LAPD at Crossroads of Old, New : Transition: Ranks torn between aggressive past, diplomatic present.

A battle is raging for the soul of the Los Angeles Police Department.

To understand the forces tearing at the LAPD, just listen to Richard Eide, a tall, tough-talking captain who stands astride two contradictory world views.

One minute the man in charge of patrol operations in the Van Nuys Division complains about do-gooders trying to defang his department. “You can’t beat all your warriors into social workers,” he grumbles as his men stand in stoic ranks taking a vulgar verbal bashing from youths demonstrating against Proposition 187.

The next, he warns that while cops on the beat will tell you the reason they joined was to help old ladies across the street, they’re fudging the truth. In fact, he says with the blunt candor of an ex-Air Force officer, many joined up to “drive fast, carry a gun and deploy on somebody.”

His ambivalence about what a police officer should be says more about the LAPD than aberrations such as the Rodney G. King beating, the O.J. Simpson trial or even the controversy over Chief Willie L. Williams’ travels. It describes the resentment and loss of confidence that afflicts a department that once set the standard for big city policing but is today the target of jokes and conspiracy theories.

Recognizing the need to let down its guard and show a human face in the wake of the blows it has received over the past four years, the LAPD allowed a Times reporter and photographer to spend three months in the Van Nuys Division. Granted unprecedented access to the closed world of behind-the-scenes policing, the journalists attended roll call, rode unsupervised with cops on the beat, went inside the yellow tape at homicide scenes, and sat in on high-level strategy sessions where Eide struggled to balance crime fighting with new political realities.

What emerged was a street-level view of a department in wrenching transition, still tethered to its past, uncertain of its future and struggling against itself to be reborn.

It is a department that understands it can no longer tell the public what kind of policing it needs but is still wary of asking its officers to be diplomats as much as centurions.

Every day, tensions between the old and the new are exposed on the streets and in the struggles of the men and women who people and run the world-famous LAPD.

Some can’t or won’t cope--they leave for easier lives at small suburban departments where they get time for lunch and where the residents wave at them with all five fingers, not just one. Some stay and rail against a department that insists on diversity in the ranks and better treatment of crime-plagued neighborhoods. Some adapt, blending tough old habits with newer sensitivities their bosses and the times demand.

Some simply endure, dealing in their own way with the horrors and challenges of homicides, child abuse, chicanery and petty street crime that are the officer’s lot in life.

Once L.A.’s sleepy back yard, the population in Van Nuys has swelled to 294,000 with the increasing urbanization of the San Fernando Valley. The once-exclusively white community, where Don Drysdale perfected his fastball and future drag racer Don (The Snake) Prudhomme cruised Bob’s Big Boy, has become as diverse as the rest of the city. About 38,000 immigrants arrived between 1987 and 1990, many of them settling into one of the rows of barracks-like apartment buildings near Van Nuys Boulevard.

Crime soared too. In 1963, there were no murders. In 1992, a record 42. Since 1975, there has been a 254% increase in robberies and a 354% increase in assaults.

By 1994, Van Nuys had become the city’s third-busiest of 18 police divisions. Its Scientific Unit alone performs 140 analyses a week, 70% for cocaine. Police resources had not kept pace with the workload. The number of detectives was virtually unchanged in 20 years. As for patrol cops in black-and-whites, Eide complained so often that he was overmatched in the war on crime that colleagues warned him he was jeopardizing his career.

Located on a tree-lined plaza, the station house is a three-story block of bland gray cement where elevators break down regularly, the computers are so antiquated that they lost five months of domestic violence records when the hard drive crashed on a donated processor, and where the cops post slogans like, “Some people are alive only because it is against the law to kill them.”

Because Van Nuys is also the Valley headquarters, inside its cramped offices all ranks rub elbows, from rookies up through Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy.

But the two men with the greatest impact on day-to-day policing have been Cmdr. James McMurray, Eide’s boss, a diffident, professorial man, and Eide, who is the reverse. The man in charge of patrol functions, Eide combines a Patton-like bluster--”I will cut your heart out,” he thunders at his advisers one day to warn them of the penalty for violating one of his rules--with a Dale Carnegie penchant for posting slogans and essays reminding cops they really have a good job.

