Officers Angry Over ACLU’s Residency Study : Police: Some say they live outside L.A. for the same reasons as millions of others. Councilman introduces motion urging city to lure back safety personnel.

Police officers fumed Tuesday about an American Civil Liberties Union report concluding that 83.1% of the city’s officers do not live in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, a City Council member introduced a motion urging the city to try to lure public safety workers into living inside the city limits.

“Police, Fire and safety departments’ personnel must be encouraged to live within Los Angeles,” Councilman Richard Alarcon said in a statement accompanying his motion. “By actually living within our city, there is a vested interest in seeing Los Angeles improve.”

Alarcon’s proposal, which he introduced in February but reintroduced Tuesday, came amid an angry eruption from many police officers about the report, which the ACLU of Southern California released at a news conference Tuesday. The report, officers said, unfairly suggests that police have to live in the communities they patrol in order to care about them.

“That’s just not true,” said one Rampart Division officer who was infuriated by the report. “It’s just the ACLU taking another cheap shot at the Police Department.”

Other police officers, while acknowledging that they have chosen to live outside the city limits of Los Angeles, said they made that decision for the same reasons that millions of other citizens have: better schools, better property values and safer neighborhoods. Several complained bitterly--but anonymously--that the ACLU was insinuating that they had done something wrong.

In his only public comments about the ACLU report, Police Chief Willie L. Williams was more tempered, saying that he had not had a chance to read the document but that he disagreed with the suggestion that officers need to live in the city where they work to fully serve it.

“Our officers have a strong attachment to the communities they serve regardless of where they live,” said Williams, one of few high-ranking LAPD leaders who lives inside the city limits. “Many of the men and women who are on our department were born and raised here. . . . There’s a strong anchor between the employees in this organization and the people they serve.”

The ACLU of Southern California found that the vast majority of police officers live outside the city and that many are concentrated in white, suburban areas such as the Santa Clarita Valley and communities such as Simi Valley. That city is home to 293 LAPD officers, more than the number of officers who live in the area patrolled by the LAPD’s Central Bureau.

The ACLU’s findings are based on ZIP code records provided by the LAPD last year. The department did not turn over officers’ names or street addresses.

“Most of our police force is composed of suburbanites who do not vote in local elections or use city services, who do not send their children to our schools and who often live in predominantly white neighborhoods,” Ramona Ripston, executive director of the Southern California ACLU, said in a statement.

“If we hope to improve relations between the LAPD and city residents, if we truly want community-based policing to work, the city and the LAPD need to work together to implement the recommendations of this report,” she said.

Among its recommendations, the ACLU proposed that the city work with lenders to offer police officers low- or no-interest loans to purchase homes inside the city limits. The report also suggested offering rent subsidies.

Several officers suggested that the report’s authors were hypocritical and demanded that ACLU officials disclose their own residences. Responding to those charges, Allan Parachini, the author of the ACLU report, released residential information about the ACLU staff showing that most of the organization’s staffers live in the city.

According to Parachini, 69% of the ACLU’s 32-member staff lives in Los Angeles, even though the Southern California ACLU covers an area from San Luis Obispo to San Diego County.

“Many of our staffers have families with young children. . . . They know exactly the challenges that are faced by young police officers and other young families, but they’ve chosen to live in Los Angeles,” Parachini said.