Desk Jockeys to Crime Fighters

Fictional police detective Sgt. Joe Friday roamed Los Angeles streets at all hours of the day and night, an aggressive, hard-boiled investigator who stopped at nothing to solve crimes and arrest bad guys.

In the real Los Angeles Police Department, detectives make up 20% of the work force, but accounted for less than 2% of arrests last year, according to department officials.

LAPD Chief William J. Bratton, an unabashed fan of the original television series “Dragnet,” wants to change all that, and more.

Since he took office five months ago, Bratton said he has been surprised to find many police divisions have one or two overnight detectives, despite the fact that most violent crime occurs between 10 p.m. Friday and 2 a.m. Monday.

Bratton found detectives who spent more time during the day behind an office desk than on the streets.

“I was amazed that it’s daytime and there are 50 or 60 people jammed in a room,” he said. “I just didn’t get the sense that there was a lot of in-the-field activity.”

Many LAPD detectives do not contact victims until days after the crime. Many do not see suspects until well after an arrest, and are likely to be in the office before the morning commute and out ahead of the afternoon rush hour.

The result, Bratton said, is a force dependent on patrol officers to make arrests and solve crimes. “And if that is the case,” he said, “we’re in trouble for the fact that black and whites had almost no time to deal with crime. We’re constantly dealing with 911 calls.”

Bratton is laying the groundwork for a major overhaul of the detective squads. By the time the makeover is complete, he expects detectives to be slapping cuffs on suspects, intensively covering nights and weekends, and taking part in all interrogations.

Department brass has not addressed those issues for many years because they had stopped asking the key question -- “why?” -- said Cmdr. James McMurray, a former detective heading up an internal review of detective deployment.

“It’s a great question,” McMurray said. “And eventually, after you’ve done it the same way after 33 years, you stop asking that question.”

The review has concluded that the LAPD’s 1,500 detectives are overly specialized, isolated from the rest of the department, and often not concentrated where crime happens, said Patrick Harnett, a consultant studying the issue.

A former high-ranking New York City police official and veteran detective, Harnett said that the LAPD also has turned many of its investigators into glorified paper pushers, who review files to make things easier for prosecutors but leave the crime fighting to others.

“The job of detectives has shifted away from searching for people who have not been arrested yet,” Harnett said.

He said most cases don’t require the expertise of detectives, whose prime objective should be to go after “the predator kind of cases,” where a suspect continues to commit crimes until they are forced to stop.

Police union President Bob Baker said Bratton’s reforms are overdue and achievable under the current union contract, even if it means putting more detectives on night and weekend duty.

But he worries that chronic personnel shortages will adversely effect those plans.

“There’s a real simple issue here,” Baker said. “There’s 27 detectives in each division, and when you factor in vacation and days off, you end up with about 21 to 22. So, when you look at their workload and start looking to move bodies to nights, something has got to give.”

Mike Thrasher, a supervisor who oversees homicide and gang investigations in the LAPD’s Hollywood Division, said his detectives work daytime hours because that’s when criminalists and prosecutors are on the job.

“This is not an LAPD problem,” Thrasher said. “This is a California justice system problem.”

Shifting more investigations to uniformed patrol officers could also be problematic, he said, because it could take officers off the streets as they build a case. McMurray said the concerns are valid, and he is exploring ways to reduce paperwork and streamline the handoff of cases to prosecutors.

The ultimate result of the changes, Bratton said, will be to give detectives a larger role in the department.

Part of the problem, McMurray said, is that since the 1970s, the department separated the detectives from the rest of the command structure, which inhibited movement in the ranks.

The result is that few top-ranking officials have detective experience, and there is nobody to champion their cause.

That’s why Bratton said he will name a deputy chief in charge of detectives in the coming weeks, the first time such a position has existed at the LAPD in decades.

“Detectives in this department don’t have the same stature,” Bratton said. “In New York, they would kill you to get the gold badge.”

The deployment issues won’t be settled completely until after the Compstat crime-tracking system -- Bratton’s major innovation -- comes on line later this month.

“The staffing had better be where the crime is,” Bratton said.