Parks Makes Call for 1,000 More Officers

Just when all the reports were showing that the wave of violence was subsiding and Los Angeles officials were beginning to think they could focus on other major problems, Police Chief Bernard C. Parks sounded another crime-fighter’s call to arms Sunday.

In a comment that clearly caught at least one City Council member by surprise, Parks said he is going to need at least an additional 1,000 police officers over the next five years.

That request comes near the end of the largest police buildup in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Speaking at a town meeting Sunday with Councilwoman Laura Chick, Parks said that Los Angeles, with its growing population, will need the additional officers to maintain the lower crime rate that the city has experienced in recent years.

“I don’t want the councilwoman to pass out when I say this,” Parks said, turning toward Chick, who is chairwoman of the council’s Public Safety Committee. “But our expectations for the 1999-2000 budget is to begin looking toward the next five years. . . . We probably should not reach that five-year mark without having at least 1,000 new officers.”

Although the Police Department has grown from about 7,500 officers in 1993 to 9,500 now, Parks noted that the agency still lags behind New York, which has 40,000 officers, and Chicago, which has 13,000. Even Philadelphia, which has about as many people as the San Fernando Valley, has about 7,000 officers.

Parks said in an interview afterward that adding an officer costs $70,000. His 1,000-officer buildup would cost $70 million, not including the cost of equipment, civilian support personnel, supervisory officers and space for them. He also said the department needs to refurbish four police stations and build six facilities in the next 10 to 15 years.

The Police Department’s current budget is $1.5 billion.

Parks and Chick, along with Constance Rice, a civil rights attorney, were participating in a meeting on police issues sponsored by the Second Baptist Church and the Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

Chick said she realized that the department will have to grow in the next five years, but she had never heard Parks mention 1,000 additional officers.

“The immediate thing I thought of is the tax dollars that we will have to be able to locate,” she said in an interview. “While we need to keep our policing where it needs to be, we also have a lot of other things that have to be dealt with.”

She said more money needs to be spent on steering children away from crime by giving them alternatives such as after-school activities.

“Having police presence does help prevent crime, but it’s a very expensive way to do it, and we have to put other pieces in place. We need to find less costly ways of preventing crime besides just adding more officers.”