New Ads to Help Recruit Officers

The Los Angeles Police Department on Friday launched a $1-million advertising campaign to recruit police officers in a new effort to overcome its hiring crisis.

The LAPD expects to shrink this year to fewer than 9,000 officers for the first time in six years, a trend that has alarmed Police Chief Bernard C. Parks and Mayor Richard Riordan, who promised in his 1993 campaign to build the force up to 10,000. Since 1998, the LAPD has been unable to hire enough officers even to replace those lost to attrition.

On Friday, Riordan and Parks unveiled a series of billboard, radio and Internet ads to lure new recruits. The ads make a low-key pitch, using minor neighborhood incidents to stress opportunities for officers to “do good” and “serve those in need.”

“Down this street, Officers Zaby and Udeshi rescued infant twins who were abducted,” says an ad to be posted on a billboard at Western Avenue and 91st Street. “Do good. Join the LAPD.”

Another billboard at Vermont Avenue and 41st Drive will say: “A few blocks from here, Officer Watson delivered a baby girl in the back seat of a ’65 Cadillac.”

Ad consultants to the city gathered the one-line anecdotes from scores of police officers. The city will place the ads on 64 billboards in the neighborhoods where the incidents occurred.

The ad campaign is part of a broad range of efforts by the city to boost recruitment. Under Riordan’s budget proposal for 2001-02, the city would offer a $2,000 signing bonus to new officers. It would also increase the “finder’s fee” paid to city employees who recruit police officers from $200 to $500, and it would shift some recruitment duties from the police department to the personnel department.

Starting pay for an LAPD officer with a four-year college degree is $46,000.

Recruitment troubles are affecting police deployment. Parks said Friday that he will soon remove two or three dozen of his most experienced officers from the elite Metro Division and reassign them to street patrol. Metro Division units are deployed citywide as needed for the most serious crime-fighting tasks, including hostage negotiations, bank robbery stakeouts and dog-led hunts for suspects.

Parks said he had no choice but to shift some Metro officers to standard patrol beats.

“As our numbers drop in the department, we have to make sure those resources are replenished,” he said. “If they’re not coming in as new recruits, the only thing we can do is take them from other assignments.”

Rampart Scandal Hurts Recruiting

Parks and Riordan acknowledged Friday that bad publicity from the Rampart police corruption scandal has made it tougher to attract applicants. They also cited the healthy state of the economy during most of Riordan’s eight years as mayor, which gave job seekers the alternative of less dangerous work.

Riordan and Parks appeared before one of the new billboards mounted on a truck outside the Police Academy in Elysian Park.

“With this ad campaign--and other restructurings in recruitment--I think we will get more and more applicants, and therefore eventually get over the 10,000 police officers that I promised,” Riordan said.

Still, Riordan’s budget projects the size of the force will drop from 9,025 to 8,654 during the fiscal year that starts July 1.

City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who heads the council’s Public Safety Committee, applauded the ads.

“We all recognize that we need to do much, much more on recruitment,” she said. “People aren’t just going to come to us because the door is open.”

The Police Protective League, the union for LAPD officers, said the ad campaign fell short of what’s needed to attract more applicants: better fringe benefits, reforms in the officer disciplinary system and a schedule that lets officers work three days a week, 12 hours a day.

“Unless you solve the LAPD’s problems, you’re not going to recruit the number of people we need,” said league director Peter Repovich. “You could put $10 million in an advertising campaign and not get the level we need to deal with attrition.”