Can N.Y.’s Lessons Be Transferred to L.A.?

Two of the three candidates for the Los Angeles Police Department’s top job are veterans of the New York City Police Department, and they are promoting their experience as an advantage.

To many LAPD loyalists, however, the East Coast experience of John F. Timoney and William Bratton doesn’t count for much. New York and Los Angeles present distinct policing challenges, they argue, and historically, the police departments differed in their approach to crime fighting, institutional structure and political oversight.

New York has a much larger force to draw upon, and the NYPD is recording twice as many arrests per officer as the LAPD. In Los Angeles, officers patrol far more territory and, on average, make more arrests in serious crimes. In recent years the NYPD has been lauded for its success fighting crime simply by mobilizing large masses of officers.

If Bratton or Timoney takes the helm in Los Angeles, said Greg Berg, a retired LAPD commander, “they will be very much surprised to find how few people they have.”

But a close look at both cities shows that some of those differences have been blurred, in part because police work has become more standardized, law enforcement experts say.

For today’s police officer, “the core job is portable,” said Alan Deal of the California Commission on Peace Officers Standards and Training.

Police leaders across the country have increasingly favored simple, practical strategies for law enforcement that emphasize accountability and data collection and can be applied anywhere, said Berg. The prevailing view is, “If you are going to be a police leader, you have to know about the fundamentals,” Berg said. “That’s crime fighting, and leading police. Those are basic.

“And if you can do it in New York, you can do it anywhere.”

At the same time, public controversies and political change in New York and Los Angeles have produced a kind of convergence between the two police departments.

Former LAPD Chief Ed Davis, long a champion of the LAPD, said that a comparison of the two departments would produce a result closer to a draw than in the past.

The cities that the departments represent reflect such contrasts and similarities. New York has larger numbers of almost every ethnic group, including Latinos.

A larger proportion of Los Angeles residents are Latino, however--47% compared with 27% of New York residents.

In Los Angeles, the non-Latino white population has declined to 30% of the total, according to the most recent U.S. census figures. But New York is not far behind at 35%.

New York has a higher percentage of black residents--24% compared with Los Angeles’ 11%. Both cities are about 10% Asian. Los Angeles’ police force appears to be more ethnically diverse than New York’s, and closer to parity with the city’s population.

The proportion of foreign-born populations of both cities is comparable, with Los Angeles’ slightly higher. But immigrants from the Americas, particularly Central America, predominate in Los Angeles, while New York draws more from the Caribbean.

Economically, according to the census, the two cities are nearly even. The median income in Los Angeles is $36,687, compared with New York’s $38,293. And in both cities, just under one-fifth of residents live on incomes that fall below the poverty line.

The most striking difference is how close together people live. New York is nearly 3 1/2 times as dense, with more than 200,000 people per square mile in some neighborhoods.

Traditionally, criminologists have equated crowding with high crime rates, an axiom that has been challenged in New York in the 1990s, said Robert McCrie, chairman of the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“That’s the assumption people have worked on,” he said. “But it needn’t be that way.”

New York’s vast police force dwarfs Los Angeles’. The NYPD has 38,000 officers, compared with 9,025 in Los Angeles, and the NYPD patrols a much smaller--though more vertical--terrain.

There are 209 residents per officer in New York, compared with 409 per officer in Los Angeles.

There are more officers per square mile in New York--127 compared with 19 in Los Angeles. Dozens of New York City stations are within walking distance of one another; Los Angeles stations police areas from 4 1/2 to 65 square miles.

Those differences bear directly on policing tactics.

In New York, saturating an area with police officers to ward off crime through police presence is much easier. As one LAPD insider put it, when the NYPD has a problem, they can “trample” it.

In Los Angeles, by contrast, the department’s long-standing reputation for aggressive policing was in part a consequence of the relatively sparse LAPD presence.

Lack of officers meant that, tactically, the LAPD had to create the impression of force.

Today, LAPD commanders speak with amazement and envy of the ability of the NYPD to deploy hundreds of uniformed officers to a single neighborhood when the need arises.

“They move complements of 1,000 officers into one area where they have a spike in crime,” said LAPD Capt. Mike Downing of the Hollywood station. “We move a platoon of 25 officers in from Metro.”

In part because of its greater numbers, the NYPD was able to stage what McCrie calls a renaissance of policing in the 1990s. New York today is considered a relatively safe city. The latest figures show New York below Los Angeles in all categories of violent crime except robbery, which is about the same in both cities.

