Despite Record Budgets, Shortages Abound at LAPD

Month after month, the Los Angeles Police Academy pumps out scores of eager young police officers--and promptly sends them into overcrowded police stations, outfits them with outmoded equipment and forces them to fritter away time with costly and antiquated procedures.

At about dawn every morning, officers coming in from the night shift line up in police stations across the city to check in their shotguns, Tasers and radios, so the next shift can check the gear out again--a process that a consultant recently estimated costs the city more than $9 million a year in lost time. Buying all that gear for every police officer in the city, the same consultant concluded, would cost less than $5 million.

“Every officer ought to have his own radio,” said Capt. Bruce E. Hagerty, whose 300 officers overflow an aging Eastside police station. “But we just don’t have enough to give one to everyone.”

On Monday, the LAPD will hire a new class of recruits and top 9,000 officers for the first time in its history. And yet, record budgets have not eliminated the department’s often grim working conditions. A few new stations are being built, and new cars have helped replace ramshackle black-and-whites, but problems and shortfalls still abound, frustrating police officers and taking a steady, wearing toll on morale.

In police stations and at City Hall, some blame Mayor Richard Riordan and his single-minded focus on increasing the number of officers. Three years of huge outlays for hiring--the department will have received more than $116 million for that purpose by the end of this fiscal year that started July 1--have not been accompanied by investments in equipment, those critics say.

Others argue that the LAPD has managed growth poorly and has squandered valuable opportunities to make life better for its officers. Those observers contend that Police Chief Willie L. Williams and his command staff have not done enough to capitalize on the political consensus that has paid for adding more than 1,800 police officers since 1993.

Whatever the cause, the results are hard to ignore:

* In the Van Nuys Division, there is no place for officers to park; in the Pacific Division, police change clothes in the hallways because there are no locker rooms; in the Newton Division, space is so scarce that some officers work in trailers; and at Parker Center, offices overflow into hallways, boxes are stacked to the ceilings and personnel files got so heavy that they caused the floors at the police headquarters to sag.

* Academy recruits learn radio skills using wooden blocks, leaving them ill-prepared for the real thing.

* LAPD veterans study community-based policing in a dingy room with no air conditioning and bad lighting.

Riordan’s critics say problems with equipment and facilities and other shortfalls were predictable and could have been avoided. In fact, Williams initially expressed reservations about the mayor’s expansion plan and warned that he would resist efforts to increase the size of the LAPD too quickly.

He was not alone. City Councilwoman Laura Chick, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, long has warned about the price of rapidly expanding the LAPD, and she often has used her position to lobby for equipment and other amenities in order to keep pace with the onslaught of new police officers.

But Williams, after first expressing doubts about Riordan’s proposed expansion, helped draft the growth plan that the mayor adopted. The chief defends his department’s handling of the expansion even as he admits that facilities and equipment have lagged behind hiring.

“We have to talk about the realities,” he said in an interview last week. “We needed more people. We needed better facilities. We needed technology. We’ve started on all those things, but we desperately needed the people.”

Nevertheless, Williams acknowledged that he is pained by some of the problems his officers continue to experience.

“It’s a tragedy,” he said. “It is wrong when people have to change in their cars. It’s wrong when we don’t have a ladies’ locker room. . . . There’s frustration among department employees.”

Similarly, the mayor acknowledged that the city’s police stations are experiencing stresses and strains, but he said those reflect breakdowns in LAPD management, not flaws with the expansion plan. And the mayor said that if the LAPD is running up against shortfalls, officials should come to him.

“All they have to do is ask for help, and we will be there,” Riordan said. “The easiest thing is to get the money. The hardest thing is to get the leadership.”

The Scene in Newton Division

While City Hall and Parker Center debate the merits of hiring versus investing in equipment and facilities, thousands of police officers wrestle with conditions that hamper the most basic aspects of their work.

A stroll through almost any police station provides examples, some large, others niggling.

Take Newton Division, one of the city’s oldest and most legendary stations.

Last month, detectives finally got computers. But the new equipment is crammed into a tiny room, so packed that detectives have to stand aside to let each other pass. There are barely enough spaces for parking the station’s black-and-whites, let alone officers’ personal cars. Some park in red zones and take their chances on a ticket. The lunch room is a couple of wooden benches and a few vending machines. Space is so short that officers sometimes use that room to inventory evidence.

It hasn’t obliterated morale. In fact, Newton is well known for its esprit de corps, a long tradition that expresses itself in a fondness for practical jokes. Officers delight in filling the earpieces of station phones with shaving cream and enjoy telling the story of a visit from Deputy Chief David J. Gascon, who went to make a phone call and got an earful.

Still, the reminders of municipal indifference are hard to overlook. Vice officers work in a trailer outside the main station. One of their cars is a battered, aging Buick, its dashboard crumbling, paint peeling and vinyl roof torn and tattered.

