Community Activists Urge Parks to Restore LAPD Liaison Officers

Saying public confidence has been shaken by the Rampart scandal, two dozen Neighborhood Watch leaders from across Los Angeles on Thursday called for LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks to restore full-time liaison officers for local communities.

Activists from the San Fernando Valley, Pico-Union, South-Central and Hollywood rallied at City Hall behind a proposal by Councilman Joel Wachs to direct the chief to restore the popular senior lead officer program to help repair police-community relations.

“If ever there was a time when the Los Angeles Police Department had to rebuild police-community partnerships, it is now,” Wachs said. “They [lead officers] are one of our most powerful antidotes to the crisis of confidence that is plaguing our city at this moment.”

All of the activists, including Berta Saavedra, who heads a community group in the Rampart Division, said relations with the police have suffered since Parks redeployed senior lead officers to patrol duty in 1997.

Saavedra said she used to be able to call her local lead officer and get an immediate response if she had a crime problem that needed attention. Now, she has to call the watch commander or patrol sergeant, she said.

“Sometimes you don’t get a timely response or no response at all,” she said.

Neighborhood Watch activist Barbra Adams said she is encountering similar problems in Reseda. “The access is not the same,” she said.

Sandra Munz of North Hollywood said elimination of the program created a division between the police and the neighborhoods they patrol.

“We lost trust. We lost direct communications,” Munz said.

The idea was to have an officer assigned to problem-solving with the community by working full time as a liaison to block clubs, Neighborhood Watch groups and homeowner associations.

“The senior lead officers were the best P.R. men the Police Department had out there in the public,” said Lori Dinkin, president of the Valley Village Homeowners Assn. “They knew people by name. We knew who to contact if we had a problem.”

Parks said all LAPD patrol officers should be problem-solvers, so he reassigned the senior leads to also work patrol, and gave station sergeants a greater role in fielding community concerns and complaints.

Parks has no plans to restore the program, said Cmdr. David Kalish.

“Taking 168 officers out of the field and putting them back in trailers and offices to answer phones would be like taking an entire patrol division out of the field,” Kalish said. “Rather than have 168 specialists in community policing, the concept is to institutionalize it so all officers in patrol are involved in problem-solving.”

Les Lovatt, who was a senior lead officer in the Devonshire Division in the north San Fernando Valley before he retired, said the officers who have returned to patrol are too busy with patrol calls to maintain their work with neighborhood groups.

As a result, Wachs said, Neighborhood Watch membership in Devonshire has significantly deteriorated.

Kalish said a recent department audit found that 90% of the time when former senior lead officers wanted to go back and work with community groups and citizens, they were able to do so.

Thursday’s news conference was held in advance of a council committee vote on Monday on a motion by Wachs and Laura Chick for the council to recommend that the chief restore the program.

Even if the council adopts the motion, the chief has primary responsibility for making decisions on deployment, and he has ignored past calls from individuals to put the senior lead officers back in place.