Mayor Expected to Scale Back LAPD Buildup

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s plan for increasing the police force, due out within days, is expected to fall considerably short of his campaign pledge to add 3,000 officers over four years.

Instead, it will advance a scaled-down scheme to triple the number of officers assigned to street patrol duty, knowledgeable sources said Thursday. They added that the plan--widely expected to offer a detailed blueprint of how Riordan would fulfill his central campaign promise--will not offer a full funding plan even for the more modest buildup.

The widely anticipated proposal is much less ambitious than the bold position the mayor staked out during the campaign--when he told voters he would not seek reelection if he failed to deliver a 40% expansion of the 7,600-officer LAPD in his first term.

The plan, which has been developed jointly by Police Chief Willie L. Williams and Riordan aides since the new mayor took office in July, is scheduled to be unveiled by the chief and Riordan at a major news conference Wednesday. Riordan’s spokeswoman, Annette Castro, said Thursday that the office would have no comment on any aspect of the plan until it is formally released.

City Hall sources and others who are familiar with the development of the plan say that Riordan advisers privately concede it may be almost impossible to reach the mayor’s promised 10,500-officer force by 1997. They cite the city’s deficit-ridden budget, obstacles to Riordan’s proposal to generate $120 million a year by leasing Los Angeles International Airport, limitations on training new officers, and a thorny labor dispute with disgruntled officers who say the top priority should be a raise for current LAPD members.

Sources said Riordan will not publicly abandon his goal of adding 3,000 officers overall, although he has long since stopped talking about it as he moves around the city. Instead, he has been emphasizing the plan to put more officers on patrol.

Tripling the department’s patrol force could be accomplished by expanding the overall force by as few as 1,000 to 1,200 officers, department sources said. The rest of the added patrols would come from reallocating existing officers.

The Riordan Administration contends that the mayor is “making tremendous progress toward a substantial increase in the total force, and putting cops on the streets, which is what people want,” said a source familiar with internal City Hall discussions.

Riordan has hinted at what is likely to come in some of his recent public statements. At a recent session with Downtown business leaders, the mayor said Williams has outlined some “very innovative ways . . . we can get significantly more police out on the street with relatively little money.”

“I mean within . . . the next year to year and a half we could as much as triple the number of police out on patrol, visibly on the street, if we can come up with the money,” Riordan said.

Rather than drafting his own plan for increasing the force by 3,000 officers, Riordan assigned the task to Williams--a move that one source said irritated some senior members of Williams’ command staff. Sources close the mayor, who is calling the proposed police buildup “Chief Williams’ plan,” insist it makes managerial sense to have the chief decide the best way to expand the department.

From the start, Williams expressed strong reservations about whether Riordan’s promise of a 10,500-officer force could be accomplished in four years. He warned against speeding up training to accommodate such a rapid influx of officers. mInstead, he is delivering a plan that police sources say will fulfill the spirit, if not the letter, of Riordan’s promise.

“The plan they’re working on is to triple the blue suits on the streets,” one source familiar with the plan said. “That way, Riordan can say he increased the visible street presence without Williams having to compromise the (LAPD) training.”

Sources say the proposal will attempt to achieve that by tripling the patrol force, partly through new hiring but also by funding the department’s overtime budget and by filling civilian vacancies within the department. Filling those vacancies frees up officers, who can then be put into patrol duties.

As of Thursday, the LAPD fielded a patrol force of 1,079 officers--not including traffic, narcotics, vice or other specialized units. Divided over shifts, that means that only about 350 to 370 uniformed officers patrol the streets of Los Angeles at any given time. Under the plan being developed, sources said, the LAPD would have about 3,000 patrol officers, with about 1,000 on duty at any given time.

While Williams has worked up the means to add officers to patrol, Riordan and his advisers have been struggling to identify the funding needed--which would require tens of millions of dollars initially and swell to hundreds of millions in three to four years, sources said.

The plan to be released next week is expected to include only a limited, one-year financing proposal, probably relying on the $17 million reserve Riordan added to the current budget and on other belt-tightening and redeployment measures in the Police Department and elsewhere.

Riordan’s campaign rhetoric asserted that the police buildup could be funded largely through streamlining the city bureaucracy. He often stated that the city could not afford new taxes.

But there is a growing awareness in his camp that in light of the looming $200-million budget deficit, some form of “revenue enhancement” is likely to be needed, even to reach the more modest goal of an expanded patrol force.

Among the new or increased fees that have been hotly debated internally are a surcharge on all car rentals in the city, a proposal that could generate millions of dollars; increases in city utility rates; an extension of state-approved transfers of Harbor Department money; a transfer of money from the possibly overfunded Department of Water and Power pension account, and use of new revenues from LAX.

Riordan aides insist that such steps would be taken only as a last resort. But Chief of Staff William McCarley and others acknowledge that all revenue sources are being considered.