Put 400 officers back on street, report urges

More than 400 Los Angeles police officers now assigned to administrative tasks and other desk-bound jobs should be returned to patrolling the streets in order to bolster the city’s meager police force, according to a report released Monday by City Controller Laura Chick.

The 203-page study comes as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William J. Bratton continue their aggressive push to hire 1,000 officers by 2010 despite a severe budget shortfall facing the city. Bratton largely endorsed the report’s findings but made clear he was girding for a fight with City Council members, whom he expects to use the review as a justification to slow down the hires.

“Let’s make it perfectly clear, I have no intention, the mayor has no intention, of retreating back from the hiring,” he said at a news conference with Chick. “We actually need 12,500 police officers. . . . Even with the 1,000, we’re still short almost 2,500 police officers from what we need in this city.”

The study, conducted by an outside consulting firm for Chick, identified 565 jobs in the Los Angeles Police Department -- many administrative in nature -- that are now assigned to sworn police officers and should be phased into civilian posts over a three-year period.

One of the report’s more striking recommendations was its call to overhaul the department’s crime data analysis unit into an almost entirely civilian operation. Firearm experts in the LAPD, who do forensic examinations of guns and ammunition used in crimes, should also be civilians, the study found. A point of contention, Bratton said, was Chick’s recommendation that the operation of the city’s jail be turned over to non-police officers.

The controller and Bratton acknowledged that the conversion plan would be hampered by the 163 injured or otherwise incapacitated police officers in jobs that should be given to civilians. Those officers, who are exempted from a 2006 policy that allows the LAPD to remove officers from the force who cannot fulfill police duties, will be allowed to remain in their positions until they retire.

Nonetheless, the plan would mean putting more of LAPD’s estimated 9,720 officers on the streets -- something that Bratton, who has bemoaned the department’s undersized force since taking over in 2001, wants to achieve. The department has 24 officers for every 10,000 residents -- about half that of New York, Chicago and Baltimore. And, charged with covering the city’s sprawl over 466 square miles, the LAPD has fewer than 20 officers per square mile, compared with nearly 60 in Chicago and 120 in New York.

Bratton dismissed the notion that able-bodied officers, who have long been assigned to low-taxing desk jobs, would balk at the idea of returning to more grueling police work, saying “there will be no resistance . . . This is a police department that follows orders.”

Converting the positions highlighted in the report to civilian jobs would cost the city about $53 million a year in salaries -- a 25% increase over the funds allotted this year for civilian salaries. But Chick said the move would ultimately save the city about $16 million a year because the civilian salaries would average about $29,000 less than those for sworn officers.

Chick also drew attention to roughly 600 civilian positions in the LAPD -- about 18% of the department’s civilian staff -- that are unfilled, largely because the department lacks the money in its budget to pay the salaries. Though acknowledging that Villaraigosa and the City Council are struggling to close a budget gap expected to reach $460 million in the coming fiscal year, the controller called on the officials to make filling those positions a higher priority.

“Quite often you hear that budget cuts do not affect the LAPD, that they’re getting all the money, that they go untouched,” she said. “That is simply not the case. . . . Who do we think is performing the essential work and tasks that these positions were created to do?”

Chick is not the first official to spotlight the question of civilians in the LAPD. In the early 1990s, then-Chief Willie L. Williams oversaw a sweeping review of LAPD positions to identify that could be handled by non-police. The resulting plan put forth by then-Mayor Richard Riordan to convert hundreds of positions was never fully carried out because of budget constraints, changes in leadership and other complications.

On Monday, City Councilman Bernard C. Parks, a former police chief who chairs the council’s budget committee, could not be reached for comment. Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, the committee’s vice chair, said decisions about which, if any, of the vacancies to fill would be part of a much larger, brutal debate over how to spread dollars far enough to cover the city’s basic responsibilities. Greuel added that she agreed with the mayor and chief that officers reassigned to street duty should not offset the campaign to hire 1,000 officers.

In an odd way, the elimination of civil servant positions that the mayor has indicated might be necessary in departments throughout government could ultimately be a boon to the LAPD. If positions in other city departments were eliminated, civil servants with seniority working in those jobs could be transferred to unfilled assignments elsewhere in city government. The mayor and City Council have a considerable say in designating which positions have a high priority and could funnel staffers into the LAPD vacancies.

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joel.rubin@latimes.com