Eide’s ideal police officer is himself. “I can go from Dirty Harry to Andy Griffith in a second. How do you bottle that? Not everybody has that capability. A lot of officers we have today don’t have what it takes to be community police officers.”

Buttoned down and standing straight as a flagpole, Eide cuts a formidable figure. And he is not afraid to go chin-to-chin with the ranks below him or the brass above.

He sparked a controversy one day when he sent a cop home for two days for getting in an accident during a pursuit. In the old days, the man might have been praised for putting his life in danger to catch a fleeing crook. But Eide lectured: “This is not camp. This is not summer school. This is a big business.”

The comment stung the ranks like a rubber bullet.

“To hear we’re running the department like a business is a major shock,” said patrol cop Robert Deamer, 33. “Police work in L.A. I consider a calling. If you just want a job, you can go to a small town.”

Answering calls for service from the public was an important element of the new community policing program, which aimed at forming a partnership between the police and the community. Eide made it a top priority when he came to Van Nuys in 1993.

On the bulletin board across from the watch commander’s office, the charts showed Van Nuys’ response time was consistently around 7 1/2 minutes.

“What the hell can I say?” Eide congratulated his assistants one day. “We’ve got the best response time in the city.”

They didn’t post the time on non-emergency calls, however, which, citywide, ran to an embarrassing 47 minutes.

Near the end of the year, after Eide’s increasingly public badgering, the brass finally began shipping in new officers.

No matter how many new cops they got, however, they always needed more because they were losing more than 400 annually departmentwide. Each costs $90,000 to train. Too often, those leaving were the best cops on watch, the ones Eide called his “pots of gold.”

Once, the LAPD was considered by many to be the finest police force in the nation. Now, it is becoming a training ground for places like Olympia, Wash., Simi Valley and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, where starting salaries are $441 a month more.

The reason: declining morale, which hasn’t responded much to slogans posted on the wall or pro-police rallies at City Hall. In Van Nuys, morale was lowest among the patrol cops, the front-line troops in the war on crime.

In 1994, 10 of them resigned to go to departments with better pay, better living conditions and better equipment, according to an LAPD report. That was more than any other division in the department. “She is looking forward to working in a clean station with clean locker rooms and not having to deal with our filthy environment,” the report said of one officer in her separation interview.

Former Police Commissioner Gary Greenebaum says that when people ask him why morale at the LAPD is so bad, he responds: “If you go to work in conditions that are borderline inhumane, how are you going to feel? Equipment is old. The joke is, as we move into the 21st Century, the department will move into the 20th.”

Perhaps the most biting symbol of police angst is the man on Hazeltine Avenue who salutes the men and women in blue when they drive by his house. His garden hose in hand, his middle finger upraised, he leaves little doubt how he feels about the LAPD. To some beat cops, he represents all of Los Angeles.

Linda Gotham, a 35-year-old cop who gobbles ulcer medication like candy, says she faces angry citizens every day. “I don’t respond fast enough. They put us down. ‘You’re no good because of this or that.’ ”

Joanne Needham, 35, a motorcycle officer, gets tired of people screaming abuse when she stops them for a ticket. “You get more and more people who want to fight into jail,” she said. She had to put a woman in a wrist lock who started scuffling with her when she asked for her driver’s license.

Though the Christopher Commission warned against the danger of developing an “us versus them” attitude, Gotham says it’s difficult not to. “It’s hard to talk to a grocery clerk, because they look at things through rose-colored glasses. I see reality.

“I catch myself at the mall, or Disneyland,” she says. “I stop and remind myself, not everybody is a bad guy. And not everybody hates the police.”

What makes it worse, she says, is a perceived attitude in management that “patrol officers are just cannon fodder, expendable. We’re the ones going home with cuts and bruises every day.”

It is a common complaint. The old-timers say it wasn’t that way in the old days, when the street cops were considered the pride of the department because they were the ones most residents met every day. Now, they repeat stories in roll call about the supervisor who supposedly said it wouldn’t be fair for him to get in a battle of wits with a patrol officer because he would be fighting an unarmed man.

