Part Two - Chief Bratton takes on LA
What’s more, the ugly battle to oust Chief Parks in 2002 had left a bitter racial aftertaste. While the city’s left wing, including new mayor James Hahn, criticized the chief for not making enough progress on the consent decree and on “racial profiling,” the black establishment stoutly defended him, showing that race politics is even stronger than anti-police and even anti–racial profiling politics. After his ouster, Parks promptly got elected to the council from a black district, where he lies in wait to ambush either the new police chief or mayor. Bratton understands the tension. As he told a group of community representatives in June: “Believe me, I had concerns as a white coming in after two black chiefs, and after the controversy of the last removal.”
But in choosing Bratton, the Police Commission showed how desperately the city wants to reclaim policing from race politics. The commission—and the mayor—wanted someone who would put modern management techniques into the relentless service of cutting crime. Bratton had jumpstarted New York’s historic crime drop—bringing homicides down 44 percent and serious crime down 25 percent in 27 months—by holding managers accountable for measurable results: fewer shootings, homicides, and armed robberies, better quality of life across all neighborhoods.
Bratton is fashioning a powerful blueprint for repeating that success, and from the very start he set out to build support for his vision of policing. “In the first few days I don’t think he slept at all,” recalls police union president Bob Baker. “He was at every community meeting in the city.” His message: the LAPD is getting back into the crime-fighting business, and it’s going to win. “For the past five years, this department has been on the bench; it hasn’t even been on the field,” he tells audiences.
He has broken some prevailing taboos to speak the truth. At one community meeting, when activists started complaining about the big, bad LAPD and demanding that Bratton control his cops, Bratton shot back: “Control your kids!” He has stressed that crime-ridden communities cannot expect the police to solve all their problems—that parents and neighbors must take responsibility for stopping gang violence, too. At other events, he called criminals “mental nitwits” and gangs “domestic terrorists.” He suggested that an appropriate response to a suspect who had fled from the police would be to “hang ‘em high.”
Such rhetoric was a shot of adrenaline to patrol officers, but the black elite, still nursing its wounds from the Parks ouster, blew up. Its members declared themselves deeply troubled by Bratton’s language, and the entire left-wing commentariat piled on. Journalist Mike Davis, the Marxist fabulist of L.A. history, complained about Bratton’s plans to attack graffiti, and anti-cop attorney Connie Rice penned an uproarious Los Angeles Times op-ed that reverentially quoted a member of the murderous Grape Street Crip gang who argued that—in essence—fighting graffiti was no different from drive-by shootings: “How they ‘spect us to respect them when they act like us?” whined this sensitive Crip.
But then something remarkable happened. In a scathing editorial, the ultimate arbiter of fashionable opinion—the Los Angeles Times—broke ranks, mocking the black establishment’s “selective war on words.” It pointed out that Bratton’s critics had failed miserably to quell street violence, and it said Bratton was right to call that violence domestic terrorism. In a hopeful augury for the future, the new chief’s lock on the pinnacle of elite opinion has held firm. Not only has the Times’s editorial page consistently backed his calls for more cops to fight crime, but Hollywood moguls Steven Spielberg and David Geffen have donated cash to help update the department’s technology.
Following his New York playbook, Bratton searched for the talent among the command staff. His promotions of Jim McDonnell and Mike Hillman to assistant and deputy chief thrilled the rank and file, for they are tough crime-fighters whom the Parks regime had shunned—both marks of honor in the eyes of the street cop. Such personnel choices have convinced officers that their new chief will back them up for smart, assertive policing. Equally crucial to restoring morale has been Bratton’s decision to return reasonable discretion to the complaint process. “Bratton is tough on discipline,” union chief Baker observes. “But the only thing cops want to know is: ‘Does he care?’ ”
Next, Bratton set priorities, with quelling gang violence at the top of the list. To do that, he put drug and gang enforcement under one command, since gangs dominate the L.A. drug trade. Gang czar Hillman has reenergized the gang units and ordered them to respond aggressively to shootings. “Do it right, do it legally, but don’t wait three days for approval before acting,” he tells them. Once-moribund multi-agency task forces—drawn from, for example, the city attorney, probation officers, and the LAPD—are finally cooperating effectively.
But these policy changes cannot be fully effective unless the beaten-down detective corps recovers its zeal and its mandate for crime-fighting. “In the old days,” says LAPD chronicler James Ellroy, “when you had a murder, the detectives would roll on it till they dropped. They’d work through the night.” Today, thanks to bureaucratic constraints, detectives spend most of their days filing reports on arrests that patrol officers have already made, not on solving crimes. And thanks to the politics of gender, they spend too much of their remaining time on domestic-violence cases, to meet politically correct state mandates.
