In South-Central, Concerns Rise on Community Policing

In the same South-Central Los Angeles churches and community centers where residents are trying to craft a new brand of policing, a small but growing opposition movement also is taking hold, raising troubling questions for the most important experiment in the modern history of the Los Angeles Police Department.

At the Mount Tabor Baptist Church recently, 40 residents groused about how the department is selecting community representatives and about the perception that it is dictating the terms of community-based policing rather than allowing residents to control it. At the Christian Community Church a few weeks later, the crowd was slightly smaller, but the complaints were much the same.

“We don’t need no captain, no deputy chief, no mayor to come out here and tell us what we need,” said Walter Richardson, an energetic, wiry man who is the president of his local block club. “What we need is for the Police Department to listen to us.”

The disaffected residents are neither radical nor, for the most part, anti-police. Many are solid, middle-class citizens with deep roots in their communities and a commitment to improving them. Some volunteer their time at their local police stations. In short, they are precisely the people the Police Department needs to make community-based policing a success.

And yet, they are restless and concerned, many of them convinced that the LAPD is bent on building a booster organization rather than a vehicle for the community to exercise control over its police. They also fear that a network of civilian advisory boards--which the department is now building as a mainstay of the community policing effort--will have no real power to direct the way police patrol their neighborhoods. Several City Council members express similar concerns.

As the battle lines take shape, a pair of dynamic leaders--Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker and longtime activist Anthony Thigpenn--have squared off, each leading the charge for his own view of how community policing should best be organized and directed.

Thigpenn is an articulate, 40-year-old community organizer who heads a group called AGENDA--short for Action for Grassroots Empowerment & Neighborhood Development Alternatives. One of the founders of the Coalition Against Police Abuse and a plaintiff in a landmark suit against police spying, Thigpenn has emerged as a leading critic of the way that community-based policing is unfolding in South Bureau. The process is being closely watched in that area because of the long history of troubled relations between residents and the LAPD.

“I think the current way that the program is being implemented, people are being set up for a huge disappointment,” Thigpenn said recently. “Either it will be very superficial . . . or it will collapse.”

Kroeker, a 49-year-old deputy chief whose devotion to community policing has made him the Police Department’s most visible proponent of the concept, can barely hide his exasperation with comments such as that. Nevertheless, he’s determined to avoid a fight.

“It’s important for me to keep my own personal chagrin out of the dialogue,” said Kroeker. But he insists that the criticism is unfair.

No one, Kroeker said, is being denied the chance to participate in community-based policing. No one, in his view, has any reason to be concerned. “The process, the membership, the access--all of it is open to anyone,” he said. To those who feel left out, he proposed: “Call me. I’ll make sure that you are included.”

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At the Christian Community Church, several dozen residents stood shoulder to shoulder, bowed their heads and joined in a prayer to “make this the best community possible.”

The prayer over, residents turned to Thigpenn and Ng’ethe Maina, another community organizer with AGENDA. The two of them stood before the group, dressed casually and armed with a stack of hand-drawn charts, and launched their explanation of why they believe that the LAPD’s approach to community policing falls short. Their first point: The police advisory boards intended to represent residents are fundamentally flawed because police are choosing the members.

“How can the boards represent the community if the LAPD picks the members of the boards?” asked Jeannette Hughes, president of the 91st, 92nd and 93rd Street block clubs. “Some of these people are good people, but they don’t represent the community, they represent the Police Department.”

Behind the group, five uniformed Los Angeles police officers interrupted them and politely defended the department’s efforts to date. They explained that senior lead officers from South Bureau’s four police stations have the job of finding block captains for every block of South-Central Los Angeles and members for dozens of the advisory boards. “There is a tremendous push on to locate block club captains,” Officer Zim Williams told the residents at the church. “But there is no intent to leave a certain segment of the community out.”

Beyond the question of who gets picked, there is a more fundamental disagreement lurking in the shadows of community policing: How much authority should the advisory boards have?

Under the department model, the answer to that question is relatively little. The advisory boards are conceived as just that--advisory. They are to suggest problem areas for police to concentrate their efforts on, and they are to supply police with information that can help the department attack crime. In return, the department says it will arm advisory board members with crime-fighting information to help them help themselves.

As Officer Williams described it: “It is our desire to teach you guys how to deal with the small things, so that we can get back to arresting criminals.”

Compare that to Laura Smith’s vision of community policing.

“We know what we want, and we know what works. We live here,” said Smith, who founded her local block club in 1982 because drug dealing in her neighborhood was driving her to distraction. “So we should have the authority to tell them what to do. After all, they work for us.”

Police officials say it’s not that simple, and shudder at the prospect of dozens of advisory boards doling out conflicting orders to officers in different parts of the city. They say they have no intention of giving community boards the power to determine police tactics, to discipline officers or to dictate policies such as how police should treat suspects whom they stop.

But, critics ask, if the boards lack that authority, why bother with them at all?

“We firmly know that the community should not micro-manage, but we believe that it needs to be involved at all levels,” said Thigpenn. “That includes tactics, misconduct and brutality.”

Views such as that one reflect a basic philosophical difference with the department about what community policing is and what it is intended to achieve. Partly in response, the LAPD has turned to a popular tool of the marketing world, and is now meeting with focus groups across the city to get their takes on community policing.

But the disagreements also grow out of something much simpler and much more volatile, something that no focus group could sway: The city’s balance of power, particularly between the City Council and the Police Department.

