U.S. Gives LAPD $48 Million to Add 643 Officers : Police: The money--from ’94 crime bill--covers three years. All the recruits will be assigned to field duty, chief says.

The Clinton Administration, delivering some badly needed good news for the Los Angeles Police Department, announced Thursday that it was awarding the city more than $48 million, enough to pay for 643 new police officers.

Noting that the grant represents the largest single federal funding award in LAPD history, Mayor Richard Riordan said the city competed with more than 1,000 municipalities for a chunk of the funds set aside in 1994’s sweeping federal anti-crime legislation.

The fact that the city got the full amount it asked for demonstrates the Administration’s “confidence in the city and the Police Department,” Riordan said.

“I am very pleased that the Clinton Administration recognizes the vital importance of community policing and supports our efforts to put more police on the streets,” Riordan said during a news conference called hastily at the Westchester police training academy to announce the grant.

The funds were something for the LAPD to celebrate after nearly two weeks of fallout from former Detective Mark Fuhrman’s explosive remarks that surfaced during the O.J. Simpson murder trial. His interviews with an aspiring screenwriter, which included racist and sexist remarks and tales of beating suspects and manufacturing evidence, have rocked the department, which is still trying to recover from the videotaped 1991 police beating of black motorist Rodney G. King.

The federal aid helps Riordan’s efforts to realize his campaign promise to add almost 3,000 officers to the force by the end of his first term, despite the city’s stubborn financial problems.

The grant will provide $75,000 per officer over a three-year period, after which the city will need to find other ways to keep them on the payroll. The city also must provide $30 million of its own money, but Riordan said that amount already has been budgeted.

Earlier, the Justice Department awarded the city $18.3 million for modernization projects that will free officers for field duty. Additionally, a private group, the Mayor’s Alliance for a Safer Los Angeles, is nearing its $15-million fund-raising goal for computers in all stations and patrol cars.

Riordan was joined at the news conference by Police Chief Willie L. Williams, Councilwomen Laura Chick and Ruth Galanter and Police Commissioner Edith Perez.

Williams said all the new officers will be assigned to field duties. The first recruits to be hired under the grant will enter the academy in October, and the department expects to hire 90 recruits each month after that.

The program will allow for “more preventative patrol time,” Williams said. “The officers can stop and have interactions with people” and get to know the communities better, rather than spending all their time “responding to 911 calls” as they are often forced to do now because of staffing shortages.