Fewer Broken Hearts

Los Angeles will end 2003 with fewer homicides than in 2002, reversing a three-year climb that last year put the city ahead of all others in the country for sheer numbers killed. By this time last year homicides had reached 623; this year at mid-December, the count was 477, down 23%. The decrease is undeniably good news. It’s just not good enough for those 477 victims and the shattered families and friends they left behind.

Few stories capture the senselessness of this ongoing slaughter like the death of Laudeina Salazar. On Dec. 12, an errant bullet from a street fight 100 yards from Salazar’s South Los Angeles home tore through her closed door, felling the 39-year-old mother as she decorated her Christmas tree with her 5-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter. Salazar died two days later, the second young mother in as many months to be slain in front of her children.

Usually in homicides it’s the parents who bury their children, not the other way around. A group called MOM -- Mothers on the March -- this month trimmed a tree for the L.A. Police Department’s 77th Street station. Each ornament commemorated a son or daughter lost to violence in the area. The tree is heartbreakingly laden.

Last spring, then-new Police Chief William J. Bratton promised to reduce homicides by 25% in 2003. (He lowered the goal to 20% when the City Council rejected Mayor James K. Hahn’s plan to hire additional officers.) Criminologists are cautious about reading too much into short-term trends; a drop in homicides can depend on factors as out of a police chief’s control as a gangbanger’s shaky aim or a trauma surgeon’s steady hand.

But this year’s change is significant enough to support Bratton’s continued overhaul of the LAPD. His tactics include assigning officers based on computerized crime mapping, a technique pioneered in New York City when he was police commissioner in the early 1990s and widely credited with contributing to that city’s prolonged drop in homicides, almost double the decline seen nationally over the last decade.

But tactics alone aren’t winning New York’s war against crime. Three successive mayors have thrown money at the problem as well, hiring and equipping additional officers even during tough budget years, even if it has meant raising taxes. New York City has 36,300 officers, one for every 220 residents. Los Angeles has 9,130 officers, one for every 404 residents.

Like the rest of California, Los Angeles is facing daunting budget woes. It is also facing homicide numbers that remain unacceptably high. Bratton must continue to set tough goals and bring the total down by policing smarter. But if Los Angeles is ever to have a turnaround as dramatic as New York’s, it is going to have to find the will to hire more cops to do the job.