Stop L.A.’s Crime Engine

Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton announced last month that violent crime fell 13% in 2004 -- criminals assaulted, robbed or raped about 6,500 fewer Angelenos. That drop is impressive, and good news for James K. Hahn’s reelection campaign, which promotes the mayor’s crime-fighting record.

But I doubt that many black and Latino residents in the city’s poorest neighborhoods feel any safer today than they did a year ago, or will five years from today, unless radical changes are made in the way we think about crime prevention. Arrests in L.A. have risen 13% in the last four years. Yet despite the fact that tens of thousands of young men and women have been imprisoned, areas like South Los Angeles remain plagued by a cycle of violent crime that began in the mid-1960s. The smallest decrease in crime last year was in South L.A., whose residents are caught in a double bind. They want more police protection but despair as their sons are arrested, convicted and sent off to prison in record numbers. If national trends continue, one in three African American males born today will spend at least one year in state prison.

A fixation on arrest and crime statistics to gauge police effectiveness is standard in law enforcement -- and politics. But the question police chiefs should be asking is what strategies will both prevent crime, short-term and long-term, and help stabilize L.A.’s communities.

Most experts agree that between 15% and 25% of the historic national drop in crime from 1992 to 2002 was attributable to harsher sentencing. Demographic changes -- the decrease in the number of 18- to 25-year-olds, who commit most crimes -- a healthy economy and other factors account for the rest.

A 15% to 25% decline in crime is significant. But consider the cost. With 162,000 inmates, California has the second-largest prison population in the world (behind China), and a $6-billion-a-year corrections budget. In 2001, the cost of fighting crime in California -- cops, courts, jails and prisons -- was $17.5 billion.

The heart of the crime problem in the state is its prison and parole systems. Last year, a panel commissioned by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger described the corrections system as “dysfunctional,” lacking “uniformity [or] transparency,” burdened by “too much political interference, too much union control, too little management courage” and the highest recidivism in the nation. Until last year and the appointment of the reform-minded Jeanne S. Woodford as director of the Department of Corrections, the department’s sole mission was to punish prisoners, and its $1.5-billion-a-year parole program reflected exactly that. Currently, 65,000 to 70,000 parolees a year end up back in prison, with one-third of them from L.A. County. An additional 35,000 county residents are on parole.

The problem begins to crystallize when you consider that 93% of everyone who enters prison in California will be released, and that the vast majority of them will return to places like South L.A. where social services to assist parolees reentering society barely exist. As a result, ex-cons are unprepared to do anything other than commit another crime and go back to prison. A 1997 Department of Corrections survey of parolees found that 85% were chronic drug or alcohol abusers, 70% to 90% were unemployed, 18% mentally ill and 10% homeless.

Parole policies and laws that effectively stigmatize former inmates compound the problem. Until recently, the operating philosophy of the state’s parole system was to return parolees to prison no matter how minor their violations. Typically, they return to their communities with little or no money. Employers routinely shun them. Laws deny them driver’s licenses, access to public housing and other services.

The effect on communities is devastating. “As you incarcerate a few people from a neighborhood, crime rates drop,” says Todd R. Clear, director of doctoral studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “But when you remove ever higher numbers [for low-level crimes], crime starts to go up at a very high rate because you’re destabilizing a lot of [supportive family and financial] relationships. When high numbers of [parolees] are also being returned, [the neighborhood is hit with] a double whammy.”

Bratton has been far better than most big-city chiefs in acknowledging that “we can’t arrest our way” out of crime and in supporting prevention and intervention programs in South and East L.A. Laudable as his efforts have been, they don’t come close to solving the problem, let alone challenging the indifference and hostility to intervention and rehabilitation among politicians, law enforcement and citizens. If Bratton wants to leave a genuine legacy of long-term crime reduction and community stabilization in Los Angeles, he’ll have to lobby hard for changes in California’s prison and parole policies, not just make more arrests.

Traditionalists will contend that this is not a police chief’s job. But what if big-city chiefs began to think and lead boldly? Bratton has headed the New York and Boston police departments and now runs one of the country’s most fabled forces. He has the national media’s attention and the respect of his colleagues. The public is skeptical of and often uninformed about methods of reducing crime other than hard-nosed policing. It needs high-profile education on these matters, and who better to do the teaching than law enforcement leaders who can convert the public and give politicians fearful of being called “soft on crime” the cover to reform the corrections and parole systems.

Otherwise, L.A.’s meanest streets will get meaner.