Panel Asks Chief to Explain Changes in Community Policing

Under pressure from the City Council and a vocal group of neighborhood activists, the Police Commission agreed Tuesday to take up the issue of redeploying LAPD’s senior lead officers, the community liaisons who have been reassigned to routine patrol duties.

At the commission’s weekly meeting, President Gerald L. Chaleff announced that he was sending a letter to Police Chief Bernard C. Parks asking for a fuller accounting of his approach to community policing. Once Parks responds, the commission will consider whether to join the City Council in calling for the senior lead officer program to be restored, he said.

Chaleff said he expects a response from Parks “in a reasonably short period of time,” but would not say how long that might be.

Councilman Joel Wachs called on the commission to act on the issue at its meeting next Tuesday. If the commission waits much longer to act, he said, the City Council’s ability to overrule a commission vote would be restricted under the new City Charter, which takes effect July 1.

“If they don’t take it up next Tuesday . . . this is just a delaying tactic, then I think it will backfire on them,” Wachs said.

Senior lead officers were deployed in the early 1990s on the recommendation of the Christopher Commission, part of an effort to repair the damaged links between police and the community.

The program proved popular in many neighborhoods, and there was an outcry from community activists when Parks announced in 1997 that he was reassigning the 168 lead officers to routine patrol duties--part of a plan, he said at the time, to bring community policing ideas to the entire force.

More than a dozen people who testified at the Police Commission meeting demanded the restoration of the senior lead officers.

“The SLO program is effective,” said George Abrahams, president of the Beachwood Canyon Neighborhood Assn. “We miss it, and we want it back. . . . We know that SLOs worked for us and the current plan does not.”

Page Miller, co-founder of an organization dedicated to saving the senior lead officers, criticized the Police Commission for refusing to consider the issue for so long. “I cannot fathom a Police Commission that would listen to 2 1/2 years of public testimony and remain mute,” she said.

After the meeting, Miller said she hoped that the commission would act quickly to restore the officers. City Atty. James K. Hahn, a mayoral candidate, said last month that the commission has the authority to order Parks to restore the officers to their community policing roles, and urged it to do so.

In his letter to Parks, Chaleff asked the chief a series of questions about his community policing policies. Among them:

* “The department has placed 168 senior lead officers back into patrol operations. Has the department’s response time gone down since that time? Has the redeployment of the SLOs had any effect on calls for service?”

* “How much time do watch commanders and basic car personnel spend in problem solving and community policing efforts?”