As most of us are aware, a great many city jobs are getting cut because, like the state, LA has serious money troubles. So, shouldn’t the Los Angeles Police Department also have to take a hit to their personnel along with the rest of the city’s agencies that are dealing with layoffs and hiring freezes?
In an editorial in this morning’s LA Times, the paper has answered the question with a resounding NO.
The opinion may prove to be an unpopular position given the number of city workers who are getting furlough days, or worse, bounced out of the workforce altogether.
Yet I agree with the Times.
For decades, Los Angeles had the lowest officer to resident ratio of all of the nation’s six largest police departments, a fact that did not serve our city well. In 2006, for example, New York City had a 228 to 1 ratio of residents to cops. Chicago had 216 to 1. LA had 426 to 1.
Over the years, the department coped by instituting its now famous command-and-control paramilitary model that resulted in such methodology as SWAT and the helicopter pursuit, all of which other departments came to emulate.
Yet it is also the same model that led to the kind of entrenched problems and abuses that broke most infamously into the open during the Rampart scandal.
Doing something to raise the numbers was one of the most important changes that Bill Bratton told me he felt he had to make when he first came the the LAPD, if he was to institute the reforms to the department’s so-called culture that he believed were necessary. He cited the out of kilter officer/resident ratio as being one of the elements that led to the attitude within certain quarters of the department that produced Rampart.
“It [became] all about control,”Bratton said in January of 2003, during my very first interview with him, (and his first for any LA print news outlet since his arrival as chief). “It was all about controlling the community, not working with the community. It starts out as the desire to control the criminal component of the community. It ends up spreading to all the aspects of the community.”
Chief Bratton fought hard to raise the number of uniformed officers on LA’s streets, and, at the same time, while crime stats dropped, the relationship between the police and the communities they served began to improve. There is still farther to go in the twinned realms of community relations and…let’s just call it…the less productive side of the department’s culture, but one thing is for sure, we cannot possibly afford to go backward.
Here’s how the LATimes described that same issue in this morning’s editorial:
After years of toying with expanding the size of the Los Angeles Police Department, advancing and then retreating when a limited funding stream evaporated or the economy turned sour, Los Angeles has begun to make some headway. It has been an important development. A growing LAPD, together with smart deployment decisions, have helped to keep crime in check and to improve the working relationship between the department and the neighborhoods it serves. A larger number of officers helps the LAPD to move away from the “occupying force”-style of policing that once prevailed in Los Angeles, keeping some communities secure and others geared for confrontation.
Allowing the LAPD to drop in size would be a setback for Los Angeles
Yep. It would. And, as unfair as it might seem given the cuts being visited on others, it would be an imprudent choice to allow that setback to occur—particularly during this stressed and insecure time.
The budget for the LAPD should not be cut. The taxpayers should be forced to cough up even more money.
You read it right.
May I suggest that the city create special tax districts where crime is highest and police presence needed most and raise the property and sales taxes in those particular areas and on those residents. There’s no sense of people in good areas and who conduct lawful lives having to pay for crime control in areas where people make things worse.
Agreed on the first sentence.
Then:
“May I suggest…”
Gee – it actually turned out to be a stupider “suggestion” than I could have possibly imagined.
THANK YOU THANK YOU CELESTE FOR BEING THE VOICE OF REASON. I couldn’t agree with you more. For decades LAPD were the only ones who shared the sacrifice working with fewer officers. Now, because of the incompetence of our council members who wasted millions they expect LAPD to again sacrifice. NO. When Parks was Chief of LAPD we lost over 1,000 officers so its interesting now he’s calling for fewer instead of being accountable for the ones we lost. How he became chair of the budget & Finance committee is shocking to many. E-mails are flying and people are tired of these politicians and the financial mess they’ve made of the city. Yet, they’ll be celebrating in front of city hall today spending $75,000 on a special event waiver and they wonder why word is a ballot measure is going to call to cut their salaries in half.
The truth is most big cities need more and better cops, trained for effective community policing, not fewer. I’d trade deadwood in city bureaucracies for more cops any day…
reg: more cops for community policing
What happened to Bill Clinton’s 100,000 cops program? Don’t tell me that was just a slick political move that didn’t make any permanent change (as though that was really the intention).
