Detective Imbalance Questioned

Saying residents deserve better protection from crime, a group of Los Angeles City Council members said Tuesday they want police to explain why more detectives aren’t assigned to areas in the city with the worst homicide rates.

Reacting to disclosures in The Times of unequal workloads for homicide detectives across Los Angeles, Councilman Ed Reyes and five other council members proposed giving the agency 60 days to report.

“This city is treated like it’s two cities,” Reyes said, with affluent areas often receiving more than their share of services. “If we don’t end that culture in city departments, we’ll never reach our full potential.”

Several other council members said they were distressed to read The Times’ analysis finding that areas of Los Angeles that experience the most homicides have fewer homicide detectives in proportion to the number of cases.

That means individual detectives had to juggle many more cases in the Police Department bureaus that cover South and Central Los Angeles, leaving them less time to pursue leads and making them less likely to find suspects.

Meanwhile, homicide detectives in safer and more affluent areas such as the San Fernando Valley had smaller caseloads and more time to work on cases.

“It seems like we are not allocating our resources where crime is, especially in the area of homicide,” Councilman Eric Garcetti said. “We don’t want to micromanage the Police Department.... But we do want to ask tough questions.”

The imbalance has varied over time, but bigger workloads in high-crime areas have persisted in all but a few of the last 12 years, and have contributed to a buildup of more than 2,000 unsolved homicide cases in South Los Angeles, according to the analysis.

LAPD Chief William J. Bratton has pledged to put police resources where crime occurs. He has changed the deployment of patrol officers, and restructured some detective squads and work schedules. He has made only a few changes to the homicide detective ranks since he took over as chief, and caseload disparities remain severe.

As of this week, homicide detectives in the four stations with the highest numbers of homicides -- the Southeast, Southwest, Newton and 77th Street divisions -- had more than double the caseloads of their colleagues in the four lowest-homicide divisions: West Los Angeles, West San Fernando Valley, Van Nuys and North Hollywood.

“This is a startling revelation,” said Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles), who represents parts of South Los Angeles.

“What is the message for those who live in areas ... most impacted?” he asked. “What are they to think about this ... lopsided approach to deployment with respect to homicide detectives? How is it to be explained in a rational way?”

Ridley-Thomas also questioned assertions by some police officials that competing priorities limit the department’s ability to even out homicide workloads.

“What crime is more serious than homicide?” he asked. “What crime more seriously stigmatizes the city of Los Angeles?.... What leaves people in more grief, whose [lives] are torn asunder, than homicide?”

Rick Caruso, speaking at the end of his term as president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, said the disparities have continued in part because the department’s first priority has been patrol officers.

“Our No. 1 priority is prevention,” he said. “Clearly, another is solving cases. But it is not as important as prevention.”

Caruso said the LAPD will move to achieve more parity in detective workloads.

Bratton “has to come up with that answer,” Caruso said. “If we [the commissioners] don’t feel it’s the right answer, then we say we have to go back and rethink it.”

Council members said they will move fast on the issue.

“I’m appalled,” Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa said. “We’ve got to do something about it.”