L.A. Police Hampered by Woeful State of Equipment : Law enforcement: Short on high-tech help, officers spend as much as 40% of their time filling out paperwork. Modernization effort has been left largely to private donors.

In today’s Los Angeles Police Department, computers are scarce, cars are worn out, fingerprint equipment years out of date. Even the basic supplies that fortify almost all modern offices--fax machines and voice mail, for instance--are all but unheard-of at the LAPD, where officers are lucky to get their own phone and an electric typewriter.

The shortages are felt in ways large and small: When residents call for emergency assistance, they sometimes languish on hold with a recording, wasting precious minutes before even speaking to an operator. When officers in the San Fernando Valley recently sought a suspected child molester, their efforts were hampered by the lack of department computers. They had no central file to review for clues about similar crimes in other parts of the city.

And when, during the January earthquake, Police Department leaders scrambled to deploy officers throughout the city, they were hamstrung by their inability to determine instantly who was at work. Each of the LAPD’s divisions had to call in its roll, and the results had to be hand tabulated for department brass to assess how many people were missing.

Day in, day out, the dearth of computers and the shortage of other high-tech equipment forces LAPD officers to spend as much as 40% of their time filling out paperwork, a tedious task that takes them out of the field even as Police Chief Willie L. Williams and Mayor Richard Riordan are leading a push to put more police on the streets.

But while the Riordan Administration has aggressively secured city funds to hire new officers, the modernization of the LAPD has been largely left to private donors. Some have given large contributions and a massive private fund-raising effort is under way. Its goal, to raise $15 million, is thought to be the largest private campaign ever waged on behalf of a city police department.

City officials applaud those efforts as well as the drive to expand the Police Department. But some worry that the emphasis on adding officers has attracted such public attention that it has eclipsed the department’s woefully inadequate technological shortcomings.

As a result, Councilwoman Laura Chick has convened a special meeting of the council’s Public Safety Committee for today. Department leaders say they will concede during that session that the LAPD, which once considered itself the nation’s most modern police department, has fallen perilously behind the times.

“The processing of information in this department is woefully inefficient,” said Bill Russell, commanding officer of the LAPD’s support services bureau. “That affects every aspect of our operation.”

Chick agreed.

“We are in a dangerously pitiful position at this time,” she said. “I’ve been saying that the LAPD is still back in the days of Joe Friday and “Dragnet.” What would be more accurate is to say that we’re back in the days of Wyatt Earp.”

The problem, she and other leaders agree, has been years in the making. Tight budgets in the 1980s and early 1990s made deferring investment in new equipment a popular way of cutting costs--with some of the consequences only recently beginning to show.

Although a recent infusion of cars has begun to make things better, LAPD vehicles have been allowed to accumulate damage and mileage for years. Many in the Police Department’s stock of vehicles have more than 100,000 miles, and some are in notoriously bad shape.

Moreover, for the better part of a decade, modern equipment--cellular phones, computers, facsimile machines--has gone unpurchased as city leaders have devoted scarce resources to hiring officers or paying for other priorities. Other LAPD facilities such as its crime lab, which has come under intense scrutiny during the O.J. Simpson murder case, also have been allowed to fall behind the times. Today, the lab sends much of its work to outside companies for testing because its equipment is so out of date.

What little modern technology the department owns has mostly been donated, and one result is that computers in one division often do not communicate with those just a few miles away. That was evident earlier this year when LAPD officers were hunting for a suspected child molester in the San Fernando Valley. No single LAPD computerized database contains information on child molesters, so information collected in one division is not easily available to detectives in another.

“There’s no way to look for patterns across the city,” said one detective. “You have to rely on what people remember.”

Nowhere is the decay of the LAPD more evident than at its older police stations. In Hollywood, locker rooms are cramped, supplies are hard to come by and there’s barely breathing space between the desks.

“If I move my desk one inch forward, it blocks the captain’s door,” said Sgt. Harry Ryon, an LAPD veteran who works in Hollywood. “If I move it one inch back, I can’t get in behind it.”

Conditions are no better at the 77th Street Division, nestled in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles. That police station was in such disrepair a few years back that crews had to lop off the second story for fear that it would collapse. A stairway now leads from the first floor straight into a brick wall--officers call the steps the “stairs to nowhere.”

Plans already have been drafted for a new police station at 77th Street, but one delay has followed the next. “We’ll believe it when we see it,” grumbled one station sergeant.

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At the Newton Street station in the heart of the city, homicide detectives work cheek by jowl at long wooden tables. There is no privacy, no place to lock up reports, no place to confer privately with witnesses other than dingy interview rooms. Desks are so cramped that officers often put their telephones in wastepaper baskets.

It was a trip to Newton Street that helped persuade Bruce Karatz, chairman of Kaufman & Broad Home Corp., that private efforts were needed to help revive the LAPD.

“You go into Newton Division and you just can’t believe it,” said Karatz, who chairs the Mayor’s Alliance for a Safer L.A., the group spearheading fund raising for the Police Department. “In fact, the more I see of the LAPD, the more shocked I am.”

Under Karatz’s leadership, the alliance hopes to raise $15 million to donate to the department to jump-start modernization of the LAPD, starting with the purchase of a badly needed computer system. As it is, the LAPD has 721 computer terminals for roughly 10,000 employees. And even the ones it has are a mishmash of antiquated units, some of which cannot communicate with each other, rendering them all but useless for anything other than typing.

According to the alliance and Police Department analysts, the new computer system could have a more immediate impact on public safety than Riordan’s Police Department expansion plan. Department officials estimate that when they’re fully up and running, the computers could free up 640,000 hours of police officer time a year--the equivalent of 350 additional officers.

And with luck, Russell said, the new computers could be in place within a year. That alone could increase police officers’ productivity by as much as 25%, he said, increasing the number of arrests they can make and adding to the time that they can spend patrolling their communities and meeting with residents.

Already, modest improvements at stations have shown the potential benefits of equipment improvements. Sgt. Craig Crosby, a technologically minded supervisor at the West Valley station, designed a new-and-improved method for collecting fingerprints from a crime scene.

The new system simplifies labeling for fingerprint cards and makes tracking the status of fingerprints simpler. Neither is an especially dramatic innovation, but the system already has succeeded in doubling the capacity of the West Valley station for lifting and analyzing prints.

As they look to the future, LAPD officials hope first to bring their department into the modern age of technology and then to take advantage of even more advanced tools that could give police the edge on criminals.

Take, for instance, technology that might allow police to use remote control to disable fleeing vehicles. Police chases are expensive and dangerous, often ending in accidents that leave bystanders as well as police and suspects hurt.

“If we had a device that could disable cars, think of the advantages,” Russell said. “That’s the kind of innovation we need to be exploring.”

Chick, whose hearings this week will feature testimony from LAPD officials and representatives of various high-tech companies, said she hopes to hear ideas for short- and long-term improvements. And while she is confident that private industry can supply the department with the computers it needs to take the first step, she and other officials are concerned that many more advances are needed if the LAPD is to regain its lost stature as one of the nation’s most advanced police agencies.

“Part of educating the public is getting them to understand that just hiring more police is not the answer,” she said. “If we don’t make these improvements, these new officers will waste all their time filling out paperwork and looking for a place to sit.”