Bratton’s inner circle is trying to turn them back into detectives. The morning after a prostitute had been killed this August, Deputy Chief Paysinger asked the detective on the case what the vice officers had said about her. The vice officers don’t get in until 2 PM, the detective replied, so he hadn’t spoken to them yet. “They have phones, don’t they?” Paysinger responded caustically. “For Christ’s sake, someone’s dead.” The department is also requiring detectives to go to every shooting, even if no one was killed, instead of showing up only at homicides or near-homicides, as before. As Paysinger explains, “If we don’t have a greater awareness of the most violent of crimes, as purveyors of the peace we’re done.”
The LAPD reengineers are hammering home to detectives how valuable search warrants are as a tool for preventing crime before it happens. “Even if you find nothing, as you search, you may see a parolee at large, or someone who wants to be a witness, or other weapons in plain sight,” says Paysinger. “You’re telling the crook: ‘I will always be there watching.’ ” But until recently, few detectives even remembered how to write a search-warrant request to a judge.
Bratton is using Compstat, the crime analysis and command accountability sessions he pioneered in New York, to reinforce these lessons in proactive policing. A sign in the large Compstat room reads: WHO ARE THEY? WHERE ARE THEY? HAVE THEY BEEN ARRESTED?—the conceptual framework for the weekly Compstat meetings. During those meetings, top brass grill area commanders on their knowledge of crime patterns in their jurisdictions and their plans for solving them. Jim McDonnell, who heads the sessions, reminds commanders about some basic crime-fighting tools imported from New York, such as questioning all suspects about other unsolved crimes. After a gang shooting, he tells them, don’t let your officers mill around guarding the perimeter of the scene; get them quickly into the shooter’s home turf, in anticipation of a retaliatory drive-by.
Besides Compstat, Bratton’s biggest New York policing innovation was to demonstrate the power of order-maintenance enforcement. When he headed the New York Transit Police, his troops began arresting turnstile jumpers and subway panhandlers—until then, viewed as harmless victims of poverty—and caught serious criminals. As NYPD commissioner, he cracked down on public drinkers and graffiti vandals, and by so doing moved once chaotic neighborhoods toward greater civility and safety.
Bratton is showcasing order-maintenance (or “broken-windows”) policing in three Los Angeles neighborhoods—downtown’s Skid Row, the sadly deteriorated Macarthur Park in Rampart, and Hollywood, with its hookers and hustlers. Skid Row (also known as the “Nickel” for the cheap flophouses that vagrants once used) is the greatest challenge.
The most amazing discovery a first-time visitor to the Nickel will make is that its few legitimate residents think it looks good—compared with before Bratton arrived. Until you’ve stood on Fifth and Wall, you haven’t really seen a vagrancy problem. Nothing in New York’s most chaotic days in the 1980s comes close to the squalor and madness that have taken over block upon block of the warehouse district. Addicted men and women fill entire streetscapes, some sitting in lawn chairs outside their tents, others sprawled out facedown on the sidewalk. Pushers peddle drugs hidden inside cigarette boxes spread out on the sidewalk. Outside the women’s missions, teenagers strut threateningly, while their newest illegitimate siblings are parked in baby carriages on the sidewalk. Transvestites in bikinis gesture defiantly at the occasional passing squad car.
A few hardy toy and fish wholesalers remain. Holly Sea Food has sold fish downtown since 1923, but over the last few years, one-third of its neighbors have left. “You can’t sell your business or hire help,” laments owner Rick Merry, in his air-conditioned wood-laminate office. “We’ve had an ad in the Times for a bookkeeper. Candidates will just drive by without stopping. They later call: ‘I’m sorry, but I won’t work there.’ The female postman put in for a transfer. Ladies were leaning up against her truck, defecating. The bad part is: my wife works here. Guys will walk right up to the gutter and whip it out, and there she is, staring at someone’s privates.”
Four months ago, a vagrant’s tent across the street from Holly’s warehouse exploded in flames as the occupant slept inside, payback for a bad drug deal. The target would have died had the surrounding bums not pulled him from his tent.
Downtown L.A.’s “homeless” problem may be unparalleled in scale and concentration, but its causes are the same as everywhere else: politics and misguided “compassion.” The lawless bum life-style depends on the subsidy of self-proclaimed do-gooders, who provide everything legal that a street person could desire. At 6 am one day this summer, a tangle of garments and half-eaten plates of food, which volunteers had doled out the night before, strewed an entire sidewalk block. The “homeless” left the city’s sanitation service to clean up what they didn’t want.
The brightly colored tents that fill the sidewalks were another gift of the homeless advocates—a gift intended to foil law enforcement, on the theory that, if the vagrants could claim ownership of their street domicile, rather than scrounging it from dumpsters every night, the police would not be able to remove encampments from the streets. The success of this strategy waxes and wanes with the politics of the moment.
Even before Bratton arrived, the former commander of downtown’s Central Division, Charles Beck, had tried to stem the anarchy. “I was abhorred by it,” he says. “It drove me nuts. My dream was to clean up downtown L.A. You need the collective will to say that this conduct is not allowed any longer.”