The NYPD’s philosophy, McCrie said, is to keep patrols relatively thin, while maintaining the capacity to quickly mobilize a huge police presence at large public gatherings or disturbances.

To maintain such a massive force, New York buys its officers more cheaply, allowing the city to get more police officers for less cost. Starting salaries for an NYPD officer are 70% of an LAPD officer’s. There is also a large gap at the top of the salary range, with LAPD officers earning considerably more.

LAPD officers are slightly upper-middle-class: Their starting salaries are well above the local median household income. In contrast, the NYPD’s salaries remain a little below, making the police force slightly lower-middle-class.

The LAPD has long thought of itself as an exceptionally lean, busy and efficient police force, one that relies more on the resourcefulness and skill of its officers than on raw numbers. LAPD officials to this day maintain that their officers are more hard-working than New York’s.

But recent statistics paint a different picture.

The LAPD receives about 365 calls per officer yearly, while the NYPD gets about 311 per officer. But if Angelenos beat New Yorkers in terms of demands made on their police, statistics suggest that the NYPD is more responsive. An NYPD unit is more likely to be dispatched in response to calls, and the NYPD sends out 117 units per officer per year compared with the LAPD’s 98.

Given Los Angeles’ vast distances and the relative sparseness of the force, LAPD officers end up relying on a triage approach to calls.

On busy nights, they zoom among serious incidents at the expense of less urgent calls--”chasing the radio,” in department parlance.

As a result, keeping response times from soaring is a constant concern for LAPD commanders, and other police functions are eclipsed by the pressure to keep response times in check.

Along with a greater workload, LAPD officials have long prided themselves on efficiency and high productivity.

But FBI statistics from 2000 undermine that belief. Total NYPD arrests rose during the 1990s in response to changes in police tactics under former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, while LAPD arrest rates, due to a combination of factors, fell.

As a result, NYPD officers in recent years have made arrests at nearly twice the rate of LAPD officers, jailing about 20 suspects per officer per year, while LAPD officers arrest 11 suspects per officer per year.

But the LAPD catches the most serious offenders more often. In categories of murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary and auto theft, Los Angeles officers make 2.6 arrests per officer per year, more than double the 1.2 made by NYPD officers.

LAPD spokesman Lt. Horace Frank said the difference reflects deliberate policy. The LAPD and NYPD have approached quality-of-life crimes in different ways in recent years, with the LAPD emphasizing prevention over arrests.

The 1990s saw other changes that served to smooth away the old municipal differences.

For one thing, the Los Angeles police chief was placed more directly under the direction of the mayor, as has long been the case in New York City.

Some saw it as an assertion of civilian control over the department. But it was anathema to some LAPD insiders who treasured the LAPD’s traditional insulation from political influences.

“When I was in the academy in the 1940s, it was drummed into us that we were a nonpolitical police department,” Davis said.

“You held your head high and you did what you thought was right, regardless of what people thought. It became part of the culture of LAPD.”

Recent changes have been to the department’s detriment, Davis said. But others, such as Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn, who will select the next chief, seek even greater civilian control over the LAPD.

Perhaps the most profound difference is that whoever is picked to be chief in Los Angeles inherits a department subject to extraordinary control by the federal government.

Faced with the threat of a lawsuit, the city in 2000 made a series of promises to reform the LAPD, including new measures such as data collection to measure potential racial profiling, and an officer tracking system to keep tabs on discipline.

The promises are embodied in an agreement, called a consent decree, under which the LAPD’s promises of change are overseen by a federal judge whose power extends into many areas traditionally the domain of law enforcement executives.

Neither New York candidate has had to deal with such a situation, which represents a unique complication to whoever gets the job.

The decree--an agreement between all parties to promote reform--mandates a variety of new safeguards, auditing and tracking functions within the LAPD bureaucracy.

Implementation is costly in terms of dollars and personnel, and poses a host of tricky practical problems, including how to remain effective in fighting crime while remaining in compliance.

But despite the particular complexities of the LAPD, the primary role of the new police chief--to fight crime and rally the troops--will remain central to the new chief’s job, said Berg, the former LAPD commander.

Despite contrasting backdrops against which they ply their trade, police “still have to catch the bad guys,” said LAPD Deputy Chief David Kalish, adding:

“East Coast, West Coast--the business of cops and robbers is more similar than different.”