Inside, officers at the end of every shift trade in their gear as a new crew lines up to check it out--the same time-consuming drill that is duplicated throughout the city.

How short is the department of equipment? On the door to the kit room in Newton Division is a small sign. “One battery only per radio,” it reads.

And what is the effect of that shortage? Throughout the city, officers report that their radios and cellular telephones run down before they finish a shift.

Replacing Old Cars

No equipment issue has greater symbolic significance for the LAPD than its cars. Patrol officers spend most of their time on wheels, and they rely on them to speed them in and out of trouble.

When Williams took command of the LAPD, the department’s fleet of cars was in woeful shape. The city government had pinched money for new cars, forcing the department to patch up its vehicles and make do. Some had holes in the floorboards and doors held together with wire. Some would stall in high-speed pursuits, leaving officers to sputter to a stop while suspects got away.

Today, as Williams notes, “you have to look hard to find an old car.”

That’s a tribute to Williams’ early honeymoon at City Hall and to the commitment of politicians such as Riordan and Chick to find money for new cars. But all their efforts have not made the problem go away.

“New vehicles continue to arrive very sporadically,” the LAPD acknowledged in an April report to council members and the mayor. With the 1995-96 fiscal year now over, most of the cars expected did arrive, but a significant number did not, the result of a combination of budgeting and delivery problems.

And even some of those that did arrive were not ready to be put to work. Money set aside for installing radios and computer terminals has not been enough to cover every car, so some of the new vehicles sit uselessly, waiting to be converted from passenger vehicles to police cars.

“Due to a number of problems, the department still does not have complete communications equipment packages for these vehicles,” the internal report noted. “Additional grant funding is being sought to purchase the remaining equipment.”

Some of those issues have cleared up in recent months, officials said, but the department still is behind on car deliveries.

Worn-Down Buildings

Although there has been progress toward outfitting the LAPD with better cars, conditions remain bleak inside many of its buildings.

Parker Center, the steel and glass headquarters of the LAPD, is a wreck. After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, broken pipes spewed water into offices and down stairways. It was weeks before the building was back to normal. And normal, for Parker Center, is no great achievement. Even on a good day, its hallways are cluttered, its offices stuffy and its elevators an even bet not to work.

Recently, a consultant looked at LAPD facilities, took stock of Parker Center and reached a stark conclusion. The LAPD headquarters, the consultant decided, should be torn down.

Things are no better in the field. Most of the city’s police stations are cramped and dingy. Some are worse than that. Perhaps the most famous example of neglect is at the 77th Street Division, where a staircase leads to a brick wall. The top floor of the station was lopped off because of safety problems, so construction workers just bricked off the stairway and police went back to work.

Today, work is nearing completion on a new station for 77th, as well as for two other divisions, Newton and North Hollywood. By next year, officers in all three divisions will have new places to work.

Already, the prospect of improvement is rippling through the LAPD. At 77th Street, Capt. Richard Gonzalez said he hears from officers regularly inquiring about when the station will be finished. “I anticipate I’ll be getting a bunch of transfer requests,” he said.

The money for those projects and for a number of other facility improvements, including new parking structures at several stations, came from a bond measure approved in 1989. But even Police Department managers now admit that they badly mishandled the money from that bond, dawdling with some projects, underestimating the cost of others and allowing inflation to eat away at the money set aside for construction.

Today, talk of a new bond measure is spreading, but politicians and department officials worry about their ability to convince the public to back them again, especially since voters have turned down similar efforts in recent years.

In the meantime, new officers are arriving in bushels from the Police Academy, and station commanding officers are trying to cram them in.

In the Hollenbeck Division, there is no more room for detectives inside the police station. They work in a converted bank building down the street. Community relations officers work in a trailer. And one officer is holed up in an old interview room. It has no windows and looks strikingly like a padded cell.

“How is the crowding here?” asked Capt. Hagerty, commanding officer of the division. “It’s horrible.”

No Backing Off

Williams acknowledges the problems, but emphasizes the progress: new stations nearing completion, new cars in the field, new riot helmets procured after an epic bureaucratic struggle, new computers at last beginning to show up in many police stations.

Those amenities have not cured everything, but they are steps in the right direction. And like many officials, Williams argues that only time and sustained commitment will cure decades of neglect of the Police Department.

“Bosses have to be very straightforward and honest and say to their people: ‘We can’t do everything at once,’ ” Williams said. “Some things are going to take more time than others.”

As for the suggestion that expansion should halt or slow down, the chief and the mayor reject it. Williams says an adequate LAPD needs to have several thousand more police officers. And Riordan, who has made police expansion the hallmark of his elected life, is in no mood to trim his sails.

“If you have goals, you find ways to reach them,” Riordan said. “It’s like business or anything. If you have goals that you’re convinced you have to get to, you find a way to do it. Or you’re going to go out of business. And in the city of L.A., everything else flows from a safe city: jobs, families staying here. We don’t have a choice.”