Community Policing Is a Two-Way Street : LAPD: A partnership has to be built across a wide breach--and not just with friendly citizens or by cultivating snitches.

Mark Kroeker, LAPD deputy chief, last Wednesday announced department plans to implement community policing where it matters most--in South-Central Los Angeles. Thirty experienced officers, Kroeker said, would work with community representatives to try to solve the area’s crime problems. Let’s hope it’s as promising as it sounds, and not more of the same in a different guise.

More than 20 years ago, the LAPD tried something similar called the Basic Car Plan. Ed Davis, then chief, wanted to provide good police service, too. Davis was bombastic enough to be dubbed “Crazy Ed” by his critics, but he was extremely smart, and understood, 20 years before it would again become fashionable, the importance of community policing.

Davis knew that impersonal, faceless police officers in patrol cars, without roots or ties or personal relationships in a community, were an ineffective method of policing that made the officer an alien among the people he was supposed to be serving. So he began the Basic Car Plan, assigning officers to specific geographic locations and instructing them to meet with advisory committees made up of representatives of the neighborhood they were policing--essentially the plan that Kroeker is now proposing.

The officers were to find out people’s concerns about crime and then address them. The concept was inspired, and had its spirit been fully implemented, it might have led to an astounding turnabout in the LAPD; the fires of April, 1992, might have never been ignited.

But the crucial step of addressing the lethal problems between the LAPD and the young men of the black and Chicano communities was never taken. Of course those communities were concerned with crime, were in fact obsessed with crime, and any moves by the LAPD to fight it more effectively were welcome. But of equal if not greater obsession to the people of areas like South-Central was the whole issue of police shootings, police brutality and police harassment, which many of the LAPD officers involved with the program went out of their way to avoid addressing at the meetings. The “code of silence,” the “brotherhood in blue,” discouraged that.

As a result, the meetings were attended by those already friendly to the department; those who weren’t stayed home.

“We told them what we wanted, rather than finding out what they wanted,” said David Dotson, former assistant chief.

Being unwilling to take that extra step and truly deal with those issues would come back to haunt the LAPD. Crime prevention is only one element of community policing; equally important is being responsive to legitimate community complaints about brutality and harassment. Was that not, after all, what the Christopher Commission report was all about?

Moreover, the line between assisting the police in catching criminals and informing on your neighbor is a fine one. Nurturing relationships and developing trust so that the community willingly cooperates in an investigation of the latest drive-by shooting is the essence of policing--as opposed to developing a community of snitches, a nightmarish specter in a free society. And it was snitches that some of the officers during the community meetings were asking the residents to become.

One of the “major tests” that Kroeker laid out for the department’s plan is whether it produces “a drop in the number of murders in South Bureau next year.” It’s a laudable, ambitious goal. It would have been even more comforting had the area’s councilman, Mark Ridley-Thomas, been included in the planning. Community policing has to be “a partnership between the community and the police, and that’s yet to happen,” Ridley-Thomas said after Kroeker’s announcement. “There’s far too little attention given to that.”

It would also have been better had Kroeker announced unequivocally that, along with lowering the murder rate, his second major and equally important goal was to reduce the decades-long hatred between the LAPD and the young men of South-Central, and not just to work with merchants and the middle class. Let’s hope that Kroeker and Chief Willie Williams understand that rather than repeat the mistakes of the past.