Homeowners Chide Chief Over Cuts in Community Policing Plan

As if he wasn’t hearing enough about scandal at the station house, Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks got an earful Friday about unrest on the home front.

Angry homeowners condemned Parks for stripping senior lead officers of their duties as liaisons with community groups and sending them back to full-time patrol and training tasks. Residents complained to the Police Commission on Friday that the reassignments have all but killed a once-thriving Neighborhood Watch anti-crime program across the city.

Parks countered by explaining that he decided to pull the senior officers out of their chairs and put them back in patrol cars because those officers were earning “5% to 15% more for doing 5% to 15% less work.”

The confrontation occurred during a daylong strategic planning workshop conducted by police commissioners at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City. One of the session’s scheduled topics was the issue of community-based policing.

Parks was delayed in arriving at the meeting by a throng of reporters who quizzed him outside the banquet hall about the growing investigation into corruption at the Rampart station near downtown. He later left the meeting early to meet with officers at Rampart.

Until March when they were returned to patrol work, senior lead officers had been assigned to coordinate police work with local residential and business leaders as part of the community-based policing plan.

Under that system, citizens could call senior officers directly to report problems or special crime prevention needs. The lead officers, in turn, handled many of the requests themselves and relayed the others to patrol officers in the field.

Homeowners complained Friday that they now sometimes get the runaround when they try to report neighborhood problems to busy police station desk officers.

Harry Flynn, a resident of West Toluca Lake, said a desk officer referred him to the city Building and Safety Department when he sought to report construction workers urinating in public near where he lives. That department did nothing about the problem.

“It may have been a small matter, but it was important to my neighborhood,” Flynn said.

North Hollywood resident Page Miller dismissed allegations that 168 lead officers citywide wasted time in the past and merely sat in their trailer offices waiting for phone calls.

She told Parks and commission members that the senior officers’ work went far beyond “just quality-of-life issues.” She said the officers were responsible for initiating the shutdown of drug houses in her area.

Winnetka resident Bill Huber asserted that loss of the lead officers had caused the ranks of Neighborhood Watch block captains in his area to shrink from 240 to 60.

Added Millie Hamilton of Encino: “Neighborhood Watch in Encino and Tarzana is gone.”

Parks shrugged off the criticism. “Your perception is totally different from that of the West Valley captain,” he told Hamilton.

He told commissioners that the redeployment of the lead officers has improved police service and has given the senior officers more time to train younger officers.

The chief said it was “a poor use of resources” to have the senior officers sitting around waiting for phone calls reporting relatively minor neighborhood problems.

Parks was equally direct about the city’s 18 local community police advisory boards, some of which have lobbied for the return of the senior lead officers.

Those community panels, matched up with LAPD’s geographic service divisions, “were never perceived to be a citywide political force that can out-vote captains, the chief of police, the commission,” he said. Those advisory panels “are one of thousands of inputs” the Police Department uses in relating with citizens.

Parks suggested that homeowners will soon become comfortable with the new role of senior lead officers.

Some members of the Police Commission wondered if there might be room for some compromise ahead on the issue. But, no action was taken Friday.

T. Warren Jackson, the commission’s vice president, told the audience not to expect restoration of the previous lead officer arrangement. It’s unrealistic for people in a city the size of Los Angeles to expect they can have what he called “a personal police officer.”

“We’ve created a standard we can’t live by,” Jackson said.