Bratton Lays Out Ambitious Set of Goals for LAPD

William J. Bratton said Thursday that his top priorities as Los Angeles police chief will be to accelerate the pace of hiring, speed the LAPD’s compliance with a federal consent decree and restore the “most famous badge in the world” to its former brilliance.

“I will not let you down,” Bratton said in his first formal remarks since being chosen Wednesday by Mayor James K. Hahn to head the LAPD.

“We will build on the legacy and the tradition and the skills,” he said at a news conference at the North Hollywood police station. “And we will take that most famous shield, and whatever little tarnish exists ... it will be wiped clean.”

Throughout the day Bratton praised the professionalism of the department and said television shows of decades past such as “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” celebrated an organization that “set the standard for so many years.”

But he also criticized the department for failing to modernize, and said he would immediately begin to redeploy officers. For example, he said he will make graffiti a top priority for all officers and reconsider the way the department’s specialized units, such as robbery-homicide, operate.

Bratton, who headed the police departments in New York City and his hometown of Boston, charged through a fast-paced day that began with a press conference and continued with lunch at the police academy, media interviews, appearances at station house roll calls and meetings with community policing volunteers. Throughout the stops he exhibited the polished speaking style and comfort in front of the cameras that helped catapult him to fame in New York.

In a meeting room at the North Hollywood station packed with more than 20 television cameras and dozens of photographers and reporters, Bratton laid out his goals for the department and a job he called “the premier law enforcement opportunity in America today.”

He also took the opportunity to address critics’ charges that he openly lobbied for the job.

“You better believe I campaigned,” he said, his voice sharp. “You want me to come in here and not know a damn thing about the place? I did my homework.”

Asked to name the two biggest problems facing the LAPD, Bratton said increasing the ranks from the current 9,000 officers up to the 10,000 authorized and implementing reforms outlined in a federal consent decree.

Los Angeles was forced last year to enter into the decree, overseen by a judge, after the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that the LAPD had for years been engaging in a “pattern or practice” of civil rights violations.

Bratton, who spent a year on the team overseeing the department’s compliance with the decree, said it had shown a pattern of resistance to implementing the reforms.

“That will not occur when I am police chief. We will begin immediately,” said Bratton, who could start work next week pending City Council approval.

He also set out an ambitious goal of meeting the conditions of the consent decree ahead of schedule. Those reforms include establishing computerized systems to track issues such as problem officers and illegal racial profiling. A judge had ordered the department to comply fully by 2006.

“The quicker we get that implemented the better for the officers and the public,” Bratton said.

Hahn, who informed Bratton Wednesday that he had the job, was at his side all day.

At one point, the mayor stretched one arm around Bratton’s shoulders in an embrace and said with a wide smile, “See why I like this guy so much?”

Introducing Bratton at the news conference, the mayor said he believed the former New York commissioner could make Los Angeles “the safest big city in America,” a challenge Bratton said he was confident he could meet.

For his part, Bratton backed the mayor’s attempt to defeat secession campaigns in the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood. “I can’t even begin to imagine why [anyone] would want to secede from L.A. Seriously, one of the great cities of the world.”

The mayor, whose reserved public persona contrasts with Bratton’s more flamboyant style, said in an interview with The Times that he was unconcerned about the possibility that Bratton will attract more attention than the man who hired him. Chatting in Hahn’s office on Thursday afternoon, the two men laughed about their perceived differences.

“I’m actually taller than he is,” Hahn joked.

“Yes, he’s a much bigger presence, I noticed that,” Bratton responded.

Hahn said it wouldn’t bother him if Bratton turns up on the cover of Time magazine, as long as he gets the job done.

“What is going to be great about working with Bill Bratton is we share the same goals,” Hahn said. “If things go right there is plenty of credit to go around for everybody. If you are the chief of police in Los Angeles, that automatically means you are in the spotlight. It also means you have to deliver. I know that, because it’s what mayors are judged on too.”

Earlier, at the news conference, Bratton deflected a question about how well he will get along with Hahn in light of his clashes with then-New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani when Bratton headed the NYPD from 1994-96. He said he’d laid it all out in his autobiography and given a copy to Hahn.

Hahn later apologetically conceded he hadn’t finished the book.

In his autobiography, Bratton details the tumultuous and bitter ending to his relationship with Giuliani, who forced him out of the NYPD commissioner’s job after an extended fight over who deserved credit for steep declines in New York City’s crime rate.

And Bratton hotly disputed criticism raised in New York that police officers there had become overzealous, resulting in serious civil rights violations. He said allegations that such instances increased under the community policing model he embraces--and plans to bring to Los Angeles--were a creation of the media.

“It’s a gross misrepresentation of [the NYPD’s] professional activities,” Bratton said.

“You don’t have to worry about officers out of control” in Los Angeles, he added.

Bratton, who had lunch with the department’s deputy chiefs, said Thursday that he anticipates having to bring in a only few outsiders to help him overhaul the LAPD. He joked that he would use his “winning personality” to win over the LAPD rank and file, a corps known for being inhospitable to outsiders. But he also pointed out he had spent a good deal of time studying the department while working as a consultant on consent decree compliance.

“One of the benefits of having been here over the past year is that I’ve had a chance to reach out to a lot of people at different levels of the organization,” Bratton said. “There’s great talent here, there’s just a lot of them in the wrong position. It’s a matter of shuffling the deck little bit.”

One of his first orders of business will be tackling the city’s graffiti problem, which falls under the category of “quality of life” enforcement that was his trademark as head of New York’s transit authority and as police commissioner.

“I was amazed to find that of 9,000 persons in the Police Department, not a single one is focused on graffiti,” Bratton said. “As a result you look like the graffiti capital of the world.... I’d like to see more focus on that issue because it reflects community pride. It reflects a sense of caring.”

He said he also plans to quickly reconfigure the LAPD’s specialized units, such as robbery-homicide, narcotics and gang divisions.

“My own sense of the Police Department is it is an overspecialized, compartmentalized department,” Bratton said. “You are policing in the 1950s here....

“Where you have guns, you have drugs. Where you have drugs, you have youth. Where you have youth, you have gangs. Why treat them like four different diseases? When you go to a doctor, he treats the totality of all the things that are affecting your body. L.A. is not doing that in any way, shape or form.”

He added: “You have a narcotics unit that works Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, and on weekends there is no one fighting drug crime in Los Angeles. If you’re a drug dealer, you are going to sleep Monday through Friday and say, ‘Let’s go party’ on the weekends.”

Bratton said he believed updating Los Angeles’s computerized crime reporting system to Compstat, the system he used in New York to break down crime statistics street by street, will go a long way making troubled areas safer.

And Bratton’s selection was welcomed by some of the rank and file who listened to his remarks.

“Everybody is looking forward to the change because he is going to step up to bat and shake things up,” said LAPD Homicide Det. Hollis Berdin of the North Hollywood Division. She said she believed Bratton’s approach “is going to bring us back as the No. 1 police department in the world.”

Bratton--who walked a beat in Boston before working his way up the ranks--said it wasn’t until after the attack on the World Trade Center that he realized how much he missed policing.

“I never felt so useless in New York City than on 9/11,” Bratton said. “It’s those kinds of things that make public service so desirable. “The day the shield is pinned to my chest, that’s when I know it’s real.”

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Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein contributed to this report.