First this: Invisible COPS – How Clinton’s plan to field 100,000 new police turned into a pork barrel as usual.
Now, this: Clinton-era community police program gets new life under new Democratic administration (complete with distortions, if you fall for that sort of thing)
Where’s this “change” that I hear about? Yeah, bring back the politics, the pork, and temporary financing that gets permanently shoved on local governments with not much to show for it.
Get in line for the money, LAPD. Just make sure that the union gets most of it.
Ahhh, it seemed like a good idea, but, although it didn’t accomplish its stated goals, let’s do it again!
House votes to revive Bill Clinton’s COPS program
Where are the cops that L.A. hired then? Gone, because the buck was passed from the Democrats to local taxpayers?
Don’t count on that money to help reduce crime in L.A., but relish in feeling good from the thought of spending that money.
When Democrats say that they want to be tough on crime, they don’t mean it and sound more like the ACLU.
Woody – go stuff it. Nobody cares about your idiot ranting.
I’ve given you three possible solutions for affording more police:
(1) Increase taxes in areas requiring more police coverage
(2) Keep using those cops hired under Clinton’s plan, or (3) Get new cops with a similar Obama plan.
Since the last two really haven’t worked and will not work, try the first one.
My plan is like a gas tax. Those who use the roads pay for them. Those who require more police get to pay for them.
Your plan is like taxing people in wheelchairs to maintain the interstates.
quit trying to make sense woody or reg won’t understand, or he will refute you with a simple insult and think he won the debate.
We’re a woefully underpoliced city, even once we reach the 10,000 figure. I’ve heard Bratton make convincing pitches that we really need 12,000 before he (and now his successor) can stop shuffling cops around to where they’re needed most, angering people like the affluent Westsiders who argue they pay way more in taxes than they get back. That may be, but if there’s violent crime elsewhere the whole city suffers. However, as a result there has been an apparent upswing in property crimes in the less-policed affluent areas, from the Palisades to the hillsides to parts of the W. Valley; with increased focus on those and community activism, it seems more cops are being put back there and a new station was opened out near your way in Topanga. It’s a tight situation, but would only get worse with fewer cops.
The Times was right (for once) in editorializing that we need to keep up police hiring toward the goal – though not without making a dig at Villaraigosa for being responsible for the mess we’re in now. (Not sure that’s true: where were Parks and the rest of them on the Budget Committee?)
Still, this half-hearted endorsement does buck the Police Protective League and its conservative head Paul Weber and his gang, who want to preserve the salary and benefits of current cops instead, and have put out scare stories in fluers and emails, tactics similar to what the LAFD union head’s Pat McOsker has been doing by the way.
McOsker was at this morning’s Council meeting siding with the union workers who argue that the June deal (not sure it it WAS a deal or tentative pact) must stand, even though it’s been proven fiscally irresponsible by new nunbers and continuing revenue declines. Wrong: much as I don’t want to lose any firetrucks or vital responder services, the LAFD will have to find internal ways to cut costs.
Those councilpeople and officials who’ve been siding with LAFD and LAPD the unions against the mayor on this for political reasons, the Zines and Trutanich’s, have to put the needs of taxpayers above their own politcal one- upmanship against the Democrats, for once.
As for where to cut in other services: seems the Council is finally getting down to brass tacks. Even Beverly Hills significantly cut back library hours and some other services to preserve its famed police dept. force. (Don’t know if they’re being required to take any furloughs etc., but they’re a much richer city than we are demographically and in terms of business revenue especially.) Among other big cities, isn’t San Francisco looking pretty pot-holed lately, for all of Newsom’s touting his financial prowess? And they couldn’t even help with the Station fire, pretty pathetic. We’re not the only ones who have to make hard choices.
“There’s no sense of people in good areas and who conduct lawful lives having to pay for crime control in areas where people make things worse.”
Just FYI, plenty of people in “bad areas” lead lawful lives. That you don’t realize that speaks volumes about your prejudice against the poor.
I’ll also add that the people you are trying to stick with the bill are the most common victims of crime. Next time we hear Woody accuse liberals of not caring for victims of crime, let’s remember that he would like a policy where if your block is victimized by more crime, it costs you more money. We can call it Woody’s Victim Tax.
