Board OKs Realignment of LAPD, Adds Car Patrols

The Los Angeles Police Commission on Tuesday approved an ambitious realignment of the Police Department that will redraw boundaries of the LAPD’s 18 divisions, add 16 cars to patrol areas across the city and pave the way for the eventual addition of two new police stations.

The commission’s unanimous vote ends a sometimes contentious debate in which some residents have complained about the shifting boundaries and their possible effect on police services. In addition, some City Council members have expressed concern about an aspect of the plan that will add six new basic police car areas to the San Fernando Valley while adding only two to the department’s West Bureau and four each to its South and Central bureaus.

In November, Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr. complained in a letter to Police Chief Willie L. Williams that his area was being slighted in favor of the Valley.

“After 20 years without such a realignment, I would think that the cars would be better suited where crime occurs,” Svorinich wrote. “The current draft of the department’s report, however, leads me to consider that other factors influenced the allocation of limited city resources.”

But LAPD Cmdr. Garrett Zimmon, who oversaw the realignment, said the decision to send more of the new cars to the Valley reflects the extraordinary growth in that area over the past two decades.

“In the past 20 years, the demographics and community sizes (throughout the city) have changed considerably, particularly in the San Fernando Valley,” Zimmon told police commissioners Tuesday.

The remapping plan represents a key element in the department’s efforts to reform itself into a more community-oriented style of policing. Backed by a federal grant, the LAPD intends to add a dozen so-called “basic car areas,” communities that are patrolled by a senior lead officer who is responsible for building ties to residents and neighborhood groups in his or her area.

Among the goals of the realignment are increasing the visibility of officers in the field and allowing senior lead officers to work as small and cohesive a community as possible.

In the process of remapping the entire city, Zimmon said police officials discovered that some of the LAPD’s areas are vastly overworked compared to others. Particularly overextended, he said, are some areas of the Valley and the Rampart police station, located at the city’s heart and home to some of its most volatile areas.

To lighten the load on the officers at the Rampart station, the realignment will carve out some of its area and will add patrol cars.

Sometime in the future, Zimmon added, the department will need to add two more police stations, one in the central Valley and another in the Mid-Wilshire area. Preliminary planning for those stations already is under way.

As news of the proposed realignment has reached community activists, some have been angered because they have felt that the process lacked sufficient community input. Commissioners chided the Police Department for that Tuesday, suggesting that officials take greater care in the future to involve community representatives in any large-scale undertakings such as redrawing police boundaries.

Williams acknowledged that the plan had caused “some significant concern in certain parts of the community,” but said he believed that the result was the best possible outcome.

“This is not a perfect plan, but there’s nothing more we can do,” he said. “With the resources we have, this is the best we can do.”