Warren Christopher : Bringing a Negotiator’s Finesse to LAPD’s Community Policing Policy

Warren Christopher is the picture of self-effacing understatement.

Lean and measured in dress, speech and manner, the 65-year-old chairman of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department chooses his words carefully. Yet he conveys the impression that he is both at ease and exceptionally direct.

This diplomatic skill befits a man who has won plaudits as a superb negotiator in many arenas, not the least of which was as deputy secretary of state in the waning days of the Carter Administration--when he played a key role in arranging for the release of U.S. hostages from Iran.

Christopher, a North Dakota native, now earns his livelihood as chairman of Los Angeles’ blue-chip O’Melveny & Myers law firm. But he has had a long and distinguished career in public service.

It began upon graduation from Stanford Law School in 1945, when he clerked for former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and included stints as a deputy attorney general in the Johnson Administration and vice chairman of the commission that investigated the causes of the Watts riots.

Following the uproar over the videotaped police beating of black motorist Rodney G. King last March, Mayor Tom Bradley asked Christopher to head a citizens’ committee to look into the problem of excessive force by LAPD officers.

Outfitted with the mayor’s subpoena power, Christopher, his nine fellow commissioners and a volunteer legal staff of 60 put in some 16,000 hours over 100 days, subjecting the LAPD to withering scrutiny and producing a measured look at a complex organization.

The commission, which concluded that the LAPD tolerated excessive force, produced a number of hard-hitting, practical suggestions. These included expanding the Police Commission’s staff and its ability to give the Police Department effective civilian oversight, and increasing the police chief’s accountability by limiting him to two five-year terms. The proposals also included a far-reaching plan to institute “community policing”--a concept even the commission’s admirers admit is hard to define.

Question: As City Council scrutiny of the Christopher Commission report continues, some are saying the council will pick and choose among the various recommendations. Are you comfortable with the way this is moving forward?

Answer: I feel that there has been solid progress on the implementation of the recommendations. Sometimes a commiss-ion’s report simply disappears. But this one seems to be remaining the center of attention. Of course, it’s too early to tell (what the City Council will do) because they’ll be taking action beginning (this) week. But the indications are they’re going to be considering the whole broad range of recommendations . . . . That wouldn’t preclude them from leaving out one or two . . . . The council is a political body . . . . It’s only healthy that they put their imprint on it and that there be a discussion . . . . But I don’t see any indication of a piecemeal approach.

Q: One of the commission’s most far-reaching recommendations was that the LAPD should change its style of policing to something called community policing. What does community policing mean?

A: . . . . In many respects, it’s an attitude. . . . One of the police officers testified that--either now or in the recent past--they have taught at the Academy that police officers shouldn’t apologize . . . If you apologized, you eroded your authority in some way. That struck me as being the wrong attitude for police officers to have--especially when frequently they interrogate people who are innocent, and especially when some of the interrogation is done through prone-outs or other techniques designed to make people angry--or certainly uncomfortable . . . When we talked to citizens, when I talked to church leaders, one of the words that they seemed to be hoping for from the police department was respect . . . . So I think part of it’s attitudinal. Part of it is where you put your emphasis: Whether you put the emphasis on arrests and response times or whether you put the emphasis on (crime) prevention and dealing with . . . how well the community is kept up, solving problems like graffiti and broken windows . . . .

I was very skeptical about the concept in the early part of our testimony. I wondered whether it might just be a slogan. But as the evidence came in, I had to conclude that there was something tangible and workable there. I’m sure you’ve seen or heard about this statement by 12 chiefs who met a month and a half after the Rodney King episode. These are not philosophers, . . . these are chiefs from the major cities in the country. (He quotes from a joint statement they issued) “Police agencies across America are moving toward a community-based style of policing.” And here’s their definition: “This style of policing values partnerships (between police and the citizens), problem-solving, accountability and a service orientation . . . . “

Q: When you talk about dealing with the service problems of people, what are you talking about? Somebody’s problems dealing with the welfare bureaucracy?

A: . . . . You can’t expect the police to solve all the community’s problems . . . . But there are a number of problems that are very much law-enforcement-related: a lack of street lights, abandoned buildings, which are the source of crime or drug problems--just the general disrepair of a community. There are many instances, I think, where a police officer has to be . . . an activist . . . to clean up the area, to get rid of obvious sources of crime.

Q: The police officer is in the field and he’s working a neighborhood characterized by the conditions you just outlined. What sorts of things should he do?

