Don’t Dismantle Community Policing

A few years ago, the Hollywood Community Redevelopment Agency provided cell phones to Neighborhood Watch leaders in that troubled community. The LAPD officers soon were getting calls day and night from the neighborhood leaders reporting on the mayhem that inundated Hollywood at the height of the crack epidemic.

That flood of communication inaugurated the reality of community-based policing for a department just beginning to recover from the 1992 riots and the blistering report of the Christopher Commission. Now, though, in Chief Bernard Parks’ sweeping reorganization of the department, the links to the community and the hard-won trust the officers have earned for the department are about to be broken. The Parks plan is laudable in almost every respect, but in putting community officers back in patrol cars, it is fatally flawed.

As the vehicle of Christopher Commission reforms, community-based policing has been the dominant philosophy of Los Angeles law enforcement. In Hollywood, the idea of community-based policing caught fire as Community Police Advisory Board members helped identify problems and helped police reduce them. In providing safe walks to school, curbing domestic violence, targeting aggressive beggars and problem liquor stores, the real doers were the officers and a single community relations sergeant.

Yet Parks’ plan calls for putting the approximately 160 so-called senior lead officers, each of whom directs nine officers on three shifts in local areas, back on patrol, essentially as training officers. The senior officers no longer will be readily available by phone, and their responsibilities will be split among the nine officers, a third of whom are at work at 3 a.m.

The “senior leads” now answer to the community every day on once-intractable problems such as gangs infesting an abandoned building or drug-dealing on a block. They also provide a presence at community events like our Ivar Hill Christmas Posada. One year when we ran short of gifts for all the kids who showed up at the posada, they found us a trunkload from another watch group. They have fielded complaints from citizens and City Council members, gotten pay phones removed to deter drug dealing, set up car burglary and drug stings and cracked down on cruising and gang activity. In the process, they made a host of strong friendships in a rescued community.

Hollywood was in bad shape when their work began. My neighborhood was among the very worst; 19 people were shot, seven fatally, on the one block of Yucca Street between Ivar and Cahuenga between 1989 and 1995. Today, that same block is almost problem-free, thanks to community based policing led by the senior officers. At a recent meeting of our Hollywood advisory board, speaker after speaker, from business people to council representatives to Neighborhood Watch leaders, spoke against the Parks plan.

Los Angeles has momentum now. Our crime rate has fallen like a rock. The mayor’s dream of fielding a vast patrol force is a worthy one, but Parks’ plan for achieving that will remove the officers who have brought a significant measure of trust between ordinary people and the police. For the sake of political goals, it will damage the reputation and authority of the chief, turn community leaders against the department and break the links that we have forged under fire and in pain.

When I called for help last week to break up fighting on our street, senior lead officer Marv Kidd showed up a few minutes later. His presence spoke worlds to a couple of 13-year-olds, one a budding gang member who can still be saved. There didn’t have to be any arrest, any community confrontation, any grief. A thousand calls to 911 could not have helped as much.