LAPD chief takes time for overtime

William J. Bratton, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, stopped by the editorial board offices this week to discuss his second-term agenda. Some highlights:

Is there too much overtime or not enough?

William Bratton: The issue facing the department right now is the issue of overtime. There’s a feeling I think on the part of some members of the City Council that the department does not do a good job on its overtime control. I have totally the contrary opinion and we’ll be making that case very forcefully: that we have historically been underfunded in overtime, going back to — Mr. Riordan in 1994 established an overtime budget of 1.2 million hours. How they arrived at that nobody seems to know, but that seems to be for 14 years that’s the figure that the city seizes on every year no matter what our respective needs. And we have been spending consistently at a rate several hundred thousand hours more than that. And as a result every year we end up in deficit. The city has historically underfunded us at the beginning of the year, knowing full well that at the end of the year they’re going to have to make us whole...to balance the budget.

Jim Newton: And as you get some of these new officers coming on will that overtime start to come down?

William Bratton: No, that’s one of the things people need to understand. Additional officers doesn’t mean less overtime, because additional officers — particularly since almost all of them are going into patrol — means increased numbers of arrests. We also, with our intense focus on crime reduction: Crime reduction means overtime. [...]

The great debate at this juncture is going to be around the issue of the budget. We will, uh, be putting in place some CompStating systems to make the case that we are tightly controlling our overtime, that the area that we have the largest expenditure of overtime is in our court overtime. That’s impacted by two things: contract and crime. Contract impacts it in that there’s a provision that officers have to receive on-call overtime even if they’re not in court, so that they’re standing by if they may be summoned to court. And that’s probably our largest expenditure of overtime; that’s contractually mandated. And then the second expenditure is our crime focus, that we make a lot of arrests; and those arrests — although they’re flat this year, reflective of the fact that crime’s down so much — have been trending up. And the cost of overtime as you prosecute cases is part of the cost of doing business. You make arrests, you put people in jail and that helps you reduce crime. So we’re making concerted efforts to tighten that up to the best of our ability. That’s the largest cost in our overtime budget. And we’ll be meeting [District Attorney Steve] Cooley to see if there’s some way he can, if there’s a way to reduce the number of officers who are brought in on a particular case, or who are kept on call in a particular case.

David Hiller: Chief, curious. This overtime, is it a combination of bringing in other people on an overtime basis or is it continuity on working a case, that if somebody’s there all day....

William Bratton: There’s a lot of — that’s a good question. There’s a lot of mitigating factors so in terms of explaining it to a budget person who has no operational expertise, that often falls on deaf ears. And so what I’m doing both in our meetings with the City Council — and from this point forward every time there’s a meeting with the City Council, in addition to my civilian budget people the operational will be there, explaining the operational exigencies...

David Hiller: I’ve had that problem in budget meetings. I can feel your pain!

William Bratton: Well, for example if an officer in the last half-hour of his tour of duty makes an arrest, an officer’s going to have to stay around for several hours, and the consent decree mandates have increased significantly the amount of bureaucracy around an average arrest. There’s a lot more that we do now than we did years ago. Through the consent decree as well as other obligations. We get a lot more scientific evidence retrieval, a lot more forms to be filled out. The average seizure of narcotics now is, there’s an incredible amount of paperwork involved with it. So you have overtime that’s related to arrests, both in terms of the time of arrest if it goes beyond the tour of duty. We have overtime that meets operational needs so that when we have a homicide detective at 3:00 in the morning, the homicide detectives are called in from home, so they’re on overtime until they start rolling into their normal tour of duty. And with homicide you don’t keep passing cases from one person to another. You assign it to people who carry it from beginning to end. And even in that area we’re, the expenditure of overtime in that area has really paid off. This year we’ll have over 400 [thousand hours] that’s a phenomenal drop from 1992 when we had 1,100. And it’ll be several hundred less than when I came through the door five years ago. Some of that reduction is that we’re doing much better with clearance rates.[...] In South Bureau our clearance rates are like 70%; it was as high as 80% I understand. National average on clearance rates is about 50% to 55%. In South Bureau those clearance rates are reflective of getting detectives to the scene very clearly, of a new organizational structure where you have district attorneys, U.S. Attorneys, FBI agents, everybody all working in one unit down there. That’s been so successful that we’re expanding that to Central Bureau and probably to the rest of the city.

But the overtime is, there’s an attitude in the city that somehow overtime’s a dirty word. Police departments cannot function without it, and by increasing the size of the department you don’t diminish the need. Cause we actually spend very little money on what we call discretionary overtime, where a commanding officer, because he’s got so few cops working decides he wants to put extra cops on. We just don’t give them that discretion.

3/12 of fight?

Jim Newton: Does 3/12 hurt you?

William Bratton: 3/12 is not the best, it’s not the worst. It’s what I have. It uh, can’t be seen in isolation as a shift. You’ve got to take it in the context of: It’s a recruiting tool, because most police departments have it or something like it; that it is uh, a significant impact on our recruiting capability; it has other issues for us, but in terms of wanting to work with it, are other shifts better? Probably, but the horse is out of the barn...

