Overseas Links Urged for LAPD

The Los Angeles Police Department should assign officers overseas as liaisons to foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies so it can obtain leads on potential terrorist plots affecting the city, according to a panel of civic leaders appointed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

The mayor’s Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness Advisors Council also recommended that the city appoint a “regional recovery czar” to plan for and oversee efforts to restore the city after a disaster, including a terrorist attack, according to the draft report.

The recommendations -- more than a dozen -- are to be presented to a City Council panel on Monday, the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but Villaraigosa is already working on putting them into effect, a spokesman said.

“All of these are innovative ideas that we are trying to move ahead on,” Deputy Mayor Maurice Suh said Friday.

The advisors council includes former Mayor Richard Riordan, former Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, Police Chief William J. Bratton, L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and a dozen other corporate and government executives.

It was appointed after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and no one person appeared to be in charge of the response, said City Councilman Jack Weiss, who co-chaired the panel.

Other recommendations include setting up a system in which Los Angeles companies would provide water, food, shelter and supplies in a disaster.

The idea of assigning officers overseas to boost police intelligence is borrowed from the New York Police Department. That agency has officers in England, Jordan, Singapore, Israel, Canada, France and the Dominican Republic, according to Det. Brian Sessa of the NYPD.

That arrangement gives New York’s counterterrorism unit a jump on information that could help thwart incidents in the United States, said R.P. Eddy, former director of counterterrorism for the National Security Council.

Eddy, who was co-chairman of a subcommittee for the mayor’s council, said that when a bomb goes off in Israel, a New York police detective goes to the scene, collects firsthand information and data from the Israeli police, and writes a memo to his boss in New York that is used to determine whether action is needed there.

“Cops know what cops need to see and what information is important,” Eddy said.

The LAPD has an officer working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and has periodically sent officers to work with Scotland Yard, according to Capt. Gary Williams, commanding officer of the LAPD’s Major Crimes Division.

An LAPD officer was in England during the July 2005 terrorist bombings of the London subway.

“There was some pretty good real-time information that made us aware of what to look for,” Williams said.

Eddy’s subcommittee recommended that the cost of the proposal be shared by several big cities -- including Los Angeles, Miami, Las Vegas and Chicago -- that already work together as part of a group called the Urban Areas Security Initiative.

Suh said the mayor is developing a proposal to deploy liaisons and fleshing out the recommendation to designate a “regional recovery czar.”

Riordan, who chaired the subcommittee that came up with the latter idea, said his experience as mayor after the Northridge earthquake convinced him that a central authority was needed for quick recovery.

“Somebody’s got to be there to make decisions,” Riordan said. “If you have a terrorist blow up half the airport, you can’t have a committee deciding what our protocols are going to be.”

Riordan said the mayor is the ultimate decision maker, but a recovery czar could speed response.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com