Community at Heart of New LAPD Program : Safety: Neighborhood-based strategy announced at site where rioters routed police. Area has 750,000 residents.

Charged with fighting crime in one of the nation’s most violent areas, Los Angeles Police Deputy Chief Mark A. Kroeker on Wednesday unveiled the LAPD’s most ambitious effort to adopt a community-oriented style of policing.

Kroeker announced the change at the site of one of the LAPD’s most notorious failures, the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, where rioters overwhelmed the Police Department in the early stages of the 1992 unrest. Kroeker, a popular deputy chief whose community outreach efforts won him an intensely loyal following in the San Fernando Valley, called the intersection a symbol of negativity but vowed that the new policing effort will help erase that legacy.

“We’ve had so much negativity,” said Kroeker, who was transferred from the Valley to the LAPD’s South Bureau in November. “Now it’s time for some positivity.”

Under Kroeker’s approach, 30 experienced officers who previously responded to radio calls now are responsible for overseeing community policing in an area that has 750,000 residents and has broken its own homicide records in each of the past three years. The officers, formally known as “senior lead officers,” have all been assigned separate neighborhoods within the area, which extends from the Santa Monica Freeway to the southern edge of the city. Those officers are responsible for coordinating the department’s activities in their designated communities.

Working with the lead officers will be a network of civilian block captains and community representatives, whose responsibilities will be to inform the police of problems in their neighborhoods and to advise officers on how residents would like to see those problems solved.

The LAPD has dabbled with community-based policing for decades, and since the arrival of Police Chief Willie L. Williams in 1992 it has experimented with various programs in different parts of the city.

But Kroeker’s campaign is the broadest and in some ways the riskiest. It has the backing of Williams and many other city leaders, but they acknowledge that, at least in the short term, response time to emergency calls may increase--a potentially perilous problem in an area overwhelmed by emergencies.

“We’re concerned that the response time may go up a little bit,” Kroeker said. “We’ll be watching that closely.”

But Kroeker and other supporters of community-based policing believe the approach ultimately will reduce crime by involving citizens in the activities of the LAPD. Moreover, Kroeker said he thinks community-based policing also will cause complaints against officers to decline.

Residents who happened by the site of Wednesday’s news conference cheered many of Kroeker’s proposals, but their skepticism about the Police Department runs deep and their optimism is guarded.

“Trust has to be rebuilt, and that’s not going to be easy,” said Fernando Pullum, a resident who works at a local high school. “They have their work cut out.”

Georgiana Williams--whose son, Damian Monroe Williams, is in prison for the beating of trucker Reginald O. Denny and other people during the riots--lives just a block away from Florence and Normandie. She missed Kroeker’s announcement but said later that she hopes his community-based policing model succeeds.

“I’m sick and tired of young men being harassed,” she said. “You have to give the police the chance to do something else. You have no choice.”

A few residents also grumbled that Kroeker had failed to invite community residents to his news conference Wednesday. “I didn’t hear nothing about it,” one man shouted to Kroeker during the news conference. “Why not?”

City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, while endorsing many of Kroeker’s community-based policing suggestions, echoed that concern.

“To succeed, community-based policing has to be a partnership between the community and the police,” said Ridley-Thomas, who represents South-Central Los Angeles. “That has yet to happen. There’s far too little attention being given to that.”

Community-based policing is an approach to law enforcement that dates back decades. In fact, former LAPD Chief Ed Davis, who commanded the department during the 1970s, is considered one of the pioneers of the idea, under which officers work closely with community representatives, cultivate contacts among residents, walk foot patrols and solicit suggestions about how to better protect the community.

In contrast to the model of so-called professional policing, which stresses crime-fighting as the ultimate objective, community-based policing emphasizes crime prevention and service to the public.

Although the LAPD has practiced some elements of community-based policing at least since Davis implemented it in 1970, that approach to law enforcement fell increasingly out of favor under former Chief Daryl F. Gates, who struggled with budget cuts and who tended to favor specialized units.

The March 3, 1991, beating of Rodney G. King by Los Angeles police officers, however, forced the department into the most wrenching period of self-examination and change in its history. In the wake of that beating, the blue-ribbon Christopher Commission examined the LAPD in detail and produced a 228-page analysis of the department.

One of its many recommendations was that the LAPD aggressively embrace a new model of policing.

“Community-based policing would both increase the effectiveness of the police and diminish the tension between the public and the LAPD by eliminating the view of ‘the community as the enemy,’ ” the authors of that report concluded. “Although we recognize that the culture of an organization developed over many years cannot be changed by simple fiat, it is now time to develop programs to de-emphasize force and promote restraint, to foster within the LAPD a different attitude toward the population it serves and to assist the public to gain greater trust in the department.”

At Wednesday’s news conference, officers acknowledged that the relationship with the communities they serve frayed in recent years. But they predicted that the community-based policing model will gradually repair that damage.

“We’re here to say today that, as a community, we are all learning,” said Reggie Paige, one of the senior lead officers under the new program. “We have learned from our past mistakes. . . . We have to listen to the community.”

That sentiment was applauded by some longtime department critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which has endorsed community-based policing and urged the LAPD to move toward that goal. That organization’s Southern California director, Ramona Ripston, said the ACLU was “very enthusiastic about the idea” of community-based policing and was pleased that Kroeker was advancing the proposal.

Kroeker said the community-based policing model that he is implementing in South Bureau went into effect on Dec. 26 and will remain the guiding policy for his 1,200 officers for at least a year. At the end of that time, Kroeker said that he and his senior officers will review the program to determine whether it has proven itself.

In particular, Kroeker said he will focus on whether violent crime has decreased, whether response time is acceptable and whether personnel complaints have dropped. The deputy chief added that he expects the LAPD to conduct community surveys to determine how residents view the services they are receiving under the new program.

As South Bureau officers launched their new initiative, many acknowledged that any policing program for South-Central and Southwest Los Angeles must take special aim at the area’s murder rate. South Bureau logged 428 homicides during 1993, the highest number of any of the LAPD’s four geographic bureaus.

As a result, one of the major tests of the community-based policing program will be whether it can produce a drop in the number of murders in South Bureau next year, Kroeker said.

“We hope the people will be patient with us,” Kroeker said. “This is a long-term investment, long and deep in every neighborhood. . . . We have to reduce the violence, and we will.”