LAPD Acts to Put More Officers on the Street

Faced with a rising crime rate, the Los Angeles Police Department is moving officers from desk duty and special investigative units and assigning them to street patrol.

“We’re seeing a rise in crime and it’s time to get more people in the streets to fight it,” Chief Bernard C. Parks said in an interview.

He noted statistics released Wednesday that showed a 9.2% rise in overall crime and a 24.8% rise in homicides over the last year.

In addition, police officials said, the department is facing an attrition rate that has dropped the number of sworn officers to about 9,200, about 800 fewer than three years ago.

They also said the federal consent decree, designed to reform the department, will require new administrative positions.

The redeployment, affecting the entire city, will take effect by Dec. 17, Parks said.

Police divisions have been ordered to reduce their non-patrol staff--from anti-drug officers to statistics-gatherers--to no more than 15% of the street force.

“It’s not that we’re saying these [units] are not important, they are important, but the fact of the matter is, we have limited resources.” said Department spokesman Lt. Horace Frank. “Hopefully, we’re not going to be down 900 officers and we’ll be able to reinvigorate our force and be able to have the luxury of addressing these other areas.”

Frank said division captains will recommend the cuts to supervisors, with Parks making final approval.

Some divisions have already begun reshuffling their ranks.

The Van Nuys Division transferred three officers who were doing detective work back to patrol in October and most of the Operations Valley Bureau’s sex crimes Registration Enforcement and Compliance Team (REACT) will be back in cars by next month. Six police officers are on the REACT Team, one of them a detective. The detective will be reassigned to another investigative post and the officers will return to the street, Frank said.

The REACT team, which investigates convicted sex offenders for parole violations and failing to register, has arrested 133 sex offenders since its inception in 1997, according to police documents released this summer. The unit was created in 1997 to track convicted sex offenders, who are required to register with their local law enforcement agency. If a convicted sex offender fails to register, he can be sent back to jail.

The team is actively investigating 41 sex offenders and has more than 190 unassigned cases, said Det. Patty Ferguson, who heads that unit.

Frank said that REACT unit investigations will be handled by other detectives but that it will “boil down to doing more with less.”

Some residents are already concerned about the ramifications of the redeployment. After her 6-year-old daughter was molested, a San Fernando Valley mother who requested anonymity said, “Every guy who walked on the street would scare me.” The REACT team kept close tabs on the man after he was released from prison in 1998. He was discovered driving by elementary schools shortly after his release, a violation of his parole that earned him another trip to jail and the mother a “tremendous sense of peace.”

“I’m terrified that REACT could be disbanded,” the mother said. “Not only to protect my own children but to protect others. . . . Preventive measures are essential. If we can stop the crime before it happens, it’s like preventing an illness before symptoms set in.”

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Times staff writers Kurt Streeter and David Pierson contributed to this story.