Forget Pro Football! Bring Back Our Senior Lead Cops

There’s this cop. For hours each day, he fills a chair at Starbucks--Winchell’s is too declasse--chain-sipping lattes, doing paperwork, networking with a clique of civilian pals from the neighborhood.

There’s this other cop. Works the same part of town, knows the territory, the people--all of them, not just the muck-a-mucks. Drinks coffee from a Thermos. A whiz at plugging Problem A into Solution B.

Funny thing is, they’re the same cop--in obverse and reverse, the two perceptions of the work habits of that near-extinct creature, the senior lead officer of the LAPD.

The SLOs were created after the Rodney King Fling at the behest of the Christopher Commission, which realized that many Angelenos never got closer to the LAPD than a traffic ticket, and no closer to city government than a DWP bill.

The SLO would be the best of community policing, spotting a problem before it matured into trouble. They had junk cars towed off and smashed street lights repaired, while regular patrol officers were busy dashing from mayhem to mayhem.

Before then, as former LAPD Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker put it, policing was like swatting the mosquitoes but ignoring the swamp; this was about draining the swamp before the mosquitoes got started.

The neighborhoods loved it. At last they had the LAPD’s ear--two ears, in fact, and the whole head in between. But then the criticisms crept forth. The same neighborhood gadflies and boosters who had always made their gripes heard were doing it again, this time with the SLOs, who by the way were also rather enjoying the cookies and the groupies.

Chief Bernard C. Parks dismantled this SLO system, sent all 168 back to patrol. Every LAPD officer, he said, should be doing community policing.

Well, I haven’t seen such an outcry since the Raiders left town. Actually, more people expressed fealty to the SLOs than to the Raiders. The clamor to get them back has been ceaseless, and the City Council, after waiting as usual for the issue to age and ripen until there is no mistaking where the smell comes from, decided to act.

It asked the Police Commission to order Parks to bring back the old SLO program. The commission instead agreed only to ask Parks questions about the befores-and-afters of changing the program.

I wonder at the council’s timing. It is more than a year since the SLOs were put back on patrol, yet the protests began right away. And, as of July 1, when the new charter reforms kick in--remember those?--the council will no longer be able to tell the Police Commission what to do, only veto what it has done.

Tick tick. Tick tick.

*

The “serve” part of “to protect and to serve” always seemed to come in a distant second. If most citizens know their police chiefly as a “please hold” recording on the other end of a 911 call, the police often appear to have more of a knack for the “policing” than the “community.” The fact that about eight in 10 LAPD officers live outside the city has less to do with it than other factors:

One, the scale of the job. L.A. is so big, with so many police divisions, that officers may barely get the lay of the land in one part of town before they’re off to the next. And hardly do they wrap up one urgent call before there are two or three more clamoring. How can that be community policing?

Two, like rookie reporters who resent having to cover the sewer commission meeting when there’s a swell murder case happening, I can’t imagine most police officers longing for a day spent on the phone getting a street light replaced or a crosswalk repainted when there are bad guys at large. Bureaucrats’ trivia, not police work.

Three, I get the feeling that some officers don’t consider themselves city employees, but LAPD employees. To them, the city is the LAPD, and the rank-and-file residents are less familiar to them, and harder to deal with, than the criminals they grapple with every day.

Now especially, with every end of the city pulling to break away from the civic harness like balky horses, all the more reason for the LAPD to pull out all the stops for community policing, lest the only face the public conjures when it thinks of the LAPD is the likes of Rafael Perez.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.