Readers React: LAPD shouldn’t be solely in charge of crime stats

To the editor: The Times is to be congratulated for uncovering a de facto coverup of crime statistics by the Los Angeles Police Department. Reporters had to sift through nearly 1,200 serious violent crimes to prove the pattern. (“LAPD misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes as minor offenses,” Aug. 9)

Among many others, I have been pressing the city for a decade to recognize the conflict of interest when the LAPD is simultaneously in charge of making arrests and defining whether they are serious or minor. That gives power to the department to manipulate crime data to promote either the image that violent crime is falling or rising.

These barometers of public safety are so important that they should be calculated in a manner that is beyond public question. We should not be manipulated either by an exaggerated politics of fear or by sunny reassurances that our crime rates are falling due to successful city and police measures.

The city should end the conflict of interest and establish an independent office capable of the scrupulous collection of reliable data. A consensus should be reached on often vague terminology, and professional social scientists should be charged with reporting the data, perhaps through the inspector general’s office.

A city where officials have touted computerized data as the foundation of law enforcement deployments cannot afford even the image of manipulating the numbers.

Tom Hayden, Los Angeles

The writer is a former state senator and Assembly member.

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To the editor: Requiring employees to attain increasingly ambitious goals is only reasonable when the goals are realistic. When LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and his administration year after year order their subordinates to reduce major crime, officers are placed in a no-win position.

Certainly, thoughtful and efficient deployment of LAPD resources is one way to reduce crime. But after five years under Beck and with finite available assets, that approach can only go so far.

What other strategies are available to the rank and file? Officers cannot be everywhere, they cannot hire additional officers and they cannot compel residents to be law abiding. Nonetheless, they are under unrelenting pressure to reduce crime.

Beck should realistically assess the achievable potential of the LAPD to reduce major crime and sets goals that fall within those boundaries.

Carolyn Magnuson, Long Beach