LAPD Attrition May Pit Mayor Against Chief

A newly intensified battle over Los Angeles Police Department attrition is being quietly waged at City Hall, where it threatens to pit Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Willie L. Williams in a new round of conflict while providing fodder for what could be a bitter standoff over the city’s police contract later this year.

According to sources familiar with the issue, Riordan staffers, top LAPD officials and leaders of the city’s police union have split over how serious the attrition problem is and what needs to be done about it. Although the internal dispute has eluded public notice so far, some of the participants say tensions are building, with Riordan aides and LAPD officials staking out opposing views. The city’s police union, meanwhile, is attempting to use the issue as an argument for pay hikes.

“The rank and file is upset,” said Cliff Ruff, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the labor organization that represents police officers. “They’re expecting to be treated fairly. If they’re not, there will be trouble.”

The debate has played out in recent weeks during a series of closed-door meetings among top city officials. At its core is a pair of questions: Why are police officers leaving the LAPD for jobs in other cities, and what, if anything, can be done to stop them?

Yet beneath those questions are a host of politically charged theories being hashed out by the city’s Attrition Task Force. That high-level group of city officials and business and community leaders was created to study the tide of departing cops, who are leaving at a rate of nearly 500 per year.

Most of those are retirements, which the city has little power to control, and some are officers who have been fired, injured or even killed. But 147 cops with less than 10 years on the job resigned their LAPD positions in 1994. Many went on to other jobs in law enforcement. Each departed with training and expertise paid for by Los Angeles taxpayers, training that their new employers got for free.

Led by Police Commissioner Art Mattox, the mayor and City Council last week attempted to stem the flow: Council members approved a motion that would require Los Angeles to be reimbursed whenever an officer with less than five years training left to join another Police Department. Few think that will solve the attrition problem, but almost all agree it will provide some respite.

Still, the larger issue remains: How can the LAPD hold onto its talent in the face of plummeting morale and dissatisfaction with wages and benefits? And how much is it worth to the city to hold onto those cops?

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For months, Riordan administration officials fretted about the implications of attrition, which also threatens to undermine the mayor’s campaign promise of expanding the LAPD by 3,000 officers in four years. But now, emboldened by new insights into the problem and faced with proposals that could cost tens of millions of dollars to fix it, the administration is shifting ground. Riordan aides are now arguing that attrition may not be as serious as it once appeared and saying that better LAPD leadership might go a long way toward solving it.

In recent meetings, sources say Riordan aides have stressed that a large number of LAPD officers express dissatisfaction with the leadership in the Police Department, including Williams. The implication: Attrition might be stemmed at little public expense by better leadership.

In fact, some observers say strong, focused leadership might even reduce some of the pressure for increased salaries because low morale and demand for pay hikes often are signs of other frustrations. Restore the LAPD’s luster, the argument goes, and fewer officers will leave in search of higher salaries; let the department languish, and angry officers will continue to demand pay hikes.

Advancing that argument serves two purposes for Riordan:

* First, sources close to the mayor say there is not enough money for a comprehensive salary and pension overhaul and that the police union is falsely raising expectations of a major increase. According to City Hall sources, some widely discussed changes to the pension system could cost as much as $100 million, far more than Riordan is willing to spend, especially if the only gain would be halting the departures of a few dozen officers a year.

* Second, the administration is unhappy with Williams’ performance on a number of levels. Focusing on leadership issues in this area reinforces Riordan administration’s general criticisms of the chief while linking those criticisms specifically to attrition.

Williams, however, has balked at being blamed for the problem. He has told associates that attrition is beyond his power to control--a view that administration officials and others dispute. In fact, Williams and his staff drafted a five-year Police Department expansion plan that called for curtailing attrition to 330 officers a year. Not only has the department never achieved that goal; it actually has moved in the opposite direction.

“It’s the chief’s goal; he came up with it,” said one Riordan advisor. “Who else are we supposed to hold responsible for it if not the chief?”

At the same time, Riordan aides say that attrition no longer seems as serious as they once believed. An informal canvassing of other major urban police departments such as New York, Chicago, Detroit and Philadelphia reveals that most have attrition rates of roughly 5%, not far from a typical LAPD year. Some, however, do a better job holding on to younger officers, losing fewer to resignations and more to retirement.

Edith R. Perez, a member of the police commission, declined to blame Williams alone for the departures of LAPD officers. But she agreed that the loss of experienced cops, many for other police departments, raises questions about supervision and leadership within Los Angeles’ police force.

“There is a connection between leadership and attrition,” she said. “It’s difficult to say how much, but it seems that historically this department had a sense of camaraderie and direction, one that officers now mourn the loss of. That feeds the attrition problem, and it raises the specter of supervision and leadership [problems].”

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Although they acknowledge some rank-and-file unhappiness with leadership, Police Department officials are emphasizing a different reason for attrition: Officers are leaving, they say, principally because they are unhappy with their pay and pension benefits.

Just as focusing on leadership serves Riordan’s interests, focusing away from it serves the LAPD’s top brass, especially Williams. But the department’s focus also suggests that solving the problem will be expensive.

