired Valleyites to organize secession campaigns in the early 1960s, the mid-1970s and mid-1980s. Few things frost Valleyites more than this fact: In the under-policed city of Los Angeles, where there are only 2.2 police officers for every 1,000 residents, the Valley has only half as many police--just 1.1 per 1,000. (And that doesn’t include Chief Willie L. Williams, who recently moved to Woodland Hills.)

Valleyites can tell Kroeker that they’re not getting their fair share of police, but Kroeker will only listen politely and disagree. Kroeker says he is much more bothered by, say, the Community Redevelopment Agency’s reluctance to do more to reverse the Valley’s urban decay than by police deployment. To even suggest that the allocation of police resources should be based on population misses the point, Kroeker says.

“This is the one thing I feel most comfortable with. The whole dispensation of this city’s police is equally anorexic. The job of the police is to spread the hurt,” Kroeker says.

You put the cops where the criminals and victims are, Kroeker argues. He offers, by way of another prism, this telling statistic: In the city’s Rampart Division, that violent precinct west of downtown, there were 138 homicides recorded in 1992. By contrast, there were 144 homicides in the five divisions that make up the Valley Bureau.

Luckily for the Valley, violent crimes aren’t the only factors considered in police deployment.

Kroeker, who was raised in Africa and Europe as the son of Mennonite missionaries, seems to come to his magnanimous perspective naturally. To some, his reputation is that of a Boy Scout, too goody-two-shoes to be true.

When he hears the “S-word,” he says, “I preach to ‘em. I tell them what happens in Boyle Heights and San Pedro affects you here in the Valley. . . . This is the City of Angels. Let’s act like it.”

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Rather than talk about L.A.’s split personality, Kroeker suggests, it makes more sense to see Los Angeles as a metropolis with a thousand different neighborhoods. If law-abiding neighbors pitch in to help each other, the neighborhoods, by extension, pull together as well. Under Kroeker’s direction, the Valley Bureau has dramatically expanded its Neighborhood Watch and community-policing programs. The programs aren’t yet what they should be, Kroeker says, but it’s a good start.

Last year, even though population increased and police staffing dwindled, the Valley experienced a decline in most major crimes.

Amen.