Crime Fight Now Job 1 on Hahn’s Agenda

Fresh on the heels of his victory over secession, Mayor James K. Hahn is launching a new campaign to reduce crime and make his mark on the Los Angeles Police Department.

Backed by his charismatic new police chief, Hahn is stumping in the city’s minority communities and heading soon to Washington, D.C., to meet with Justice Department officials, where he is seeking federal help in supplementing the LAPD and fighting street gangs. He is trying to build a coalition of businesses, community groups and others to thwart recent increases in violent crime, and is developing new recruitment initiatives for the Police Department.

This public safety focus is not new for Hahn, but it represents a significant refocusing of a term so far largely dedicated to the political contest over San Fernando Valley and Hollywood secession efforts, both of which failed in November.

When he was city attorney, Hahn sought court injunctions against loitering gang members, moves that brought mixed results. Shortly after he was elected mayor, Hahn ordered the Police Department to undertake a number of initiatives to boost recruitment and decrease resignations and retirements.

Hahn’s most notable staff moves as mayor have involved the LAPD, where he rejected a second term for Chief Bernard C. Parks and brought in William J. Bratton, former New York City police commissioner, to head the force.

Today, no issue occupies more of Hahn’s schedule or attention. He holds weekly one-on-one lunches with Bratton, and he has a deputy mayor who is in regular communication with the police chief’s top-ranking officers. Hahn’s public schedule includes regular addresses on crime and policing, and those topics generally dominate the questions asked of him by reporters and the public.

Hahn’s attention comes at a time of increased urgency.

The city’s homicide count for the year has surpassed 600, with more than half of those killings occurring in South Los Angeles. In the last three weeks, more than 20 people have been gunned down in South Los Angeles.

“There is no more important issue for a mayor than crime,” said Fernando Guerra, a Loyola Marymount University professor who studies Los Angeles. “Of the big three [issues] -- crime, education and the economy -- mayors can impact crime. It’s the No. 1 game.”

While the mayor and his top staff deny it, some City Hall observers say the recent spate of violence has altered Hahn’s approach and emphasis. They say he needs to prove why he needed to hire a new police chief and that he needs to make good on public pledges to make Los Angeles safer, which could come at the expense of such other weighty issues as housing and transportation.

Still, these people acknowledge that the mayor has put in place a police chief who is a nationally known, aggressive crime-fighter. If Bratton is successful here, the mayor also will be successful, that thinking goes.

“I’m not sure I would have chosen this as my No. 1 agenda post-secession ... but I don’t think the mayor has any other choice,” said Rich Lichtenstein, a political consultant at Marathon Communications. Crime “is something very, very specific that you can quantify -- it’s either a failure or a success” for the mayor.

Politics aside, some civil rights lawyers and others are bracing for what they fear will be a reprise of some of the city’s previous attempts to stymie gang violence.

Carol Watson is a civil rights lawyer who has made a practice of representing plaintiffs in cases typically brought against law enforcement agencies.

“They can spout all their little slogans all they want, but if they’re really serious about it, they’re going to do something about the lack of jobs,” Watson said. “They’re going at it backward: They have to start with economics, jobs and education.”

The answers to gang violence, Watson and others said, are not simple. Watson said she has represented young people born and raised in Los Angeles who have never seen the ocean, kids who believe their neighborhoods are the only turf they will ever know.

“I don’t know what [the police] are planning on doing -- shoot them, lock them up, chase them from neighborhood to neighborhood?” Watson said.

In an interview, Hahn said he favors a multi-pronged approach, one that will deal not just with police action but also with gang prevention and intervention. He is ordering several city departments to begin working with the Police Department in seven areas of the city to determine how they can help reduce crime.

On Friday in San Pedro, two LAPD captains joined with other department leaders to coordinate their response to problems in that area. Abandoned buildings and cars present problems for that area, they said, and officials from the various agencies pledged cooperation in addressing those issues as part of a broader campaign to suppress crime.

Additionally, Hahn is meeting this week with representatives of dozens of community-based groups that receive city money for programs dealing with young people at risk of criminal behavior. Those groups, which fall under the L.A. Bridges program, receive hundreds of thousands of public dollars, and some critics question whether there are adequate ways to evaluate their effectiveness. Hahn said he will attempt to determine which of those programs are successful and how they can be replicated.

“We need to have a strong understanding in this city that you cannot have economic prosperity, you cannot attract new jobs and new investment, if people are looking at this area as unsafe,” Hahn said. “We all need to get involved.”

The mayor said he understands that the job of reducing crime is not the police chief’s alone -- that the LAPD cannot, by itself, make Los Angeles safe. Still, much of his attention is devoted to the Police Department and its officers.

Hahn spent much of the last year working on changing the way the Police Department hires and retains officers. Shortly after taking office, he made good on a preelection promise to the police union to allow officers to work on a more flexible schedule. He charged the city’s Personnel Department with working with the LAPD to streamline hiring procedures for new officers, and he has tried to create incentives to lure former officers back to the department.

Now, the mayor plans to call in help from federal sources. He will host a meeting of California’s congressional delegation in a couple of weeks, and his trip to Washington with Bratton will focus on police hiring as well. He is meeting this week with Bratton and U.S. Atty. Debra Yang to determine how federal resources and agents can be more involved.

Hahn also plans to announce new initiatives to boost the hiring of women in the LAPD, in which about 19% of the officers are female. The mayor wants to set specific goals for hiring more women and is seeking reforms in the way female officers are hired and trained. Hahn said he realizes that his efforts must be continuous and that changes -- both inside and outside the department -- will take time.

“This is not something that’s going to happen overnight,” the mayor said. “It’s going to take years to undo the damage that gangs have done to our communities. We all need to get involved ....We’re talking about real families who are suffering real tragedies.”