Compressing a Week, or a Life, Into a 12th-Hour Misjudgment

Some days, when the distance from Monday to Friday looks to be as far as it is from City Hall to Saturn, I wish the two men running for mayor of Los Angeles were pandering to me, arguing over how to keep me in the city, about how to improve my morale.

In the last week, James Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa’s bidding war over who can be nicer to the LAPD and its union has been as snippy as some Wal-Mart/Kmart price war and as inside-politics as late-night C-SPAN. So here’s a free translation:

I’m backing a 3/12 schedule.

Well, I’m not. I’m backing a 4/10.

But you did back 3/12.

I never!

Did so!

What they’re yammering over is called a compressed-workweek schedule. The police union says that if L.A. wants happy cops, cops who will stay with the force, that’s a good start: a four-day, 10-hour workweek, or better yet, a three-day, 12-hour week, with an extra day thrown in here and there like leap year to round it up to 40 hours. (Villaraigosa says he’s a 4-10 man, and Hahn, who won the police union’s endorsement, is on the side of the 3-12ers.)

Bill Parker’s ghost, who wouldn’t love that? Four-10, 3-12--why not 2-20? Two days of 20-hour shifts, and see you back here next Thursday, Officer Murphy! The LAPD could recruit rookie candidates by tacking signs on the telephone poles--”Work part time, earn full-time money! Call and ask how!”

Of course it’d be good for officers--more family time, more home improvement projects, more second jobs like movie work and security consulting. But does that make it by default good for the city?

You wouldn’t know from hearing Hahn and Villaraigosa go snipe-hunting after each other. Only one LAPD officer in 10 lives in the city of L.A., so this isn’t about their votes. It’s about what the police union thinks of the candidates, and what the voters of the city think of their police.

So few police departments have tried compressed schedules, and so few scholars and efficiency experts have added and measured and calculated, that for every statistic there’s probably an equal and opposite statistic.

After Chief Bernard C. Parks pulled the plug on an experimental compressed-schedule program in 1997, the union was furious. Look here, its president thundered. It made for better morale, less overtime, less stress, less sick time--even less smog, because we’re not driving to work as much!

Parks flung this back over the wall: Community policing takes a hit. Bill Gates couldn’t design a schedule to make it work. Officers are away for four days a week and it takes longer to catch up on what happened while they were gone.

There is a “tremendous complexity to it,” says UCLA professor Wellford Wilms, who has been surveying LAPD officers every 18 months since 1996. What’s not often studied, says Wilms, is the vast difference between a 4-10 and a 3-12 week. “You run the risk of having a police force that’s really part time.”

There’s a reason labor unions fought to get an eight-hour workday. After a time, the brain isn’t as sharp, the hand isn’t as sure. My brother-in-law drives a long-haul big rig, and he can only drive so many hours a day; who wants that behemoth barreling down the interstate with Mr. Sandman behind the wheel? If LAPD scandals and screw-ups cost the city millions now, what kind of lawsuit-shoppers will be looking for 12th-hour misjudgments?

Since 1974, California police have not been required to live in the cities they serve. More Los Angeles police officers--10% of the force--now live in little Santa Clarita than live in all of the city of Los Angeles.

There’s something unsettling about that, something a 3-12 workweek might make more so. Even to the Founding Fathers, the city represented something impure and soiled, like its inhabitants. The countryside created healthy, clean-minded citizens. Thomas Jefferson wrote of cities like New York as “painful objects of vice and wretchedness,” but in the country, “crime is scarcely heard of, breaches of order rare, and our societies, if not refined, are rational, moral, and affectionate at least.”

The old LAPD image of the alien, occupying force has been shed somewhat by a department that is blacker, browner and more female than it was. But if Los Angeles again sees itself policed by a commuter militia that wants to descend as infrequently as possible into the urban pesthole for three days a week and escape back to the clean, safe suburbs for the other four--fair or no, it might conjure up that genie all over again.

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