Thin Blue Line Being Stretched Ever Thinner : Riordan Police Buildup Plan Will Help, but Not Much

Are you sitting down? If you aren’t, have a seat . . . please.

In 1991, the Police Foundation, a nationally recognized nonprofit group dedicated to improving law enforcement, had disturbing news for the city of Los Angeles. In a report entitled “The Big Six: Policing America’s Largest Cities,” there were statistics on the number of sworn personnel per square mile of each municipality.

Detroit had 37.2 officers per square mile. Philadelphia, with Willie L. Williams as chief at the time, had more than 50 officers per square mile. Chicago had nearly 55 officers. New York City was in a league of its own, with nearly 90 officers per square mile. Washington, D.C., wasn’t included in the report, but the nation’s capital had 70 local officers per square mile.

Los Angeles, all 465.9 square miles of it, had just 14.9 sworn officers per square mile.

So, how would Mayor Richard Riordan’s first-year proposed budget buildup affect that horribly skewed bar graph? If the City Council approves it? Not by much. It would bring the number up to 16.6 sworn officers per square mile.

It gets worse.

The term “sworn” can be quite misleading. It says nothing, in fact, about the number of uniformed and traffic officers who are actually out in cars or on motorcycles, patrolling our streets. They are far fewer in number. For the San Fernando Valley’s 2,812 street miles, for example, there are 1,047 uniformed and traffic officers. Factor in illnesses, injuries, vacations and the fact that folks work in shifts, not like 24-hour RoboCops, and that figure is reduced accordingly.

What does it finally mean? In the Foothill Division, for example, with its 60.8 square miles and 538 street miles, there might be four or five cars patrolling on the morning shift, which runs from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., according to Cmdr. John Moran, the assistant commanding officer for operations in the San Fernando Valley.

And, oh yes, a few of those wheezing, six-figure-mileage patrol cars might just stall at some inopportune moment. “If you have one car covering a couple of reporting districts, it doesn’t take long for one car to be out of service. Another car has to back up the other,” Moran says. “Pretty soon there is no integrity for staying on one’s beat.”

This is not the thin blue line. It’s the thin blue thread, and it is being pulled to the breaking point by new, labor-intensive demands.

One of those demands include gang bans in certain parts of town. These require police officers to maintain long lists of gang members who are to be arrested if found in certain parts of Panorama City, for example, even if they are only carrying a flashlight, screwdriver or a gang-emblem belt buckle.

Now, the Los Angeles city attorney has added that officers must arrest certain convicted prostitutes for probation violations if they are simply caught attracting traffic in certain locations at certain hours. Solicitation need not be proved. Both are incredibly labor-intensive in terms of the number of police needed to clear such areas.

Other crimes, for which Los Angeles is notorious, have not slackened either. There are more hit-and-run accidents here than any other part of the state, and California leads the nation in such accidents. They are difficult to solve, time-consuming and are handled, of course, by traffic officers.

The meaning of all this ought to be quite clear to Valley residents. Riordan’s proposed police buildup is but a first step (and a vital one) on a tall staircase toward the kind of police force that can implement a preventive, community-oriented policing program. It will take considerable time and expense to build the LAPD to a force befitting the city’s size and population.