The Top Priority: Community Policing

Now that the upheaval over former Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks is over, what qualities are important in his successor?

We have studied the LAPD for the past six years, and we believe that the answer is a commitment to community policing.

After the Rodney G. King beating in 1991, the Christopher Commission said replacing the LAPD’s “command and control” culture with one that supported community policing was essential. If police and residents could work together around common interests, misperceptions and misunderstandings would break down and crime problems could be solved before they became statistics.

Community policing is not a quick fix, because it requires fundamental changes in police culture. In Baltimore, Birmingham, Ala., Houston, Newark, N.J., and Oakland, it has shown results. Fear of crime and actual crime rates have fallen.

But in Los Angeles, a decade and two police chiefs later, community policing is mostly just rhetoric.

Although Parks’ predecessor, Willie Williams, attracted considerable support for the idea of community policing from city leaders and citizens, he failed to win support within the LAPD.

When Parks took over, he launched a blizzard of new initiatives, which took away from the goal of community policing. The captains who commanded the LAPD’s 18 geographic areas were buried under an avalanche of new orders. To accommodate the workload, Parks reassigned the 168 senior lead officers--the very officers who were on the front line of community policing--back to the field.

Parks also developed a strict new citizen complaint system that investigated even the most trivial offenses by officers. Investigations took up to a year to complete--during which time accused officers could not be promoted or transferred--depressing officer morale and further reducing any fledgling community policing efforts.

We conducted three officer surveys, in 1996-1997, 1998 and 1999-2000. Not surprisingly, our latest survey showed that beginning in 1998, a year after Parks took over, officers’ job satisfaction declined dramatically. Nearly 80% said they feared being punished for making an honest mistake.

Officers’ increasingly negative feelings translated into the highest rates of attrition in the department’s history. In such a climate and absent leadership from Parks, the commitment to community policing withered.

We believe that there is something to be learned by comparing Parks’ authoritarian style, which produced fear throughout the ranks and diminished officers’ willingness to become involved with citizens, and Williams’ lack of control, which inadvertently produced some localized division experiments with community policing.

“Williams was asleep at the switch,” one commander said, “but it allowed us to get things done.”

Connie Dial, captain at the Hollywood Division between 1996 and when she retired in 1999, decided to implement community policing. “The first thing we did was to get our officers working with citizens who were worried about crime,” she said. “The officers quickly learned that they had a supportive community and the residents saw that the police didn’t fit their stereotypes.”

Dial said neighbors worried about burglaries and business owners about drug addicts hanging around their stores. “Two officers volunteered to work on it for a month, and with the help of residents they figured out it was the ‘hypes’ who were committing the burglaries. We beefed up the operation, got support from the city attorney’s office and started making a huge number of arrests.”

By 1998, Dial said, Hollywood was making more arrests than nearly any other division. In the same period, Dial said, Hollywood robberies declined 31% and burglaries 17%. “Community policing doesn’t mean being soft on crime,” she said. “You just have to know the root of the problem before you can target the resources. Everyone was part of the solution and it didn’t cost a single extra officer or car.”

And when officers’ job satisfaction ratings began to plunge in other divisions, Hollywood’s officers’ satisfaction and morale rose. Eighty-three percent said they felt they were part of a team. More than two-thirds said they were encouraged to try new ideas; 91% rated their captains as good leaders. But when Parks removed the senior lead officers, Dial said, “The impact was devastating. It was a real blow to community policing.”

Our research makes clear that LAPD officers, like Angelenos in general, are waiting for new leadership. Surveys show that most officers say they are in police work to make the community safer and to help people. And most support community policing.

In the next few months, the Los Angeles Police Commission will forward three names to Mayor James Hahn, from which he will choose a new chief of police. For the commission and for Hahn, the past 10 years should be their guide.