Riordan Revises Pledge on Adding Officers

Retreating on his central campaign promise to add 3,000 police officers to the streets in four years or step aside, Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan on Thursday said that meant all hires, not necessarily expansions to the force.

In an afternoon meeting with Times editors and reporters, Riordan indicated that simply filling vacancies should count toward his pledge.

“What I said I would do is recruit, train and deploy 3,000 officers. We’ll reach that number. Now, it won’t be a net number, because there’s attrition, but I didn’t talk about net numbers,” the mayor said.

“With that, and with everything that’s said, I think numbers are not important,” he added. “Whether I reach it or not is not important. The whole thing is, is the mayor, is the City Council, doing everything they can to make the city safer? And if the public believes I’m doing everything I can, they will reelect me.”

But council members--who are locked in a bitter battle with Riordan over his proposed budget for the police expansion--said Riordan was essentially admitting failure on his pledge. Although Riordan has engineered the largest expansion in LAPD history, attrition during his administration has also increased, slowing his plan to swell the department and making it virtually impossible to meet his goal of nearly 11,000 officers by 1997.

“The mayor is struggling to be credible,” Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas said when told of the comments regarding “net” hires.

“I think he’s trying to put the best possible face on it. It sounds to me like what he’s saying is, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ve done, and we’ll say that was my goal,’ ” said Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg. “I guess that’s what you do when you haven’t quite met your goal. If you crack eggs, you should make omelets.”

Riordan first unveiled his 3,000-officer plan as he announced his mayoral candidacy at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City on Nov. 18, 1992. It became the hallmark of his campaign literature and speeches, and was the backbone of his Project Safety Los Angeles, a blueprint for LAPD expansion that the council approved in October 1993.

And at other times during the campaign, it seemed clear that the candidate was talking about gaining additional officers, not just filling vacant spots.

“I’ll put 3,000 more officers on the street,” one brochure announced next to a picture of the millionaire philanthropist, hands on hips. In his campaign booklet, Riordan said the city must immediately “hire, train and deploy an additional 3,000 police officers.”

In a debate just hours before the polls opened, Riordan raised the ante: “I promise that I will add 3,000 police officers over four years,” he said. If not, he added: “I guarantee you I won’t run again.”

Riordan inherited a department of 7,600 officers when he came to City Hall in 1993. There are now about 8,900 sworn personnel in the LAPD, including about 600 still in the Academy. Riordan wants to recruit about 90 a month over the next year, for a net of 710 new officers hired.

If filling already funded spots is included, Riordan has hired about 2,000 officers, and should easily eclipse the 3,000 benchmark. But Councilwoman Laura Chick, who heads the Public Safety Committee, said Riordan should forget about the semantics of net or gross and focus on substance.

“The public’s perception was 3,000 more officers on the street than we have [in 1993],” Chick said.