Hahn: LAPD’s Not Doing Enough

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn continued to sound the alarm about the city’s crime rate during a visit Friday to the Eastside, where 14 people have been slain already this year.

Hahn said the Los Angeles Police Department has not done enough to combat a recent crime wave in Boyle Heights and the rest of the city. In January, there were 76 homicides in the city, almost twice the number last year.

“We can’t continue at this pace for the rest of the year,” he said during a tour of a neighborhood garden run by Las Madres del Este de Los Angeles-Santa Isabel, a local activist group.

“That would just return us to a level of homicides that we haven’t seen for 25 years in this city,” Hahn added. “So we have to stop this, and stop it quickly.”

Hahn’s efforts to draw attention to crime in the city come as he is attempting to build public support for his decision to oppose a second term for Police Chief Bernard C. Parks.

Hahn and Parks agree that violent crime has increased 17% over the last two years, but disagree over how to interpret that increase.

Parks argues that although the recent trends are significant, overall crime is still at one of the lowest levels it has been in 30 years.

“We have to put things in perspective and realize where we were five or 10 years ago,” said Lt. Horace Frank, a spokesman for the department. “That is not in any way to diminish the concerns we have.... The officers in the department have been working very diligently to address these issues all over the city.”

Frank said the LAPD has tried to cope with the spike in homicides on the Eastside by putting an additional 3,912 working hours in the Hollenbeck Division in January. Those increases were made possible by bringing in officers from LAPD special enforcement units and the Metro Division, he said.

But the mayor said the Police Department needs to respond more quickly to problems, deploy more patrols and add more special enforcement units to address chronic problems such as drug trafficking.

Hahn also noted that the LAPD remains about 1,200 officers short of its authorized strength, which he said hampers the department’s ability to cope with the increase in crime.

The mayor did not make any specific suggestions about how the LAPD could deploy its officers while trying to hire more.

“We need to look at the entire organization of LAPD and see if there is a better way to deploy the scarce resources that we have,” Hahn said. “I’m not going to go through every single division of LAPD and micromanage that. I think the message is ... we need help now. It’s [the LAPD’s] job to figure out how to find out how we can get that help.”

Hahn was joined by City Councilman Nick Pacheco, who said he would like officers brought in to prevent crimes in the neighborhoods he represents.

“There’s a real high sense of fear right now in the community that I’ve never seen before,” he said.

Many of the homicides have been gang-related, officials said, and several bystanders have been caught in the cross-fire. In late January, a pregnant mother sitting in her car was shot and killed. On Sunday, an off-duty Marine was slain outside his parents’ house on Breed Street.

“There’s a lot of violence, and in the last few months, it’s really gone up,” said Maria Henriquez, who lives a few blocks from where one of the recent killings occurred. “It makes me so scared.”

The spate of shootings has made many people fearful to go out at night, said her husband, Carlos, as the couple left a corner park Friday afternoon with their 2-year-old son.

“The gangs come out and fight and people get shot,” he said. “It happens all the time.”