“When people believe, through their salary and benefits, that they’re not valued and that in a sense they don’t feel that their efforts are respected, that becomes a source of aggravation,” said Deputy Chief David J. Gascon. “Being appreciated is a major, major issue, and I think frankly that a lot of people here don’t feel appreciated.”

Gascon acknowledged that some officers do express anxiety about the LAPD’s leadership, but he disputed the notion that Williams should be held accountable for the exodus of police talent.

“The decision to leave the organization is an individual decision based upon many factors,” he said. “I doubt whether any of us as individual managers have much to do with overall attrition.”

A few months ago, Gascon might have gotten an argument on that point from the Protective League, which was gleefully on the warpath against Williams. Last August, for instance, the front page of the union newspaper featured a drawing of the chief, his nose growing in Pinocchio fashion under the headline: “I am not a liar.”

Now, however, the league and Williams have a common interest: focusing the attrition debate toward salaries and benefits.

“We’ve had our differences with the chief,” said Ruff. “But I don’t think they’ve found one guy who’s said: ‘I left the Police Department because of Willie Williams.’ ”

Ruff, whose organization gave Riordan crucial political support in the 1993 mayoral election, now accuses the mayor of trying to divert the debate over attrition to leadership in order to undermine Williams and to avoid committing the city to a significant police pay increase.

“The mayor is going to use the chief’s leadership issues as a wedge,” Ruff said. “He’s going to regret taking that tactic because it’s going to backfire on him.”

According to Ruff, officers remained dissatisfied by the contract settlement reached in 1994 after months of fractious negotiations. This time, police officers are determined to hold out for a salary increase that would make their pay at least comparable to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Ruff said, adding that that would require about a 15% pay hike.

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To support the argument that attrition is driven by dissatisfaction with LAPD benefits, Ruff and others point to a recent survey that the LAPD conducted of officers. In it, 41% of all those questioned cited salaries as a concern that has caused them to consider leaving the department.

That was by far the top response, but some sources close to Riordan point to a quirk in the way survey questions were posed. Three different responses--lack of command support, lack of leadership and low morale--all seem to bear closely on the question of LAPD leadership. A total of 36% of those polled cited at least one of those as a reason for considering departure, suggesting that leadership concerns rank a close second to pay.

What’s more, the survey only polled LAPD employees. As a result Riordan aides argue, it is an attrition poll of the wrong group of people--those who have chosen to stay, not those who have left.

“Based on those preliminary findings,” said Noelia Rodriguez, the mayor’s press secretary, “I think all we can say is that we don’t think that a lot of questions have been answered yet.”

A review of exit interviews with departing officers, by contrast, reveals that the interplay of salary and benefits issues with leadership and morale concerns is subtle and hard to unravel from the data.

Take one month from last year, when nine experienced officers resigned. According to summaries of their exit interviews, most cited a blend of reasons for leaving. One said she was leaving to raise a family and four cited improved benefits packages offered by their new employers. But two indicated that they were angry about the way the LAPD treats its employees, one preferred to “work for a city that supports their police department” and one said she was being harassed by the LAPD and her supervisors.

But even some of those who expressed nonsalary complaints about the LAPD noted that the departments where they were headed--Ventura County sheriff’s, Phoenix police, Anaheim police, among others--would pay them better than their current salaries.

All of that, said Police Commissioner Raymond C. Fisher, suggests that the attrition issue is a complex and overlapping one--one where morale, salaries and politics all intersect and one that the department and city need to address squarely.

“There is clearly a lot of anecdotal evidence that some people are leaving because of their work situation,” he said. “And if you are losing high-quality people who you would like to keep, that’s a problem, no matter how many people it is.”

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Police Attrition

LAPD resignations have increased markedly during the last 10 years, hampering efforts to expand the Police Department. Officers cite a variety of reasons, including that they are underpaid and that their department lacks leadership. In evaluating results of a recent LAPD poll, department officials emphasize that unhappiness about pay ranked first among all reasons employees gave for considering leaving. But the mayor’s office notes that officers cited various complaints about the department’s overall leadership, command support and low morale.

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Recruits* Officers Total** Year Leaving Leaving Leaving 1985 15 63 243 1986 12 65 282 1987 43 55 270 1988 45 86 365 1989 51 97 403 1990 45 105 402 1991 15 109 415 1992 7 92 464 1993 11 96 436 1994 44 147 479

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* Regular resignations are those of officers who leave with less than 10 years on the job. Recruit resignations are those of recruits still at the Police Academy.

** Yearly attrition totals include retirements, which form the largest single category, as well as dismissals, disabilities and deaths.

Reasons given for leaving on attrition survey:

* Pay: 41%

* Lack of top command support: 18%

* Inadequate benefits: 16%

* Inadequate/outdated equipment: 13%

* Lack of leadership/direction: 10%

* Low morale: 8%

Note: Adds up to more than 100% because some employees gave more than one reason for leaving.

Source: Los Angeles Police Department