But Beck made little progress: advocates had the City Council under their thumb. The shrillest activist, Alice Callahan, could call the council and say: “Do you know that an officer just told a homeless person to wake up?” and the police would get an incensed phone call in ten minutes, recalls officer Daniel Gomez. Business owners, by contrast, could tell the council: “We have a serious problem,” and the response would be, “Yeah, whatever.”
Now, though, some newly elected council members recognize the truth: conditions on the Nickel are unacceptable in a civilized society. Their election to the council could not be more timely. Chief Bratton needs all the political backing he can get to battle the advocates.
Every Bratton initiative to civilize Skid Row has sparked a lawsuit. The radical National Lawyers Guild sued to prevent arrests of parole and probation violators, while the ACLU asserts that enforcing a law against blocking sidewalks constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment.” Undeterred, the LAPD continues to target drug dealing, violence, and other illegal behavior, without exempting people who choose to live on the streets. A team of officers patrols Skid Row every morning, referring people to housing and services, yes—but also making arrests for lawless conduct.
Bratton’s attack on street disorder has dramatically improved public space downtown, according to local businesses. “Eight months ago, there were 50 tents across the street,” says fish merchant Rick Merry. “You couldn’t walk on the sidewalk.” To a newcomer, the sidewalks still look perilous, but the regulars see tremendous progress. Patrol cops agree. “These guys [the homeless task force] have done an incredible job,” says officer Robert Duke. “If they stopped for two days, it would be out of control; patrol can’t handle it.”
Developers are taking note as well. They are converting abandoned Beaux Arts office buildings and factories into hotly sought-after lofts, moving ever closer to the heart of the Nickel. If Bratton can continue to fend off the advocates and their judicial handmaidens, L.A.’s architecturally rich downtown may eventually throb with round-the-clock living for the law-abiding.
What Bratton needs most for all these initiatives to succeed is more manpower. In New York, as he and his deputies rolled out one new strategy after another, the department had ample staffing to implement them, and crime plunged immediately—16 percent after six weeks. In Los Angeles, by contrast, Bratton has had to backtrack. He had to dismantle an anti-graffiti squad, because he needed more patrol officers. He has scaled back his crime-reduction schedule from an originally promised 10 percent reduction in crime and a 25 percent cut in homicides in 2003 to a 5 percent drop in crime and a 20 percent cut in homicides. These goals are still exceedingly impressive, and he is already close to meeting them. As of September 13, homicides were down 23 percent compared with the year before, and all felonies were down 3.9 percent. But in his first year in New York, felonies dropped 12 percent.
When the City Council refused Bratton’s plea for 320 new officers this spring, the chief lashed out, citing the urgency of fighting gangs and defending against terrorism. Putting police hiring on hold, he said, is like “placing a telephone call to Osama and saying, ‘Osama, hold off for nine months till we get our act together here.’ ” The Council declared itself shocked by his tone. The Los Angeles Times told the legislators to get over it. When Bratton tried to free up existing cops by allowing them to ignore residential burglar alarms unless verified by the owner or alarm company, since over 90 percent of alarm calls are false, the council balked again, and the compromise that the mayor engineered—allowing homeowners two false alarms—will just engender more paperwork without unburdening patrol.
It is critical to L.A.’s future that Bratton succeed. Effective policing is our most powerful urban reclamation tool: when cops make inner cities safe, commerce and homeownership revive, as happened in Central Harlem following its 80 percent drop in homicides and burglaries in the 1990s. Crime reduction also improves race relations. Bratton himself argued to a community meeting this June that as long as the black and Hispanic crime rate remains so high, whites and Asians—as well as some police officers—will continue to fear suspicious-looking blacks and Hispanics.
To get at least some of the manpower he needs, Bratton has a source at his fingertips: the 300-plus officers engaged full time in consent-decree duty. In addition, he could profitably redirect the thousands of hours that all other officers and commanders spend on consent-decree mandates, which undoubtedly add up to hundreds of full-time positions.
One of the best urban-policy moves that the Bush administration could make, since energetic policing is not a local issue but a national one, would be to free the LAPD from the consent decree. By doing so, the administration would also be boosting homeland security: alert cops are the country’s second most important defense against another terror attack, after robust intelligence. That defense is useless, however, without enough cops to go around.
The consent decree is based on outdated stereotypes about the LAPD. If Attorney General John Ashcroft thinks that, without federal control, the LAPD would abuse people’s rights, he should send his Justice Department lawyers to talk to people like the Reverend Leonard Jackson of the First African-American Methodist Episcopal Church. Asked if the police treat innocent black men abusively, Jackson responds emphatically: “No, no, no. They don’t still work like that. It’s been drummed into the heads of officers that everybody has rights.”
Urban policing could be raised to a new height of professionalism by taking the shackles off the LAPD and letting Bratton turn the department into a national model of twenty-first-century policing, as it once was for the twentieth century.
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