Get a New Playbook, Chief

Welcome to the Wild West, Chief Bratton.

The last thing you want after a mere month on the job is unsolicited advice -- particularly when your plans are still gestating. But Los Angeles’ latest spasm of violence warrants some fast action to avert a breech birth.

Your outrage at L.A.’s recent carnage and at the public’s quiescence is justified. But until corpses start piling up in front of Spago, don’t expect much anger from the affluent about what’s happening in L.A.’s discarded neighborhoods. You were also right to confront us for failing our children. But avoid blaming innocent victims for your cops’ bad shootings or for gang violence they don’t condone. That’s what Daryl Gates used to do.

Your mission is to make L.A. the safest big city in the country. While not impossible, you won’t succeed unless you chart an entirely new approach to crime fighting.

In the short term, your department must marshal community intelligence and energy to quell the violent surge. Longer term, a revolution in how cops do their jobs must be coordinated regionally. It should include an army of reform-minded law enforcers, concerned residents, modernized prison and parole departments, functioning schools and teams of experts on everything from human services to economics.

Past policing here stemmed from a suppressive vision of “getting tough on crime” in which police considered themselves a “thin blue line” standing between chaos and civilization. The result: mass arrests that swept the innocent along with the guilty, macho confrontations between police and private citizens, even the invasion of neighborhoods with battering rams. While this all made for an impressive display of male behavior, it shattered all trust. More important, it didn’t work. Our city is still dangerously like Afghanistan, with warlords operating unchecked in their enclaves of power.

Your department, which in the past has barely been able to work with its own Police Commission, must now reach far outside its bunker and coordinate its actions with other agencies, departments and experts who know how to work with community members on stopping crime.

Combining the region’s many police forces for joint operations that deploy cops equipped with state-of-the-art systems and teams of experts would immediately add brains as well as muscle and efficiency. If the LAPD joined forces with the Sheriff’s Department, you’d have a force of 14,000 -- more even than you’ve asked for. Teams from multiple disciplines need to be integrated into your strategies: people standing ready to help cops put away violent predators, deal with the mentally ill, support desperate families and divert nonviolent kids.

The LAPD can’t fight crime effectively unless probation and parole run smoothly. Nor can you make a real dent in crime without an ear to the ground in jails and prisons, where much of what happens on the streets is orchestrated. And without effective rehabilitation and reintegration strategies, far too many ex-cons end up in a revolving door of incarceration and release that endangers their neighbors as well as police.

Equally critical is working with the men who know gangs because they used to run them. Too many LAPD officers instinctively crush these guys, but Boy Scouts aren’t going to be of much use to you. Former gang members know the streets, the prisons and what it takes to create truces. They want to help.

You’ll also have to make it safe for the community to work with the LAPD. Witnesses need protecting, and cops must be taught not to “mark” complainants.

You’re not responsible, of course, for schools, charities and churches, but you do need to galvanize them to create the competent, citywide system of after-school and preschool programs that should have been in place long ago. And remind the city’s many artists that, next to family and faith, their music and art have more power to move kids away from violence than almost any other force.

Cops aren’t social workers, but if we’re ever going to move from reacting to crime waves to preventing them, your department will have to learn to work with social workers -- and a lot of others.

None of this can happen within the LAPD’s current culture. The force you now command has many strengths, but it also has an insular, rigid and retaliatory culture that, unless changed, will doom it to repeat its past failures. The LAPD has always shot down demands for change. If reversing crime waves requires creative, data-driven, community-savvy cops, then you have no choice but to aggressively change the department.

Know that those of us who live here won’t take roll-call exhortations for change seriously until we see aggressive anti-retaliation systems that protect whistle-blowers, independent investigations of complaints and police shootings, and the complete reconfiguration of transfer, promotion and discipline policies to promote community-based policing. In the past, the LAPD rewarded “kicking butt.” Now let it reward the smarter policing of collaboration that can reduce violence, solve serious crime, salvage nonviolent kids and create a real dynamic of prevention.

The LAPD is still feared as a hyper-aggressive force that targets neighborhoods for unfair mass arrests and other intimidation tactics. While we want police to vigorously respond to serious crime and violence, encouraging this department to be aggressive is kind of like telling Charlton Heston to protect his gun. If your goal is to boost testosterone and dubious police shootings, continue in this vein. But if you want to enlist community help in combating crime, you need to send different signals.

A case in point: your declaration of war on graffiti to show gangbangers that you’re in charge. The problem is that you’re not in charge, and they know it. Your throwing down a turf challenge triggers precisely the wrong response. As one Grape Street Crip put it: “How they ‘spect us to respect them when they act like us?”

Our emergency isn’t broken windows; it’s broken communities. And broken children. We don’t need military-style SWAT teams to remove hundreds of our nonviolent taggers to camps that return them as bitter and dangerous men. We don’t need the homeless herded out and locked up, only to be released a few weeks later no better off. And we don’t need mothers swept away on minor charges that inflict major damage to children left to raise themselves.

These tactics destroy families in our most tormented neighborhoods and divert energy from removing the truly dangerous. We need cops who stay in communities long enough and behave well enough to earn the trust of residents who can help fight crime and remove the sociopaths.

So, fix broken windows if you think that helps. But only as one part of a radically reconfigured regional strategy that aims at changing not just your department but the region’s exhausting dynamic of scrambling to counter waves of violence. For years, officers have been shoveling quicksand. Without fundamental change that includes aggressive prevention, strong civic backup and the end of the department’s robo-cop culture, you can forget computers. What you’ll need is more shovels.