Seeking Solutions

Experts propose solutions to the problem of too many killers going unpunished:

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“When people talk about community policing, you often hear about it in terms of increasing order or helping people to run their communities. But people forget that the old beats were very important to intelligence gathering. . . . In the old days, beat officers would know what was going on in the community. They would know the people, and the community would feel more comfortable sharing information with them. [So] more community policing could help a lot. Itcould have a dramatic impact.”

--Criminologist David

Cavanagh, Cambridge, Mass.

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“We’re still under-policing. . . . You give us more people, better equipment, more money for the overtime, and we’ll give you better cases and solve more crime.”

--LAPD Deputy Police Chief

John D. White

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“Maybe we are at that stage with community policing where specialization [of homicide investigations] . . . is not necessarily the best way to go. . . . It seems to me that individuals who are assigned to permanent neighborhoods should understand the subtle variations that exist with various forms of violence. So when someone gets killed, they should know if it is drug related, revenge related, organized crime related . . . to look at the kind of evidence that would later allow a specialized unit, if necessary, to go forward with an investigation that will have a higher probability of arrest and conviction.”

--Albert P. Cardarelli,

senior fellow at the McCormack Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Massachusetts

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“It is up to law enforcement and the public agencies to pacify the streets. By more presence. By more priority on violent crime and guns rather than drugs. You can’t emphasize everything. . . . We are seeing that [occur] in other cities, where people are making those choices. That has been done in New York, where the pressure has been to drive the drug dealers inside and not tolerate them on the streets.”

--Peter Greenwood,

director of the Criminal Justice Program at Rand

Reported by Times staff writer Greg Krikorian