Many outsiders consider the hostility the public shows police these days to be payment for the LAPD’s past belief in its own infallibility. Privately, Eide admits there is truth in this.

“Do [cops] have to be a little more careful?” Eide asked one day. “Yeah. But some of it we’ve brought on ourselves by being jerks in the last 30 years.”

Some of the older cops are giving up this arrogance only grudgingly. They complain when the bosses order them to be more polite and use less profanity in dealing with the public.

One morning, a cop orders a man to move his car from in front of a doughnut shop. The man doesn’t mouth off, but he doesn’t exactly hustle to move the car, and he shakes his head as he goes.

“Don’t you look at me like that,” the officer says. “You see? We don’t get any respect. In the old days, I’m not saying I would have jumped on him. But if he looks at me like that once, he wouldn’t do it twice.”

One sergeant spoke admiringly of the way the LAPD solved domestic disputes in the old days. He said his dad couldn’t control his older brother so he called the LAPD. Two huge, blonde cops showed up and listened to the parent. They nodded, went back in the older boy’s bedroom and thumped him.

Today, they could never get away with administering curbside justice like that. The fear of being sued has become a major factor in the morale crisis. Between 1980 and 1992, the amount the city paid to settle police misconduct lawsuits increased more than 20 times, to $19.7 million. In the last two years, settlements declined, but the climate of fear remains.

Cops say they are not going after crooks the way they once did.

“Everyone’s laying off,” said Rich Groller, a veteran street cop with an apocalyptic view. “Not that police don’t care. But [the brass is] not stressing making a lot of arrests. You’re not aggressively challenging people as much. Sergeants don’t want complaints. The only ones losing are the citizens. We’re living on the laurels of the old LAPD. Once they find out we’re not around anymore, they’re going to start taking over.”

Dan Drulias, a Medal of Valor winner who once crawled into a burning building in Hollywood to rescue several people, said he used to run 150 license plates a night through the computers when he was out looking for bad guys, which cops call “hunting elephants.” Now, he does a 10th as many.

“If we stop a kid who’s black, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘You only stopped me because I’m black.’ Then they try suing us,” said Kim Peterson, Drulias’ partner. “What message do you send to police? I lose my house because I stop this kid. Human nature tells you not to do it. If we verbally try to bash them and scare the parents, they want to make personnel complaints. Why am I going to go out of my way to do something when I may lose everything? I’ve worked hard for everything I have.”

Many street cops believe that three years of community policing has only aggravated the problem.

What the brass is harping on now is response time and citations, said Russ Carr, a much-admired veteran street cop.

“There should be a little more emphasis on crime fighting,” he said. “I don’t like what the department has turned into. I don’t think we’ll ever recover” from the crisis King inspired.

When Alan Hamilton came on the force, the philosophy was, “How many gangsters did you book?” Now, he says, many officers “don’t do any proactive work at all.”

There are some chilling implications. “The least you do, the least you see, the better off you are,” a cop sitting in court whispered one morning. “You didn’t hear it from me, but some people feel the later you get to a call, the better off you are.”

This was a disgruntled cop. But even Eide, while insisting most cops are still fighting crime, notes that a reason for the loss of so many cops to other departments is the “idea that the LAPD has lost it. That it’s not really a police department anymore.”

But it’s too broad a statement to say nobody is aggressively going after bad guys. Detective Greg Demirjian, 46, nicknamed “the Smurf” by gang members in Venice, still hunts big game.

He was shot at three times last year during a successful pursuit of armed robbers who hit eight catering trucks over a two-month period. One bullet crashed through the window of his unmarked car a foot above his head. Alone, he got out of his car and chased three suspects.

“I figured somebody would get killed” if he didn’t catch them, Demirjian said in explaining his persistence.

“He did good,” said his boss, Mel Arnold. But Arnold noted that the problem with that kind of proactive work is “there is more opportunity for personal conflict and the use of force. These days, use of force and personnel complaints are frowned upon.”

Demirjian says he is not alone in doing aggressive police work. “My experience is, the guys doing it are the guys who don’t want to promote,” he said.

Cops like Demirjian say there is a danger that in trying to screen out officers with thuggish streaks, the LAPD could become a department filled with what some call “radio drones.”