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This is not the first time that the council and the department, two of the city’s central political institutions, have struggled for political power at each other’s expense. In fact, the current battle for control over community policing has summoned forth echoes of a similar contest in the 1970s.

In those days, community organizations under the wing of the department sprouted up throughout the city. Neighborhood Watch groups, police advisory boards and block clubs gained in number and stature. Within a few years of the program’s birth, the Police Department had thousands of citizens meeting with its officers on a regular basis, building what amounted to its own political base in the community.

Police Chief Ed Davis, now retired, oversaw that burgeoning group of volunteers. It was not long before he began to sense the discomfort that it was causing among political leaders in Los Angeles.

“There was never any intent on my part to pick up political power with these groups,” he said. “That happened, but that was not my goal.”

Zev Yaroslavsky, who joined the City Council in 1976, accepts Davis’ contention that community policing was not intended as a way to expand the Police Department’s political influence. But, like Davis, he says it eventually did just that.

When a hot issue was before the City Council, the department’s lead officers in community policing--nicknamed “crows,” after the police acronym for “community relations officers”--would sometimes encourage their neighborhood groups to call their council members and express their views. Council members would be deluged with calls supporting budget increases for more vice officers or patrol cars, Yaroslavsky recalled.

“It wasn’t always that effective, at least in my part of town,” said Yaroslavsky, who represents the Westside. “But they had this cadre of supporters, people who would do whatever their CROs asked them to. . . . That helped make the police a powerful political force.”

Davis conceived his model, known as “team policing,” in 1969, when he was seeking to become chief. The city was still haunted by the 1965 Watts riots, tension between the Police Department and minority communities was high, and morale within the LAPD was low.

Today, a different riot haunts the LAPD, but it similarly affects every aspect of the organization. Racial tension is high, officer morale low, some say lower than at any point since the late 1960s.

Davis proposed his version of community policing as a way of mending the relationship between the Police Department and the city it served. The idea then, as now, was that better relations would help police to solve crime and residents to recapture a sense of safety and well-being in their neighborhoods. The method then, as now, was to involve the Police Department in a broader range of services, encouraging its officers to attack crime in part by linking social service organizations and striving to improve the quality of life in the neighborhoods they patrol.

And now, as in Davis’ era, some contend that if the Police Department succeeds in building widespread community support and in delivering services to residents, it might weaken the City Council’s importance to its constituents.

“It’s extremely political,” said Thigpenn, whose office is lined with butcher-block paper charts that trace the history of community organization and grass-roots political organizing. “There’s this huge apparatus that’s being set up by this important institution, the Los Angeles Police Department. That affects power relations between the City Council, the community and the department.”

As they make their case for a new approach to community policing, Thigpenn and his group are closely allied with Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. He shares their sense of the program’s political implications.

“With this program, the department can potentially endear a network of community residents and cause them to be more closely aligned with the political interests of the department,” said Ridley-Thomas, a leading critic of how the LAPD is proceeding with community-based policing. “You think they would resist the temptation of exploiting that relationship they are building on an issue that is important to them? I can tell you, they already are using that relationship.”

Ridley-Thomas and other LAPD critics, such as Councilman Richard Alarcon, have proposed at least one concrete change in the department’s community policing program. They want their staffs to be represented on the community police advisory boards. Police Chief Willie L. Williams, whose top advisers served under Davis and worry about the encroachment of politics into policing, has so far refused, although he also has said he ultimately will defer to the council’s wishes.

Davis said he sympathizes with Williams’ predicament.

“If a politician starts getting involved, you know where that leads,” said Davis. “If a politician is in Neighborhood Watch, he wants the glory of it. The whole idea is to build the propinquity between a police officer and the people he serves, not between a police officer and his councilman.”

But the fear is not just of politics twisting policing. It is equally about police exerting inappropriate political influence.

“When the police tell a council member that he or his staff is not welcome at a meeting, they better have a reason,” Yaroslavsky said. “I can’t conceive of a good one.”

Nor can Ridley-Thomas. He has appeared at public forums to raise his concerns and has clashed with the department over who deserves credit for certain projects in his district.

“This is about control,” Ridley-Thomas said. “About who will control this process. . . . If, in fact, community-based policing is to be the critical element in causing this department to be reformed as well as transformed, it would seem to me that this department has a long way to go.”

Those in the small band seeking to alter the course of the LAPD’s grand experiment also see a tough road ahead.

On a recent Tuesday evening, a few of AGENDA’s die-hard supporters gathered in its tidy Vermont Avenue offices to brainstorm about community policing and to plot the organization’s next move.

Thigpenn, Maina and another AGENDA organizer, Adrianne Shropshire, sketched out a plan of action, soliciting suggestions from a number of concerned community members and asking them to rate the effectiveness of various ideas. Together, they discussed tactics for persuading the LAPD to change its approach, starting with a request that the department convene a mass meeting where residents could air their concerns and suggest changes.

“We have to make them see that they have something to gain from this,” said Aladean Markham, a block club member from the Baldwin Vista area. “They get a better attitude from the community, and that could help them do their jobs. It could even save lives.”

A dozen people, gathered in a semicircle on folding chairs, nodded in agreement. But they admitted that they are not sure whether they can get the Police Department to join them.

At one point, Maina sketched a slope to represent the hill that organizers must climb to make their case. Now, he said, the organizing efforts had pushed the campaign about a third of the way up. But there was a long way to go.

“Questions?” he asked.

Markham spoke up: “I think you should make the hill steeper.”