A Structured Approach Lowers the Crime...

Culver City is surrounded by five of Los Angeles’ busiest police divisions, plus Inglewood, and they’ve all had explosions of crime. And yet we’ve had less crime for 14 out of the last 15 years--44% less violent crime last year than we had in 1980. We’re probably the only city in the county that’s had that kind of an impact on crime.

Crime’s not that difficult. You need swiftness of apprehension and certainty of punishment. The only thing that is marginally effective in addition to that is a juvenile-diversion program. We identify at-risk kids and pay for outreach programs for them--counseling, camping programs; we get them very much involved with our organization.

The police officers personally follow up to ensure that the kids are doing homework, that the family’s getting along. We’ve had occasions to get the mother into Alcoholics Anonymous or get the father a job. We’ve dealt with a little under 100 kids in the last couple of years, and only one of them screwed up.

About 30% of all crime in our state is committed by juveniles; in our city it’s only 13%. So we think this is a good program.

Most departments are reactive. We’re proactive. We identify patterns, we identify criminals, we just do a lot of things that impact crime. Everything we do is structured around being efficient and effective and impacting crime.

For example, we do not go along with plea bargains. We make probable-cause arrests. We have extremely well-trained policemen. We have well-educated policemen. We have 200 people--117 sworn officers--and 137 of them have college degrees.

We do statistical analysis so that we distribute people on the basis of the best bang for the buck. We have 71% of our people in the field, either directly or indirectly doing field activities; we have an absolute minimum number of people doing administrative background things. And so our response time, 24 hours, seven days a week, on all calls, was 11 minutes last year, and in crimes in progress or emergency calls, three minutes. We’re able to maximize what we do.

On “three strikes, you’re out,” I think that by the time a guy’s committed 700 or 800 crimes and has been convicted for the third time, society is much better off without him and it’s a lot cheaper to put him in jail.

They get convicted for one crime, but that’s probably on the tail end of 80 crimes where they didn’t get caught. So “three strikes” would be a substantial impact on crime in a very positive way--if, in fact, we don’t let the lawyers take it over and disregard it by not alleging the prior offenses in court. I think you’ll find out that all the complaints about “three strikes” are from the usual suspects--all lawyers. The lawyers cannot make money from criminals who are in jail.

You cannot create procedural rules that hide perfectly reliable evidence from the jury so that criminals go free and then applaud those decisions as though we had done something worthwhile. This is crazy.

Because of procedural restraints, it’s difficult for us to inquire within a community about a person we think is suspicious. On those people we do stop, we can’t do certain searches like we used to--pat-downs and that sort of thing, searches of vehicles of people in suspicious circumstances. So people slide through the cracks that way.

Do we have systems that encourage people to be criminals? Yes.

For example, in the past when a juvenile was arrested, we’d sit down and talk to this kid, find out what would be the best way to see that he didn’t continue being a criminal. About 18 years ago, the courts created a rule that said we could no longer do this. Now, when any kid is arrested, you’ve got to treat him like a criminal, you’ve got to give him Miranda rights, the relationship has to be adversarial, you’ve got to give him a public defender to counsel him.

By the time they’ve been arrested four or five or six times, they know there are no penalties attached to crime because they’ve been able to successfully navigate away from going to jail or the California Youth Authority or anything else, and this adversarial system has educated young people to be criminals. So now we have thousands and thousands of hard-core criminals that our system has created.

If we can convict the guy, 64% of the convicted felons get probation. It’s crazy. People like me get so upset with probation and parole because a good burglar, looking to pay for his habit, will hit three to five times a day, three to five times a week. So if you get him off the street, that’s between 600 and 1,400 burglaries that don’t happen in and around your jurisdiction.

We don’t have the death penalty in this state--if you don’t use it, you don’t have it. The most severe penalty in California is life in prison without possibility of parole. If you get that, you’ll only serve 5 1/2 years.

That’s why guys like me go crazy, and why I say guys like me have got to have an opportunity to speak out, because these people that the media interview on crime don’t know what they’re talking about.