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Posted 3/22/09
A LARGER FORCE, BUT AT WHAT COST?
As crime falls, LAPD’s growth threatens other city services
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Even as he pushes a $74 million deficit into the next fiscal year, when the shortfall is predicted to rise to $433 million, recently-reelected Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is sticking to a long-standing campaign promise, made well before the financial meltdown, of adding 1,000 cops to the city’s payrolls. Other than for a few minor adjustments, public safety is off the table.
Yet what’s left over is pitifully small. Police and fire together consume seventy percent of revenues, so balancing the budget on the backs of other departments might call for as many as four-thousand layoffs, affecting key services including sanitation, public works, libraries and parks. It’s why City council members Greig Smith and (former police chief) Bernard Parks suggest putting the brakes on LAPD’s expansion until the economy improves.
But Hizzoner won’t hear of it. “Let me make something clear,” Villaraigosa said. “I am not talking about the slowing down of our police recruitment effort. These numbers are irrefutable; L.A. is safer than at any time since the 1950s.” Police Chief Bratton quickly chimed in, saying that throttling back on police hiring wouldn’t solve things, and that in any case the city council had already signed off.
Everyone knows that crime in the City of Angels has been dropping for years. Only question is, did the number of cops have anything to do with it? Poring through a decade’s worth of FBI crime statistics yielded some tantalizing clues.
Overall, violent crime fell twenty-four percent between 1997 and 2007. Many large cities experienced dramatic declines: forty-seven percent in Miami, forty-eight percent in Chicago, fifty-one percent in New York and a stunning fifty-five percent in Los Angeles. Murder (including non-negligent manslaughter) also fell, with Chicago and New York enjoying plunges of forty-three percent.
What accounts for the remarkable improvement? Most criminologists point to socioeconomic factors. Some also credit the incapacitative effect of so-called “three-strikes” laws, which imposed substantially longer prison terms on violent felons and recidivists. And yes, the police probably played a role. But it wasn’t because of numerical strength.
Indeed, police staffing has receded most everywhere. As NYPD lost sixteen percent of its cops (it’s down nearly 2,000 officers, and still shrinking) murder also declined, by a full forty-three percent. In sunny L.A., where the officer/population ratio fell by seven percent, murder tumbled an impressive thirty-seven percent.
If we believe City Hall and Parker Center, L.A.’s improvement is mostly due to Chief Bratton and his vaunted Compstat. But as the chart below demonstrates, violent crimes peaked in 2001, so the decline was already underway when Bratton took over in October 2002 (he replaced Acting Chief Martin Pomeroy, an LAPD retiree who stepped in after Parks left.) The homicide free-fall did start in 2003; however, its previous path was very unstable, so attributing the drop to a change in command -- it was Bratton’s first year -- is highly questionable.
While police around the U.S. are simply trying to keep the cops they’ve got -- NYPD recently reduced its force by 1,000 and canceled an academy class -- Mayor Villaraigosa seems determined to proceed. Already underway, the hike of 1,000 officers will increase coverage about eight percent, from 2.5 to 2.7 per thousand, a boost that in a city as as large and spread out as Los Angeles can’t yield a visibly increased police presence. As we mentioned in an earlier posting, LAPD’s relatively generous salary and benefits schedules make it impossible to reach the far higher levels of coverage that citizens in the eastern U.S. enjoy (depicted in the above chart, it’s nearly twice L.A.’s per capita.) Anyway, what would be the purpose? Their rates of violence are no better.
Short of tripling or quadrupling the number of officers, something that no one’s suggesting, adding cops will have little effect on crime. Sure there will be more arrests, but those that really count require solid evidence -- which in stranger violence often means catching someone at or near the scene -- and cooperating witnesses. How a marginally larger force will accomplish these ends no one’s said. What it will do is further erode other city services. Villaraigosa didn’t mention this tradeoff during his 2005 campaign, but things were different then. Now that we’re all a bit poorer surely he would be forgiven a midcourse correction. After all, a civil society requires more than police.
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UPDATES
06/10/11 By contract LAPD doesn’t pay overtime; instead, officers must take time off when they accrue 96 hours. An interim agreement extending this to 250 hours is set to expire. If it’s not renewed, warned Chief Charlie Beck, so many cops will be sent home that he will have to fill patrol slots with detectives and officers from specialized units.
01/24/11 Camden’s layoff of nearly half its police force will have an impact, experts say. Even so, the reductions actually bring the community more in line with average nationwide staffing of about 2.1 officers per 10,000.
01/19/11 Due to a budget crisis Camden, New Jersey laid off 168 police officers, nearly half the force. A third of firefighters were also let go. Among the newly unemployed are a street cop with 10 years on the job. To maintain patrol coverage many supervisors have also been demoted. Local, state and Federal agencies are also pitching in.
12/21/10 While the city of Camden readies to cut its police force by half, the county plans to slash the D.A.’s office by a quarter, including 15 of 62 attorneys and dozens of investigators and support staff.
12/09/10 Six persons were shot and three killed in a ten-day period following the November 30th. layoff of 167 Newark cops. There has also been a spate of carjackings. In a bid to halt the violence the local prosecutor is turning to the State Police and national guard (see 12/1/10 entry).
12/04/10 Facing a budgetary crisis, Camden, New Jersey plans to cut 180 police officers from its 373-officer force on January 18, a reduction of nearly half. Similar cuts would befall other city services. Most of the poor, crime ridden city’s budget comes from the state, which has its own problems. State police are already in town to help.
11/11/10 In lightly patrolled Los Angeles 93 able-bodied cops are rotating through clerical assignments because LAPD is 120 civilians short. Worse, 90 more cops will soon get taken off the streets to help staff a new, manpower-intensive jail to replace an old one run by non-sworn staff. But there’s simply no money to hire anyone but cops.
10/13/10 Unable to come to terms with the police union and facing an $83 million deficit, including an $11 million shortfall in the police budget, Newark is laying off 163 of the 184 police officers hired during the past four years.
10/13/10 To save $2 million per year Pontiac, Michigan is disbanding its police force and turning over law enforcement to the Sheriff’s department. It will employ all current officers but not be bound by their contract.
05/19/10 Facing a budget deficit, Dallas, which is striving to increase police coverage, is considering furloughs and pay cuts. But the police union favors stopping hiring and allowing attrition to occur.
04/12/10 Critically short of overtime funds, LAPD is forcing homicide detectives to take days off instead. With killings on the rise, that’s affecting clearances.
02/17/10 Forced by budget cuts to save on overtime costs, LAPD is shifting hundreds of officers from specialized units to patrol.
01/22/10 Determined to replace police officers who leave the force, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa released a plan to trim the city’s civilian workforce by 1,000 positions.
01/18/10 To catch up with its DNA backlog LAPD’s lab needs 36 new analysts. But the city’s fiscal crisis has made hiring them impossible.
05/19/09 City, to lay off 1,200 employees, defers goal of a 10,000 officer force, allows replacing 480 expected to leave
05/06/09 City Council votes to lay off 400 employees and eliminate 1,200 positions
04/30/09 LAPD Chief Bratton’s interpretations of crime data challenged
04/06/09 Villaraigosa warns that major layoffs coming
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