Reports Sharpen Focus on LAPD’s Problems, Needs

Confronted with a pair of consultants’ reports that paint a bleak picture of the Los Angeles Police Department’s support services and facilities, top city and LAPD officials said Thursday that only strong leadership and a sustained financial commitment will bring the Police Department back to national preeminence.

In recent months, two high-powered consulting groups have delivered back-to-back assessments of the LAPD, and both have detailed a host of troubles. First was the Kosmont study, which found that some Police Department facilities had been allowed to decay beyond repair. The study recommended that Parker Center be demolished and a new police headquarters built.

Now there is the Blue Marble report, and its findings are no less alarming: According to the latest study, one out of every four emergency calls to 911 are abandoned, training officers are overwhelmed, the Police Academy is understaffed, officers who repeatedly fail shooting tests are patrolling city streets, and LAPD recruits are consistently scoring below state averages on standardized peace officer tests.

Deirdre Hill, president of the city’s civilian Police Commission, said many of the reports’ points were known to police officials and are being addressed. After all, she noted, it hardly took a consultant to tell Police Department leaders that the buildings in which they work are aging and unreliable.

But Hill said the two documents have helped coalesce a variety of concerns into two central reports and may help draw public attention to the problems.

“Hopefully, the attention that the reports generate will help us find the resources we need,” Hill said. “I’m sure it can seem overwhelming, particularly to some of our command staff, because there are so many issues that need attention. But all we can do is address these one at a time.”

Councilwoman Laura Chick, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, echoed some of that sentiment and stressed the need for officials to respond to the issues detailed by the various consultants.

“I don’t think we can twiddle our fingers on this report,” Chick said of the Blue Marble study, which was sent to city leaders last week and publicly reported in detail for the first time Wednesday. “It is a thorough and complete job. . . . We have to examine these issues and act on them.”

Chick has long argued that the Police Department expansion plan advanced by Mayor Richard Riordan needs to be balanced against the LAPD’s other needs--areas such as equipment, training and the like. She and other critics of the mayor’s plan said the Blue Marble report reinforces those concerns, but she stressed that it would take the cooperation of the mayor, council members and others to respond to the problems identified by the recent study.

Already, Riordan administration officials say they are doing just that. According to aides to the mayor, the budget to be released today includes money for roughly 100 more training officers--some for the Police Academy, some for field operations--as well as about $3 million for the Scientific Investigation Division and more for other equipment needs.

Those investments, Police Department officials say, will not erase the problems identified by the Blue Marble report but will begin to chip away at some of them.

Department officials are careful not to criticize the expansion efforts spearheaded by Riordan, but emphasize that other department improvements have to keep pace in order to keep the LAPD from languishing in terms of its technological and training capacities.

Asked whether the LAPD can absorb thousands of new officers into decaying police stations and overburdened training systems, Cmdr. Tim McBride responded: “I think we can. The challenge is to maintain quality. And that’s a real challenge, but it’s one we have to meet.”

Art Mattox, vice president of the Police Commission, agreed. The recent consultants’ work, he said, made clear that adding police officers is more complex than merely hiring new recruits. “When we look at putting an officer on the street, we need to look at all these other questions,” he said.

At the same time, Mattox and LAPD leaders said the two reports’ candid, sometimes brutal assessments of the Police Department’s current state offered the department a chance to come to grips with its long-term structural problems.

“The only thing that’s going to help us in the long run is the truth,” said Bill Moran, commanding officer of the Fiscal Support Bureau. “I think this is an honest report. I’m not taking this defensively.”

Moran, like some other LAPD officials, said that while he agreed with most of the report, he did not concur with every one of its findings.

Some LAPD officials say the report’s concern about falling LAPD recruit scores on state Peace Officers Standards and Training tests is misplaced because the Los Angeles police recruits do not spend much time studying for that test and LAPD training does not emphasize it.

But Moran said other problems are serious and stressed that they took years to develop. Solving them, he added, also will take time and money. “It’s going to take a long-term commitment,” Moran said.

He declined comment on one aspect of the report, its discussion of a group of officers it called “the Chronic 31,” who repeatedly failed shooting tests and were forced to retake the tests again and again. Despite their evident difficulties shooting, those officers are assigned to field responsibilities, a situation that the Blue Marble report said was dangerous and exposed the city to potential lawsuits.

Thursday, McBride stressed that the officers referred to as the “Chronic 31” were identified in a Police Department audit and said that remedial training already is underway for them. He would not disclose the names of the 31 officers, but said some had only failed the test two or three times, while others had failed 10 or 15 times. One officer took the test 25 times before passing it.

Now that the Kosmont and Blue Marble reports are finished, police officials say the next task is to see that they do not gather dust. The Kosmont study recommended that the city ask voters to approve a Police Department bond measure to pay for new facility construction, an idea city officials are weighing.

And the Blue Marble report suggests appointment of a special committee to shepherd the implementation of its recommendations. Moran said he expected that police officials would formally present the Blue Marble report to the Police Commission in coming weeks and would then propose a plan for implementing the bulk of its recommendations.