Jim Newton: There’s no going back on it?

William Bratton: Five years ago when they were looking at 3/12 they should also have been looking at 4/10, but the instructions over there were not to look at anything but the 3/12, and as a result that’s what they ended up with. Uh, 4/10 is probably a better shift — four ten-hour days that um. But as you look around the country, same thing; every department in America’s got different types of things; in Boston they’ve got 4/2, that I began with in 1970 and 35 years later you still have got a 4/2. Under 4/2 shifts there you work midnight to eight, you’re off eight to four, you’re back four to 12, you’re off 24 hours, do it again, then you’re off two days. Then you start it all over again. Those are killer shifts, but the cops like it; if you tried to get rid of that there they’d mutiny. Same thing here. So the 3/12, Council Member Parks keeps banging away on that, all the letters went out from the other Council members referenced the bad old 3/12 — that that’s the reason they don’t have more cops. The reason they don’t have more cops in their areas is that five years ago they decided they didn’t want to hire cops; they decided they wanted to spend money on something else. So it took them a couple years to decide they wanted more cops. Now they’re getting more cops. The 3/12 shift is not going away; that’s the reality.

Trash for cops

Jim Newton: When the mayor got the trash-fee hike, the mayor was quite clear that that money would be dedicated to hiring new officers. If the city now runs into trouble with its budget, whether it’s the cell-phone tax or whatnot, or any other budget trouble, is that pledge still good? I mean is your ability to hire those 1,000 additional officers protected against any, any other confusion or problems in the budget?

William Bratton: My understanding is that it is. That was the commitment made to the public, and I would not want to be on the City Council and renege on that, no matter what budget problems the city is facing. That, the sense is that the public feels that it’s been lied to by the Council and the political leadership in the city for so many years. That’s why they’re reluctant to support things like the trash fee hike. So I’d like to believe that the growth of the department is assured.

The problem with that growth being ensured however, is that if I don’t get support behind that — for equipment, technology, and frankly even infrastructure support; I’m getting a thousand additional cops but I’m not getting additional sergeants, lieutenants, captains to — the department’s growing by a huge number but in the infrastructure, my spans of control are just getting larger. I’m getting a younger workforce, but I’m getting a larger span of control at the same time. So managerially, organizationally, that’s problematic. And so as we go into this budget issue that’s going to be one of the great debates. That’s why we’re focusing so heavily on overtime, because many in the city think more cops means less overtime. Doesn’t work that way. Because we’re not really using overtime to cover for lost cops. We’re using overtime for court, using overtime to support all these parades that the City Council doesn’t want to charge anybody for, we’re using overtime for a whole variety of circumstances. That doesn’t necessarily give me the flexibility to put more cops here for a couple hours, a bunch of cars over here for a couple extra hours. I’m looking over the next two years as very lean times, even more lean than what we’ve had.

Driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants

Jim Newton: We’ve written a fair bit about these driver’s license proposals here and in New York. From a purely law enforcement perspective, is there, do you have a view about whether it would be helpful to issue licenses to people without them having to prove citizenship. I guess the question is from a road safety point of view, does it make a difference to you whether people who are here in the country illegally have access to a driver’s license?

William Bratton: My perspective on that is pretty clear, pretty consistent. I have been supportive of the various initiatives of Gil Cedillo, and each of those there have been significant improvements of what would be required, and I think the latest version would require a full set of fingerprints, would require a photograph, would require a prior proof of identity, address, etc. And the crux of the issue is would that person get a license that looks exactly like a citizen’s license if you will, and could that be used for identification purposes other than driving, in other words for an airport security checkpoint. Those nuances have not been looked at, but my reasons — for illegal immigrants or people who are here — wearing my police hat I have a tremendous problem with hit and runs, and part of that is caused by people who are uninsured, unlicensed and illegal. And I, we, I, based on input from other people at the department, believe that problem would be significantly mitigated if people had licenses, had insurance. They’d be less inclined to flee the scenes of accidents. The issue of somehow this would assist terrorists, I don’t buy that. Any terrorist wants to come in and give us fingerprints and get a photograph and current residence, come on down. That might even get Osama out of the cave.

Jim Newton: All for a California driver’s license.

William Bratton: I know that’s not a particularly popular view here, but I’m looking at it strictly from a City of Los Angeles public safety issue, that I think here it would reduce a major number of hit and runs and the issues that go with that. It would increase my database, because quite frankly there are hundreds of thousands of people here who we don’t have the faintest idea who they are. With licenses I’d have some sense of who’s here.

Freakonomics

Tim Cavanaugh: Does crime really go up during a full moon?

William Bratton: Not that I’m aware of. There’s this belief that it goes up or down. I’ll tell you, you hear this, the idea now with the cooler weather, there’s this sense as reflected in the numbers that we have more murders in the summer than in the winter. But then you have anomalies that uh, you know, out of the clear blue that... I don’t think it has anything to do with warmer weather, it has nothing to do with lead poisoning, it has nothing to do with abortions, and if it does those are very minor influences on the crime rate. What does influence crime is people deciding to break the law, or unintentionally finding themselves in violation of the law.