LAPD Ties Drop in Arrests to New Style of Policing

The Los Angeles Police Department, struggling to explain why arrests have fallen off dramatically in recent years, has produced a new report that attributes the drop to the LAPD’s embrace of a more community-oriented approach to law enforcement.

According to the study, today’s LAPD is focused on solving community problems, not just rounding up suspects. The report describes that as a shift “from an ineffective style of policing to a more effective community policing style.”

The report also notes that arrests have recently increased, suggesting that the LAPD may have turned the corner on five years of steady declines.

The study represents the LAPD’s first official explanation for the decline in arrests, reports of which first appeared in March and raised new doubts about the aggressiveness and effectiveness of the Police Department.

Dated May 8, the LAPD study has not been made public, but a copy was obtained by The Times. Some officials are not satisfied with the department’s look at the issue, partly because the report contains errors and partly because its analysis strikes some observers as contradictory in places. Police Commission staffers are preparing an analysis of their own.

Art Mattox, acting president of the Police Commission, declined to comment in detail Thursday about the new report, but said it did not answer all his questions and added that he hopes the commission analysis will fill in some holes.

Mayor Richard Riordan requested the study after an article in the March 13 editions of The Times disclosed that Police Department budget figures showed a drop in arrests from 289,000 in fiscal year 1990-91 to 189,000 last year. Riordan, who has helped fund a historic expansion of the Police Department, said he was perplexed by that decline. He asked that the issue be studied and results forwarded to him within 90 days.

Some patrol officers and their union representatives say Los Angeles police officers are less aggressive than they used to be. Some observers applaud that, noting that the LAPD’s tradition of aggressiveness was a long-standing source of tension in some areas. But others worry that officers have been demoralized by the intense scrutiny of the LAPD in recent years and have responded by becoming complacent; within the LAPD, cynics refer to the new philosophy as “driving and waving.”

The report, forwarded to the commission by Police Chief Willie L. Williams, calls it “riding and waving,” and suggests that its impact has been exaggerated. Despite the scrutiny and fear of prosecution, the report says officers “have continued to diligently carry out their duties and responsibilities with professionalism and integrity.”

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Among other things, the report emphasizes that reported crime is down in Los Angeles, as are personnel complaints against police officers.

Cmdr. Tim McBride, a spokesman for the LAPD, echoed the report’s conclusions Thursday and said he believed the department was making progress.

“Certainly, there was a significant drop [in arrests] in the immediate post-riot, post-Rodney King period,” he said. “I think every day we don’t have to view that videotape . . . is a day we put that behind us.”

The report does not dispute that overall trends of productivity are down over the last five years. It acknowledges that arrests have dropped by more than a third since 1990, and that fewer traffic citations are being issued, fewer field interviews are being conducted and fewer cases are being cleared than five years ago, even though the LAPD today is significantly larger.

But rather than attribute those declines to complacency or a reluctance to confront suspects, the LAPD points primarily to the shift to a more community-oriented style of policing.

“Overall, it must be emphasized that the focus of the Los Angeles Police Department has significantly changed,” the report states, “from an aggressive, proactive, quasi-military style of policing to a more directed focus on community policing, problem-solving and education.”

That shift, the report’s authors note, has helped focus the LAPD on producing quality arrests, rather than racking up large numbers just for the sake of boosting statistics.

In the late 1980s, for instance, the LAPD conducted a number of controversial sweep operations in which hundreds of suspects were rounded up, often for minor offenses. The sweeps inflamed community tensions, and some department insiders now say that they did little to address underlying problems of crime.

Virtually no local law enforcement observers suggest a return to the sweeps of that era, and the LAPD report also rejects that course.

But the report contains a number of findings that have struck some officials as inconsistent.

For instance, the new LAPD analysis does not explain why community policing would drive down the overall number of arrests and then allow that number to begin increasing as well. According to the LAPD report, arrests rose from 175,555 in 1994 to 189,191 last year--a year in which Chief Williams has said that community policing has made significant strides.

Similarly, the report’s authors argue that traffic citations are down over the last five years because accidents resulting in serious injuries and fatal accidents are down. But the report then notes that citations in fact have increased since 1993. As with arrests, the report does not explain why it is desirable for the number of citations to go down, and then a sign of improved productivity when they go up.

Indeed, just a few paragraphs after noting that “a problem would be indicated” if arrests, citations, field interviews and other categories were increasing, the report boasts that they are doing just that.

“All the statistics are on an upward trend,” the report states.

Some officials expressed concern about the findings in the report that appear to be at cross-purposes.

“This report,” said acting commission President Mattox, “raises more questions than it answers.”

Although Mattox declined to discuss specifics of the document because it still has not been released and commission staff is preparing its own analysis, he did add that the recent gains in some areas have been so modest that he is unsure how much weight to attach to them.

“I don’t know if that’s statistically significant,” he said of the 1995 increase in arrests. Mattox added that he hoped the small upticks in numbers reflected the fact that officers hired as part of the LAPD expansion plan are finally completing their training and moving into patrol. But the report is silent on that issue, Mattox noted, so more study is needed.

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In March, the LAPD produced four sets of arrest statistics in response to requests from The Times. That triggered alarm in some quarters, with Riordan and others questioning whether the LAPD was adequately monitoring the issue.

In its report, the LAPD suggests that its failure to produce reliable data on arrests was essentially because different kinds of analysis can generate different results and because the data produced by some parts of the department are more reliable than others. The report recommends expanding the department’s Information Resources Division, but also says the LAPD has already added to its crime analysis unit in order to spot crime patterns and target problems.

The department’s reassurances about its grasp of the statistics are at least partly undermined, however, by the fact that it makes new errors in its latest report.

For instance, the report praises officers for increasing the quality of their work even as calls for service have increased during the last five years. But a chart attached to the report shows that calls for service actually have fallen during that period, dropping from 5.17 million in 1990 to 4.84 million last year.

In addition, Riordan had asked that LAPD officials explain why detectives appeared to be clearing fewer cases. The LAPD study acknowledges that detectives are solving fewer crimes than they did in 1990 but attributed that to a general decline in crime. With fewer crimes being committed, it argues, there are fewer for detectives to solve.

It did not explain, however, why detectives are solving a lower percentage of the crimes given to them to investigate--the percentage has dropped from 24.9% in 1990 to 20.8% last year.

Generally, law enforcement authorities expect that detectives should solve a higher percentage of their cases as their workloads decrease. At the LAPD, that does not appear to have been the case. The report does not explain why.

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BACKGROUND

* In March, The Times reported that over the last five years arrests by the LAPD had plunged from 289,000 to 189,000, and that fewer cases were being cleared, fewer traffic citations were being issued and fewer field interviews were being conducted. Mayor Richard Riordan called the numbers “disturbing statistics” and asked that the Police Commission investigate. The LAPD report obtained this week represents the department’s official explanation of the declines.