“You can slide through your whole career and promote up without doing any proactive police work in the street,” Demirjian says.

Greenebaum, the former police commissioner, is skeptical of cops who say nobody is doing aggressive police work. When he asks if that means them, they always say no, they are still doing their job. “I trust them more than they do themselves,” he said.

“What I hear them say is we’re trying to make them social workers. We’re not. . . . It’s about supporting them and wanting them and needing them to change.”

The new political realities were starkly revealed in a closed-door meeting in Eide’s office one day. He gathered his aides together to find a solution to a wave of street robberies. Fear was running high in Panorama City, a gritty patchwork of post-war bungalows and overcrowded stucco apartment buildings whose territory was carved up by five different street gangs.

Nobody had been killed, but it was just a matter of time. Several elderly people had been roughed up by the gun-toting gangsters.

In the old days, Eide would have sent in undercover teams to roust the bad guys until the suspects were caught. But this was post-Rodney King. Sending in hard-nosed “Special Problems Units” wouldn’t fly in an era when the public want cops out writing tickets and waving at children, not sneaking around in the bushes. It smacked too much of the old LAPD--flying batons, chokeholds, the whole steely-eyed, predatory image.

Somehow, they had to go after the robbers while playing the “community policing” game.

One sergeant, his fear outweighing his sense of responsibility, timidly recommended doing nothing at all.

Then came the perfect political solution. Send in a team, but give it a new name--”Crime Impact Team.” No matter that the team would be doing the same work as the old SPU teams.

This time, everything worked. The team discovered warrants for 1,000 parolees in Van Nuys. State parole officials didn’t have time to arrest them, so the Crime Impact Team went after them.

As a result, the robbery problem dried up. “You see kids playing outside again,” said Sgt. Donald Kiefer, who ran the team for several months.

Eide basked in the thanks of a grateful community, which never learned how much their salvation depended on politics.

Since this story was reported, several of the people named were given new jobs. McMurray will soon be transferring to headquarters Downtown. Patrol Officer Rich Groller was promoted to sergeant and transferred to the Newton Division. Russ Carr made sergeant and went to Pacific Division. Alan Hamilton became a detective in Hollywood Division.

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Behind the Badge

From the Christopher Commission to the O.J. Simpson trial, the Los Angeles Police Department is in the line of fire as critics challenge its competence, and its integrity. Times journalists John Johnson and Joel Lugavere spent three months late last year in the Van Nuys Division, one of the city’s busiest, to find how well police officers serve and protect as the department struggles to redefine itself.

SUNDAY: Shedding the past for an uncertain future

MONDAY: A crusader for crime’s smallest victims

TUESDAY: Diversity or division--the new struggle for equality in blue

WEDNESDAY: Homicide--a killing season

THURSDAY: The thinning blue line and the resource crisis

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Sinking Morale Makes an Impact

The LAPD lost 482 officers last year. The trend in resignations among those with less than 20 years experience is even more troubling, quadrupling from 32 four years ago to 143 last year. Of the 77 officers who moved on to other departments, 10 were from Van Nuys, the most of any division. Average sick days are also on the rise.

CIVILIAN COMPLAINTS

Percentage change in initial personnel complaints against LAPD officers*: Unbecoming Conduct: -15% Unauthorized Force: -19% Discourtesy: 19% Gender Bias: 82% Improper Remarks: 63% * These are total complaints; does not reflect department’s evaluation of the merit of the complaint.

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SICK DAYS

Average number of sick days per sworn LAPD officer 1987: 56 1988: 60 1989: 55 1990: 53 1991: 56 1992: 69 1993: 71 ****

OVERTIME HOURS

Average overtime worked per sworn LAPD officer. Totals for straight overtime and 1.5 time. 1987: 195 1988: 209 1989: 210 1990: 195 1991: 166 1992: 236 1993: 202 ****

SWORN PERSONNEL INCREASE/DECREASE

Figures for the entire LAPD:

1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 Academy Graduates 342 614 717 893 21 0 138 N/A Total Separations 275 366 428 323 387 459 410 482 Resignations* N/A N/A N/A N/A 32 42 99 143

* Officers with less than 20 years experience

Source: LAPD