Antiquated Equipment Hinders LAPD

In the Los Angeles Police Department of legend, officers work with crisp efficiency--patrolling city streets in gleaming black and white vehicles, barking orders on state-of-the-art communications gear, interviewing suspects in station houses that are clean and well-equipped.

As with most legends, that one bears almost no resemblance to the truth. Today’s LAPD is beset by decay, its 7,600 officers handicapped by dilapidated police stations and broken-down cars.

Tales of equipment breakdowns abound.

One Devonshire Division police officer tells of being forced to abandon his pursuit of a rape suspect because the brakes failed in his car. Several San Fernando Valley patrolmen recall spending more than an hour trying to call in a search warrant because they had no cellular phone and no neighbor would let them in the front door. Narcotics investigators say they have been forced to postpone operations because they have to borrow sophisticated cameras from the Drug Enforcement Administration. Officers in one South-Central Los Angeles station cite incident after incident in which their handcuffs have jammed, a frightening occurrence at a time when police are deeply troubled by the prospect of being ambushed.

“It’s getting real rough out there,” one Newton Division officer complained to Police Commission President Gary Greenebaum during a recent roll call. “This is dangerous.”

That sentiment is echoed up and down the department ranks, from new patrol officers to Chief Willie L. Williams. Their consensus: The LAPD, once considered the nation’s best-equipped police force, is now badly out of date and getting worse.

“It’s bad,” Williams said in an interview last week. “If you were to ask me to give an overall evaluation of our equipment, I’d have to say it’s poor to super poor.”

The state of the LAPD’s equipment has contributed to dismal morale among the rank and file and has sent many officers packing in search of more modern police forces. Most discouragingly, the department’s declining infrastructure has raised questions about whether the police buildup plan advocated by Williams and Mayor Richard Riordan can accomplish its objectives.

Although Riordan has called for improvements in LAPD equipment, his campaign pledge was to increase the size of the department. Many officers worry that he is not as interested in equipping the current force. And without investment in new equipment, those officers say, the department is unprepared to absorb thousands of new hires.

“It’s a sad situation,” said Detective Lou Koven, a 20-year veteran who works in the department’s missing-persons section. “It’s gotten to the point where we don’t expect to get anything from the city--ever.”

The decline, longtime LAPD observers say, has become particularly acute during the past few years, but its roots reach back into the 1970s. In 1973, the department’s share of the city budget was about 35%, compared to just over 25% this year. Although the size of the force has increased over the same period, politicians have made ends meet by putting off scheduled improvements in LAPD equipment and station houses.

Two police stations, those at 77th Street and Newton, are so dilapidated that within the ranks at least they have come to symbolize the department’s decline. Newton and 77th Street are in the city’s urban center, and they are among the busiest police stations in the city.

Both were built in the mid-1920s, and officials say they held up well for decades. In recent years, however, additional officers and the wear and tear of 24-hour-a-day operations have left the stations shabby.

At 77th Street, 300 male and female officers share a single bathroom, roll calls are delivered in a trailer and employees have to eat lunch at their desks or outside the station because it has no lunchroom. Plaster falls from the walls in some rooms, the paint is peeling in others, roaches periodically make runs on the station’s jail cells and thousands of files are stored in steel containers outside because there is no room in the building.

The most striking thing is the fate of the station’s second floor: It no longer exists. Inspectors determined a few years ago that it was about to collapse, so it was condemned and lopped off the top of the building.

At one end of the station, a staircase, dubbed the “stairway to nowhere,” still leads upward, ending in a wall. Its only use these days is as a gag. When new arrivals ask senior officers where to look for supplies, veterans occasionally send them hunting for the second floor.

The situation is better--but not by much--at Newton. That station’s detectives work elbow to elbow on wooden tables without so much as drawers, filling out their reports by hand because not enough computers are available.

Upstairs, officers used to have a small room with cots so they could catch a nap between working a night shift and having to appear in court. A few years back, that space was commandeered for telephone switching equipment. Today, the only sleeping space is in a dingy basement room, where a single mattress lies on the floor, surrounded by cardboard boxes of files.

The problems at Newton and 77th Street are well known throughout the LAPD. A bond measure approved in 1989 was intended to pay for improving those two stations, along with other improvements. But setback after setback has delayed progress. Five years later, neither station has broken ground.

“The condition of this building is abominable,” said Capt. Larry R. Goebel, commanding officer at 77th Street. “There is not a more demanding place for a police officer to work, certainly not in this city and probably in the country. To ask them to work with these handicaps of facility and equipment is asking an awful lot.”

Senior department officials say the list of equipment needs is almost endless. Budget officers have not even bothered to tally up how much it would cost to modernize the entire department. Al Beuerlein, the LAPD’s top financial officer, calls that “an academic exercise,” given how little the city has been willing to spend on equipment and facility improvements.