Woody would love our very own Carmen Trutanich, City Atty, whose graffiti injunction and I assume other ideas are pretty much what Woody’s espousing here: if you’re unlucky enough to be growing up in an area with more graffiti vandals than most, and if you’re caught “hanging” anywhere near them, you can and will be treated like a criminal, too, in some “end of the earth scenario” he’s painting. Wish WE could send him to Alabama or Georgia (forgot which one Woody lives in)
We’re a woefully underpoliced city, even once we reach the 10,000 figure.
I agree. New York City has some 36,000 police officers. The land area of LA is greater than that of New York City by some 30 square miles and the population of LA is a little less than half of NYC. The number of police is woefully small.
People in high crime areas wouldn’t be able to afford a tax increase. Literally not afford it, not meaning that it’s an inconvenience, which is what rich people mean when they say they can’t afford it. So, because the cost of everything would go up in high crime areas via a sales tax, people would have to commit even more crimes to pay for goods. The results would be disastrous, and would make the LAPD’s job 20 times harder. You’re an idealistic fool, Woody.
It’s the first time I’ve been called idealistic, but you guys regularly call me a fool.
However, I’m no fool because I don’t want to have to pay for other people’s problems.
What do other cities do that get completely taken over by poverty and crime? After the criminal culture drives out the decent people through higher taxes for their self-created problems, the only people left are those that you say can’t afford the taxes.
Not ony do those who remain have to pay for expanded police services, they now have to pay for everything else, too. They do it somehow. Newark comes to mind, although I’m not up to date on changes to that city. I guess they drop all the art and poetry programs.
I’m also reminded of the Watts riots in which people looted and destroyed their own neighborhoods. How stupid. It’s hard to hold sympathy for people who ruined their own homes and businesses and forced good people to leave. At least those responsible all got new TV’s in the process. I hope it was worth it to them.
Woody, you’re an idealist. The definition of idealism is to believe in things that won’t work. Raising taxes on the poor? Fuckin’ stupid.
Woody, poor people will continue to riot, and everyone else will pay for it. That’s life. Grow up. Be glad you have what you have. Be glad you don’t live in Watts. I think if you spent a little more time taking inventory of what you do have and a little less time graveling over the benefits that the poor get, you’d be a happier person. Give it a try.
RIP Patrick Swayze.
I certainly had the “time of my life” watching your perfectly sculptured bod on the big screen. You’ll be missed.
Gava Joe – I know what you mean. Swayze was so hot, I can’t believe I won’t get to enjoy his sexy loins anymore. I’m going out to rent Ghost right now!
Sisco, do you live in Watt’s???
The Mayor’s threat to cut LAPD is a typical chicken-s***t response and exactly what I would expect from the egocentric fool we allowed into the Mayor’s Office. Villaraigosa is doing the the same thing the Sheriff does when his budget is threatened; he says he’ll have to let more people out of jail. Usually that strategy succeeds in forcing the County to come up with the necessary Benjamins to solve the problem. Unfortunately for the Mayor of Failure, the man who couldn’t pass the Bar Exam, there’s nobody to force into providing more money for a failed City.
Cutting LAPD and Fire services will only do one thing, it will make life worse for those who are least able to protect themselves, and by that I mean the regular people who live in the north, south and east of Los Angeles. The Westside will just hire more wannabe cops aka private security firms.
So our Chicken-S***t Mayor of Failure will continue to photo-op his way through the destruction of the City’s finances with more pathetic platitudes like “Shared Sacrifice” and will bail out of Los Angeles before the end of his term to take up some highly paid job as a lobbyist for SEIU – they own him anyway.
Trutanich was right when he said the ERIP solution would have worked if the Mayor had the muscle to make it happen when it was first talked about. Now it is too little, too late. The Mayor could no more get the unions to agree to ERIP than he could convince that bunch of hand wringing indecisive useless council members to do something, anything, to solve the City’s problem.
The problem is really not that hard to understand; the City pays out $1M more than it receives, every week. It pays out most of it’s budget in salaries. LAPD and the Fire Dept are but only 2 of many other City departments, and it’s in those departments where the deepest cuts need to be made. Slash Parks & Rec, Building & Safety, Department of Transport, and the City’s own private police force, and you can balance the budget no problem. But this Mayor hasn’t got the brains or guts to do it.
