Rapid Police Recruitment Questioned : City Hall: Councilwoman Chick raises concern that fast pace could detract from goals of eliminating bias and improving training. She will seek funding postponement.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick on Monday raised new questions about the city’s warp-speed recruitment of police officers, saying the goal of having a force of almost 10,000 officers by 1997--the main plank of the mayor’s campaign and Administration--could detract from the LAPD’s other goals of stamping out bias and providing top-notch training.

Chick, who has previously been a key supporter of Mayor Richard Riordan’s “Project Safety L.A.” plan to expand the force, said during a special council committee hearing on LAPD problems that she fears the department is trying to do too much too fast. She plans to ask the council today to postpone for two weeks a $750,000 expenditure for police recruitment until the Public Safety Committee she chairs can better evaluate how the money would be spent.

“Have we put this Police Department in an overload situation?” Chick asked during the hearing into recruitment and training practices of the embattled department. “Are we starting to sacrifice quality for quantity?”

The joint session of the council’s public safety and personnel committees was called in response to the recent release of taped comments by former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman. After the meeting, Chick said she believes the numbers outlined in the public safety plan approved two years ago should be scaled back, though she would not say by how much.

“It’s hard to know what the magic number is,” she said. “It’s not the number that’s magic. What’s magic is that we are hiring and training and making sure the existing officers are the best we can get. That’s what’s going to make this city safer.”

Riordan spokeswoman Noelia Rodriguez said that the mayor remains committed to his timetable for expanding the police force and that the Administration has found no evidence of the problems Chick mentioned Monday, such as overcrowding at the Police Academy or poor training of recruits.

“Recruits still have to pass the tests--written, oral, psychological and physical agility--and they have to go through the academy,” Rodriguez said. “The bottom line is that the recruits that are going through the academy are getting the full training. There are not any shortcuts being taken to get people there quicker.”

During his campaign for mayor, Riordan vowed not to seek reelection if he failed to hire 3,000 additional police officers during his first term. Once in office, he unveiled a scaled-back version of that promise, outlining a plan to increase the force from 7,600 sworn officers in 1993 to 9,700 in 1997.

By October, 1994, attrition had left the ambitious plan woefully behind schedule, and the mayor upped pressure on Police Chief Willie L. Williams to meet the goals outlined in Project Safety L.A.

Monday, council members Jackie Goldberg and Michael Feuer echoed Chick’s concerns, questioning police brass about whether academy classrooms are overcrowded and whether there are enough field training officers to match up with the probationers being churned out at the rate of 90 per month.

“Everybody wants to hurry,” Goldberg said later. “But you don’t want to hurry so much that in the end you say, ‘Oh my God, where did we get these people?’ ”

Other officials expressed confidence Monday about the pace of the expansion.

“We’re running at peak capacity, but I think it’s doable,” Police Commission Vice President Art Mattox said.

Councilman Nate Holden, who sits on the Public Safety Committee with Chick and Feuer, said speedy recruitment is the only way to increase the diversity of the department, another hot topic that dominated Monday’s hearing.

Earlier Monday, a coalition of women’s groups and two women LAPD officers called on the city to hire and promote more women and to wipe out gender bias within the department. Sexist officers, while a minority, nonetheless “have a chokehold on the informal culture of the LAPD,” said Penny Harrington, director of the National Center for Women and Policing and the former police chief of Portland, Ore.

Harrington and others in her group called for a well-funded task force to speed implementation of the reforms recommended in 1991 by the Christopher Commission, and insisted that the City Council immediately authorize an anti-discrimination unit the Police Commission has been requesting for a year. “The LAPD still is a good old boys club. . . . The guys at the top aren’t doing the job” of seeing that women are treated fairly, said LAPD Officer Kelly Shea.

Later, Goldberg reiterated the officers’ complaints about promotion of women, noting that in fiscal 1994-95, no women were promoted to captain, commander or deputy chief, and only three were named lieutenants. During the same period, 25 men made lieutenant and 21 achieved higher ranks. In all, only 187 of the 1,020 people promoted that year were women.

Cmdr. Keith Bushey tried to reassure Goldberg. “If you could see the way these females are bubbling up in the organization. There’s a big wave coming.”

“The females who have been in the department 10 or 15 years don’t think they’re bubbling,” Goldberg responded.

“All I can say,” Bushey added, “is some people bubble and some don’t.”

Police Chief Williams told the council members that the department is trying to recruit more women and minorities by diversifying its sources of applicants. Instead of concentrating on military bases, he said, recruiters now use television and newspaper advertisements and visit colleges as well.