Even the recent expansion plan prepared by Williams and his senior staff--a far-reaching document whose preparation consumed so much time and energy that some LAPD leaders dubbed it the “Manhattan Project”--does not analyze the full costs for modernizing the department’s equipment and police stations. Williams said no precise figures are available, but he estimates that it would take “hundreds of millions of dollars” to bring the department’s equipment and facilities up to date and to keep them that way.

The first priority, most rank-and-file officers agree, ought to be the department’s aging fleet of vehicles.

Many police cars have more than 100,000 miles on them--departmentwide, the average is about 90,000 miles--and they break down with increasing frequency. When the rare new car does come in, rank-and-file officers say, it usually goes to a commander.

As a result of the vehicle shortage, officers in almost every one of the LAPD’s 18 geographic divisions are forced to stand in line for cars. The department has so few working vehicles that one shift cannot hit the streets until the previous one returns.

And even those cars that are deemed fit for service often have more than their share of problems. One detective says the Wilshire Division had a car that for eight or nine months was so cobbled together that the driver could watch the roadway through a crack between the door and the car frame.

Detectives muddled through with that car, but sometimes the equipment failures are more dangerous. In the Valley last fall, three LAPD vehicles took off in pursuit of a suspect. The man was apprehended, but it was a good thing there were three cars on the chase: The brakes in one car failed, while the engine stalled in another. The officers in the lone surviving car had to make the arrest themselves, without backup.

Until recently, the LAPD at least had a small fleet of replacement vehicles that it put on the street as other cars were totaled or fell apart. The last replacement ran out this fall. “By last count,” Williams said last week, “I had no new cars left, literally none.”

Department officials credit their maintenance crews with keeping the ramshackle car fleet running, but the shortage has raised troubling questions about the department’s ability to respond to emergencies.

When the recent fire erupted in the hills above Malibu, the LAPD’s West Valley Area went on tactical alert. At first, there were enough cars to accommodate the officers who were sent to lend assistance at the scene. But had the alert been maintained into the night watch, officials say, it would have created a problem: There were no more cars in which to send out more officers.

Sometimes the situation can get downright embarrassing. Last month, Riordan was participating in a weekend bicycle ride for charity. One of his police escorts was in an LAPD patrol car, which was assigned to tail the mayor slowly. But the car had about 150,000 miles on it, and it stalled every few minutes. Embarrassed officers were forced to repeatedly apologize to the bike riders.

Although officers gripe most angrily about the state of their cars, other equipment is similarly outdated. Officers use aging radios and other antiquated communications gear at a time when even small police departments issue cellular phones. Helicopters, an LAPD innovation that speeds response in a sprawling city, have been allowed to remain in service after their recommended life span because there is no money for replacements. Much paperwork is done by hand, and the computers that are available are old, forcing officers to spend hours preparing reports that are done much more quickly in most departments.

Detectives who might be able to link more crimes if they could cross-check information in a central database instead are often forced to rely on memory and the experience of their peers.

“We’re totally unable to handle the caseload,” said Koven, the missing-persons detective. “That’s because of the equipment.”

A group of Valley business leaders recently donated computers and other equipment to the LAPD’s West Valley police station after Councilwoman Laura Chick called attention to that station’s inadequacies. Officers in other parts of the city have not been so lucky.

“We just don’t have a lot of computer businesses in this area that we can call on for help,” said Goebel, the commanding officer at 77th Street. “So we make do.”

The shortage of computers creates problems all the way up the LAPD chain of command. Top-ranking officials cannot simply call up information about how many officers they have on patrol or how many crimes their officers are combatting.

“I can’t turn around to a laptop or go out in the office and punch some keys and get an immediate update on a shift or . . . crime,” Williams said. “I’ve got to get a group of people to tabulate that. And if that’s a problem for the chief of police, by the time it gets down to the rank and file, it’s a major problem.”

Williams, along with Commission President Greenebaum, pledged to lobby for new equipment for the LAPD, a mission they say is as important to public safety as it is to officers. And both men warn that the mayor’s police buildup plan will fail unless there are better cars, computers, police stations and the like to absorb the expected influx of new officers.

“If you hire 3,000 new police officers, and they’re all out in the parking lot, waiting for a car that works, you haven’t accomplished anything,” Greenebaum said. “I consider it my responsibility to see that that does not happen.”

But until those officials and others deliver on those promises, officers say they will remain skeptical. They have been promised new police cars for years. They were told 77th Street and Newton would be replaced after voters passed the 1989 bond issue. They have heard discussions for half a decade about the city’s need for a 19th and 20th police station.

And yet, every day they clamber into aging vehicles, line up for roll call in trailers, and fill out reports by hand--just as they have for years.

“The officers have a right to see results. . . . The public has the right to see results,” Williams said. “Until they see results, I as chief and others are going to have to live with criticism.”