Community Policing, Made Even Better

Community policing is more than another fad. It truly goes to the Los Angeles Police Department’s organizational core and is the philosophy by which we carry out our daily duties. As one of the recommendations of the Christopher Commission, the department has achieved impressive results with community policing over the past five years. Yet it has not achieved a level of departmentwide institutionalization, and therefore some changes are necessary.

When the Christopher Commission challenged us to provide services and programs with a strong community-focused philosophy of policing, the LAPD responded by establishing Community Police advisory boards in each of our 18 geographic areas and assigning senior lead officers as full-time community activists and problem-solvers. These have been tremendously successful changes, generating wide support from our communities and our city’s leaders.

As successful as these programs have been, the current deployment of senior lead officers is limiting our progress toward our goal of institutionalizing community policing throughout the department. The fact is that responsibility for community policing is vested in about 191 members of this 12,000 member organization--168 senior lead officers, 18 area captains, four geographic bureau commanding officers and the chief.

But community policing cannot be run by a few people out of a few offices. It has to move out into the patrol cars, into the detective squad rooms and into our classrooms. Everyone in the organization must embrace community policing in their daily work. For that reason, it is imperative that we change the organizational deployment structure.

The emerging tenets of community policing are a partnership between the entire department and the communities we serve, with shared priority setting and decision making; operational decentralization and stability of personnel assignments; a problem-solving approach to our daily work rather than simply responding to a variety of incidents; and departmentwide orientation in which every member of this organization has “ownership” in the success of community policing. Our current structure, as popular as it may be in the short term, simply cannot accomplish these expectations and involve the entire department in this new philosophy.

Under the new organization, the senior lead officers will serve as valuable peer leaders on their assigned watches and as accomplished training officers who will round out the training of both senior officers and the probationary training for young officers. Returning the senior lead officers to patrol duties will recapture an aspect of our service delivery that has been conspicuously absent.

In a few areas, senior lead officers have never left their cars, so this transition will have a minimal impact. In others, however, the redeployment of senior lead officers to field duties will create different relationships as senior lead officers have become a critical single point of contact for our communities. Instead, sergeants will coordinate basic cars for all areas, with each sergeant so assigned responsible for two basic cars. This upgrading of the contact point position from senior lead officer to sergeant not only will bring a more seasoned officer into the problem-solving process, but also will put supervisors in the position of overseeing each basic car’s service delivery and problem-solving capabilities. Each area commanding officer will be given the latitude to prepare his or her command for this change and, when they feel they are ready, they will consult with their bureau commanding officer to ensure that they have a solid transition plan.

It is important for our communities to realize that this is an evolution, not a revolution. Tradition holds a high place in our law enforcement culture, but we also must be aware of our responsibility to adapt to the changing demands of a diverse society. To succeed in community policing, we must establish an organizational structure that allows each and every one of us to work in partnership with the communities we serve and continually strive to identify and implement better ways of doing business.

Anything less would be inconsistent with our charge to protect and serve all the people of this city.