Will N.Y. M.O. Work in L.A.?

Now that New York City crime fighter William J. Bratton has been selected to head the Los Angeles Police Department, the question becomes: Can he do it here?

In his 27-month reign as police commissioner in New York City, Bratton oversaw double-digit declines in crime; violent felonies fell by a third and homicides were cut in half. It was that record that made him one of the country’s best-known chiefs and that helped him secure the top job at the LAPD.

Bratton, who titled his 1998 autobiography “Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic,” is one of many who credit the NYPD and his leadership with playing a large role in reducing New York crime.

Still, there is considerable skepticism among academics and policing experts that Bratton can neatly replicate New York’s crime statistics from those years in this city at this time. Among other things, the LAPD is far smaller than the NYPD.

But Bratton is widely admired for his creativity and insistence on accountability. His admirers say that bodes well for crime fighting in the nation’s second-largest city under Bratton’s watch.

“It’s not going to be the Bill Bratton method applied to L.A.,” said Richard Emery, a New York City civil rights lawyer and Bratton’s lawyer as well. “I don’t think that’s what will occur. It’s going to be the creativity of Bill Bratton for L.A. That is the key factor here.”

In New York, Bratton employed a computer statistical program aimed at identifying problem areas, directing resources there and holding supervisors accountable for reducing crime.

As commissioner in New York, Bratton defined those methods as community policing, and positioned himself as a leading advocate of that law enforcement style. Indeed, he said Thursday he will expand the system for tracking crime in the LAPD and that he will encourage officers “to take back the streets” of Los Angeles--an echo of the rhetoric he employed in taking over the NYPD in 1994.

“What we effectively did in New York was use quality-of-life control by the police--understandably with a much larger police force--that literally for 25 years did not have a modicum of quality-of-life enforcement,” Bratton said at a morning news conference.

But Bratton will have far fewer officers in a far larger geographical area, making cop-on-the-beat policing difficult. That’s likely to provoke a debate over exactly what is meant by community policing here in Los Angeles--the assertive style of Bratton’s NYPD or the more community-relations oriented approach the LAPD has practiced in recent years.

“There are probably 150 visions of community policing,” said former Philadelphia Police Commissioner John F. Timoney, who was a finalist for the LAPD job and who was one of Bratton’s most trusted aides in New York.

“The bottom line is his [program] is problem solving, not just dealing with the immediate problem but fixing it once and for all.”

For New York, community policing meant the broken window approach: cracking down on small problems in a neighborhood in order to avoid the bigger, more violent ones.

“I would say his biggest challenge is he will not have the number of people in proportion to the population that he had in New York City,” said James Q. Wilson, a retired UCLA professor who is considered the godfather of that theory. “In New York, you have enough officers to do ordinary and specialized patrols. Here, you need virtually every officer.”

The NYPD has nearly 40,000 police officers, compared to more than 9,000 in Los Angeles. Although New York is the bigger city, that still amounts to one officer for every 209 residents of that city and one for every 409 Los Angeles residents.

“It will be the greatest challenge of Commissioner Bratton’s career to take on the complex crime problems in Los Angeles with a force that’s much smaller than what he had,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University professor of law and public health.

Bratton’s arrival in L.A. reignites an old debate: the question of how much the police in New York were responsible for that city’s drop in crime in the 1990s.

“Historians like to argue that things are intertwined and one factor can never explain a phenomenon, but he gets a lot of credit, and of course the 40,000 men and women [in the New York Police Department] get a lot of credit, for what happened here in New York,” said Robert McCrie, chairman of the law, police science and criminal justice administration department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.

“If we list the forces that can have an effect, good or bad, policing would be at the top, and Bratton was the police chief,” he said.

In his autobiography, Bratton skewered academic experts who at first explained away New York’s double-digit drop in crime during the mid-1990s: “We lined up their alternate reasons like ducks in a row and shot them all down,” Bratton wrote, dismissing arguments that the strong economy and changing demographics, among other things, were the real reasons for the drop in violence.

Nonetheless, McCrie said that the economic boom, with record low unemployment, as well as a calm political climate in New York, helped Bratton’s crusade appreciably.

“We didn’t have reasons for riots and disorders,” McCrie said. “The city wasn’t unhappy with the government.”

But there was a downside to the Bratton formula, as activists accused the NYPD of engaging in racial profiling in their aggressive pursuit of street crime.

Minority communities within Los Angeles have long felt disenfranchised by the Police Department, criticizing it for racially profiling residents, among other things.

The federally negotiated consent decree in Los Angeles, which grew out of the Rampart corruption scandal, has been blamed in some quarters for distracting LAPD management from the business of fighting crime. Mayor James K. Hahn, whose office helped negotiate the decree, disagrees and has indicated his desire to more fully implement those reforms in the LAPD.

Thursday, some experts said the decree actually may strengthen Bratton’s hand as he takes aim at crime.

“By adhering to the order of the court, he will help build legitimacy in the Police Department in the eyes of the minority community,” Fagan said. “Legitimacy is an important ingredient to building citizen and department partnerships.”

Inside the department, Timoney and others say Bratton’s forte will be in fostering an environment where less-senior officers are encouraged to be innovative in their approach to targeting violent hot spots.

“You’ll see some junior officers get moved up almost overnight,” Timoney said. “He’s a risk taker; he will surround himself with junior officers and he’ll give them the authority to really do their job.”

In New York, for example, Bratton shifted the working hours of robbery detectives to match the hours of robbers, based on a suggestion from a detective. He promoted that detective, McCrie said.

“Bratton is a manager, an executive--maybe not a manager to everyone’s taste, but he’s not going to come in saying, ‘I know the solutions to your problems,’ ” McCrie said. “He’ll create an environment where people who have ideas on how to solve L.A.’s problems will feel comfortable bringing up ideas and having them tested.”

But as Bratton moves to step up the LAPD’s technological capacity for spotting crime trends and beefs up its insistence on accountability, he still will face deep challenges in learning the department he will soon lead--in the city he is only just beginning to know.

“He can get the numbers easily, but can he get the qualitative nature of Los Angeles?” said Geoff Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.

“I wish him the best and hope he does well, but it isn’t going to be easy.”