Keeping L.A. safe

This week’s news that Los Angeles is likely to finish the year with the fewest homicides in nearly half a century should be both a source of satisfaction and a challenge to city and county policymakers.

Barring some dreadful event between now and New Year’s, as The Times’ Joel Rubin and Robert Faturechi reported Monday, the city will record fewer than 300 homicides in 2010, the first time that number has fallen below that mark since 1967, when the city’s population was less than three-quarters of what it is today. Similarly, in areas patrolled by the county Sheriff’s Department and in which the population also has burgeoned, there have been just 159 homicides over the last 12 months.

To measure the progress those numbers represent, it’s only necessary to recall that as recently as 1992, there were 1,092 killings in Los Angeles. Because homicide is far less likely to go unreported than other crimes, it is reasonable to assume that other crimes of violence and against property were far higher than actually recorded that year. The year now ending will be the eighth in a row in which crime in Los Angeles has declined. Violent crimes other than homicide have fallen by 11% and offenses against property by 6%.

The remarkable thing is that the last 36 months of decline have coincided with the worst period of economic distress since the Depression. In some parts of the city and county, real unemployment is running close to 25%, yet areas served by the Los Angeles Police Department have seen homicides fall by nearly a third over the last three years, and communities policed by the Sheriff’s Department have recorded declines of 40%.

Serious historians and analysts now acknowledge that the reasons crime — and, particularly, homicide — waxes and wanes are complex, involving an interplay of policing strategies, criminal justice policies, economics, demographics, social factors and historical forces we cannot easily detect. On the other hand, we know that the three greatest spikes in the homicide rate over the last century coincided with the apogees of the heroin, powder cocaine and crack epidemics, when hopelessness born of isolation and lack of opportunity lured tens of thousands of urban Americans into what amounted to an alternative economy of escapism and criminal predation.

That’s where the challenge arises, because the same economic forces that are straining families and neighborhoods to the breaking point are doing the same to the city and county budgets. We know that as the historically small LAPD has grown to a more reasonable size and as reform chiefs William J. Bratton and Charlie Beck have pursued more flexible, statistically based and proactive community policing strategies, the decline in crime rates has accelerated. Similarly, Sheriff Lee Baca’s innovative community policing and prisoner education programs have had a demonstrable impact.

Now, however, the LAPD must fight to maintain something close to a 10,000-officer force as well as to find funds to pay for needed overtime. The sheriff faces similar strains. The City Council and the Board of Supervisors need to find the money to keep an adequate number of law enforcement officers on the streets for an adequate number of hours, or the gains of recent years won’t be maintained, let alone improved on.

Then there are the homicides that remain. Fewer than 300 killings is, relatively speaking, a triumph, and yet it remains a tragedy, a marker of pain and loss that no one should accept with equanimity. We know, moreover, that more than half of those homicides were somehow related to gang activity. We know, as well, that gang membership, like involvement in the drug culture, is a social inversion born of hopelessness and neglect, a funhouse mirror version of what communities and families would have provided had they not failed under unbearable stress.

Even so, Los Angeles is home to some of the most effective gang intervention programs in the nation. Organizations such as Father Gregory Boyle’s Homeboy Industries and the approaches identified and promoted by civil rights attorney Connie Rice of the Advancement Project have proven track records of success. So too do the proactive community policing strategies that the LAPD has advanced with even greater urgency under Beck.

All of these things, like adequate levels of policing, require money and will on the part of city and county leaders. What can’t be forgotten now is that public safety is the cornerstone of both decency and prosperity.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com