And before I finish, let’s talk about that ‘Shared Sacrifice’ crap. First of all, I wonder how much the Mayor’s Office paid to some friendly PR company to come up with that meaningless catch-phrase? Second, why is it that the Mayor’s Office has expanded it’s staff of highly paid deputies and assistants by 26%? Where’s the Shared Sacrifice there?
Los Angeles Magazine was right to put Villaraigosa on their front cover with the word “Failure” across him. That’s what he is, a good time Charlie, and a abject failure when times are hard.
No, I don’t live in Watts.
“Mayor of Failure” is so catchy, Kelvin.
Kelvin, hello, hello. the mayor is the one adamantly opposed to cutting the #’s of cops at LAPD; re-read the Editorial, for once they get it mostly right: this is about his wanting to keep his promise to grow the force to 10,000 (and he’s fought to put the tripled trash fees toward same, at least to public safety vs just being swept into Gen’l Fund), while the PPL is what’s more analagous to how Baca’s operating. The PPL wants to retain all current benefits, salaries & perks, while the Mayor (as editorial details) says sorry, we have to cut back for now, which will allow us to retain the officers we have on duty and expand to the min. nec’y number, until the overall budget situation improves. — It’s the PPL and LAFD Union/ Pat McOsker that you need to address your grievances to.
(I’m not defending the mayor here per se, but just insofar as he’s echoing what Bratton says and wants — as Randy Paul says, our numbers vs. NYC are ridiculous, and it’s amazing that Bratton’s as successful as he’s been w/ his Comstat or whatever it’s called, the shuttling around business. But that’s wearying for the cops and for the communities.)
Kelvin, just read your comment a little more carefully, and don’t see how Trutanich (who you regularly speak up for) was right saying the ERIP plan would have worked a few months ago but now it’s too late. The opposite seems to be true: that we’d have been locked into a bad situation, given new numbers and continued decline in revenue.
MAYBE the mayor, Garcetti and all the rest of them should have been tougher then about furloughs and layoffs (and no doubt the whole bunch including the self-styled budget hawks like Parks, Zine, Smith, and the CFO/CLA whoever, should have sent out sirens years ago), but it’s NOT true that the June proposal would have worked out splendidly if etched in stone at the time, and frankly, it’s dumb for Trutanich to say that when he’s supposed to defend the Mayor’s position vs. a likely lawsuit from the unions.
Sounds like he is, like you, more focused on the mayor with hatred and on grandstanding even when he makes no sense, than focused on what’s best for the city. (All while he announced right off the bat, as reported here, that he wants to ADD 200 cops fully equipped with cars and fancy gadgets, and admits he’d need to hire upto 100 high-priced specialist lawyers — Rocky had allowed half that to fade away by attrition, as ordered for budgetary reasons — before the ofc. can actually handle more in-house cases. Right now, he’s still farming them out to the same firms, whatever he claims.) DON’T get me started on this guy, I wish there were a one-way slow bus to Alabama for him.
Hey, I’m not saying that the people in high crime areas have to pay for more police any more than the anyone else saying that they have to have collision insurance on their cars. But, if they want the protection, they (those who need it) would have to pay for it. If they can’t afford the costs of more police, then make do rather than tell others to pay for the problems of their own making.
Rob Thomas can kiss my ass. That degenerate fool is a friend of Pee Wee Herman on Facebook.
Woody, still wouldn’t work. Dumb, unrealistic idea.
Good dialogue boys. First let’s not forget Mayor Hahn included in his budget back in 2003 to add 320 cops. But can you believe those arrogant council members voted NO and Antonio was part of the group. Mayor Hahn wanted to put on ballot a 1/2 cent sales tax for police late 2003. The council voted NO including Antonio again even though when Sheriff Baca tried to do it for the entire county and %’s from the city were all in favor. Baca’s lost out by only 2% points. Antonio and city council were deceitful saying the trash fee hike was for police. Its been increased twice and now they want to do it again because of all the pipe breaks. Over $137 million of that trash fee hike goes directly into general fund. Antonio only wants to get to 10,000 police so he can say its his only big accomplishment even though its well known throughout the department that officers do not like him or any of our politicians. They go to their funerals for photo ops but how often do you see them support them in the media? Hardly ever.