Riordan Takes First Step to Beef Up LAPD

Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan proposed Wednesday that the city move ahead with the first phase of his police buildup plan and immediately beef up the number of officers on patrol by nearly 50% through a relatively painless budgeting maneuver.

Riordan forwarded the implementation plan to the City Council--where it drew praise as a way of quickly putting police on the street but also skepticism from lawmakers who wondered whether the city can find the money to sustain the buildup.

Wednesday’s proposal is Riordan’s first formal step toward implementing Project Safety Los Angeles. In that sweeping initiative, announced last month, the mayor called for expanding the police force by more than one-third with the addition of 2,855 officers over five years. He also proposed putting more officers on the street immediately by paying them to work overtime and by moving desk officers into the field.

The implementation plan presented Wednesday addresses only the short-term issue of expanding the street patrols, and only for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends July 1. It also calls for immediate expenditures to buy 353 more police cars and to improve the city’s antiquated Emergency Operations Center.

“This is fine, but the question is, can we sustain it?” said City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter. “I don’t know the answer to that and I keep waiting for the mayor and the chief of police to tell me.

“We are going to have to find a long-term, reliable source of funds and no one has come up with that yet,” she said.

The money to put more police on the street over the next seven months would come, ironically, from savings the Police Department has accrued in the last year because it was understaffed.

The department was budgeted for 7,900 officers, but because of a citywide hiring freeze, the force lagged well below that. There are currently only 7,649 officers in the LAPD, which will save the department $17.4 million this fiscal year.

Riordan has proposed using most of that money to pay police officers to work more overtime. Another $1 million would go to hire 80 civilians to take over desk jobs so that uniformed officers could return to street duty.

Together, those changes would put the equivalent of 501 additional patrol officers on duty during any 24-hour period. They would join the 1,050 already on the streets, for a net increase of 48%. On any given day, most of the LAPD’s officers are off duty, on special assignments or in court, drastically reducing the number available for routine patrols.

But the money for the extra overtime and for hiring civilians will dry up by July 1, when the LAPD is projected to reach its full staffing. The city recently lifted the hiring freeze on the Police Department and plans to hire 275 new officers by summer.

“We still don’t know how we are going to do this and sustain all the other things that the mayor wants to do,” said another council member. The lawmaker, who asked not to be named, said the council is likely to support the plan, but with trepidation over how Riordan will continue to fund the buildup.

Riordan said he is prepared to deliver those plans to the City Council early in 1994.

“Let’s think positively right now,” he urged. “We are going to add about 70% more, visible police on the streets in the next six months.

“It shows a very good, strong, positive start,” Riordan added. “Then in the next four years, we are going to raise the money, simply because we have to.”

The mayor has previously said he hopes to get much of the money for the buildup from the city’s semiautonomous Harbor, Airport and Water and Power departments.

City budget analysts have said the cost will range from $90 million in the first full year of the buildup to $300 million in the fifth year. Meanwhile, the city must contend with a projected $150-million deficit next year.

Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the council’s Budget and Finance Committee, and other lawmakers have expressed skepticism that Riordan can carry off the massive shift without raising taxes.

But sources familiar with Riordan’s strategy said he hopes that the significant gains in community safety accompanying the buildup will help him rally public support for the dramatic moves he will have to make to raise the money.

Also included in the Riordan proposal are several other public safety expenditures, including:

* $6 million from the recently approved extension of the half-cent sales tax to pay for 353 police cars. Many officers complain that cruisers are so antiquated now that they often start patrols late, while they wait for a functioning car.

* $4.5 million to pay overtime still owed to officers for extra duty around the time of the verdicts in the federal trial of the officers accused of beating Rodney G. King.

* $400,000 to install video simulation equipment used in firearms training.

* $300,000 to separate police from other functions at the city’s Emergency Operations Center. The Webster Commission reported after last year’s riots that police and other city officials were crowded into one room, causing confusion in the city’s emergency command center.