SYLMAR : Foothill Officers Study New Approach

Eager to move forward after the Rodney G. King beating and its aftershocks crippled morale, dozens of officers from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Foothill Division went back to class this week to study a new approach to policing.

The new strategy, called problem-oriented policing, was described by San Diego Police Sgt. Guy Swanger.

According to Swanger, problem-oriented policing is similar to community policing. Officers are assigned a particular beat and encouraged to get to know people in community.

The difference, according to Swanger, is that in problem-oriented policing, the emphasis is shifted from the number of arrests and reaction time to 911 calls and placed on the ability to accurately identify the cause of a crime.

“Officers must learn to be proactive, rather than reactive,” Swanger said.

Officers are trained to spend more time with each call, instead of rushing to be ready for the next one. By looking for patterns in crimes such as location, time and type and analyzing them, an officer can eventually identify a cause, rather than simply making similar arrests time after time.

Sometimes an officer is able to refer the problem to another agency, which is often better equipped than the police to tackle the problem, he said.

To illustrate the strategy, Swanger described an abandoned house in San Diego that had been the site of frequent drug activity, vandalism and violence. An officer assigned to the neighborhood noticed several 911 calls in connection with the house and found out who the owner was. An elderly woman had paid contractors to repair a cracked foundation, but they fled with her money before doing any work, and she had to move out. The officer contacted the local housing authority, which helped the woman secure repairs and move back into her house.

Swanger, who has taken his message to more than 100 police departments, spoke at Mission College on Thursday at the invitation of Foothill’s commanding officer, Gabe Ornelas. Ornelas described the training session as a necessary first step on the way to restoring public faith in the division.

“We are in a crisis,” he said. “We can’t do business as usual, or we’ll die on the vine.”