A: He has to get in touch with (the other appropriate) departments of the city and say, “Look, this is a problem for your department. Come down here and fix these streets. Come down here and fix these street lights.” And if he doesn’t get action, I think the chief of police has to go to the mayor and say, “Look, Mr. Mayor, we can’t deal with this problem all alone. Our officers are trying, but it’s going to require a commitment from some other departments of the city.”

Q: So he’s functioning as an advocate for the community.

A: That’s right. An activist.

Q: Is that what you see as the heart of this community policing?

A: I wouldn’t want to say any one thing is the heart of it, because I think that backs me into too narrow a corner. It’s attitude. It’s a service relationship. It’s certainly respect. It’s being close enough to the community so that, when you go into that area, people regard you as not somebody who’s just jumped out of a car, but somebody they’ve got enough confidence in to say, “I think if you go down two blocks, and look for a black Volkswagen . . . that was the car that was involved in the drive-by shooting.” . . . So often, I think, the community is so wary of the police officers that they freeze up.

Q: The commission makes the point again and again in its report that the LAPD has relatively few police officers compared with other cities, and you also tell the history of the LAPD and its efforts involving community-policing that, in a nutshell, peaked in 1979, when (Chief Daryl F.) Gates said, because of budgetary constraints, we’re not going to be able to do this as much. What are the budgetary realities? The commission does not say we need more cops flat out, but it seems implicit.

A: . . . I would start with redeployment before I immediately bought into the concept of the need for additional officers. . . . Indeed, many in the Los Angeles Police Department would say one of the best things you could do for the department is to more or less stabilize it at its present size or to have the numbers grow gradually, because we are still reaping the problems of this very large, 1,500 (officer) expansion--without enough training officers.

Q: Would the redeployment increase those assigned to patrol?

A: Right. You would also make patrol a more desirable place to be . . . . As patrol is now, people are anxious to get out . . . .

Q: Where do you take the police officers from to put more in patrol?

A: You certainly would take some from the emphasis on paperwork. I don’t know whether you can take any from the special task forces or not. But there’s a tremendous amount of time spent on the recordation of the numbers games that police officers say they’re constantly involved in.

Q: This is numbers of citations, numbers of arrests?

A: Right. You should talk to officers about the amount of time they spend filling out forms. Sometimes they say, particularly in the training area, quite meaningless forms. I don’t want to be an expert on deployment . . . but before thinking that we should immediately assume a massive change in size was essential, I would certainly try whatever you could achieve through . . . minimizing the amount of paperwork. I think, in many places in our society, we have too many levels. Businesses find that they can cut out a level without losing a lot.

Q: You’re talking about decentralizing the police department. There are two competing notions here. One is that to pull off this fundamental change in values in a military-like organization, you need a strong leader; at the same time, you’re saying decentralize control.

A: That was one of the most interesting discussions we had in the commission . . . . How can you have greater accountability and get your message across with decentralization? But those on the commission who were most experienced with management said the only way you can do it is through decentralization. You’ve got to decentralize, give somebody responsibility, hold him accountable, but don’t make him go by the book . . . .

Q: If you’re measuring results, what would you be looking for? Clean streets?

A: I think you’d be looking for the satisfaction of the community--something that’s hard to measure . . . .

Q: The history of some of the community police experiments in the LAPD is that there was a rank created, called senior lead officer, who had responsibility for managing the Basic Car area and community meetings. Is that what you think would work?

A: I’m not sure that the community meetings would work . . . . I’m sensitive to the idea that you can get a community meeting together, but you probably can’t get it together every week or every month . . . . It probably requires a more informal relationship than somebody putting on a sport coat or geting dressed up to go to a community meeting. You have to see the people where they live.

Q: The cost of this experimentation with community policing, in the past, has been pitted against the cost of maintaining rapid emergency response time. A few years ago, there was a controversy in which minority communities were saying they were being given short shrift on response time. Clearly that was a community concern. I get back to this question of allocation. How do you get away from being able to respond rapidly to emergencies, when the LAPD is already selective about which 911 calls it responds to?

A: There was a differential response- time problem there (with cars allegedly taking longer to respond to emergencies in some minority neighborhoods than in some predominately Anglo neighborhoods.) It’s hard to justify a differential response time. The LAPD, I think, only responds with a car to 26% of the calls they get--the lowest in the country, which is, as you say, quite selective. But if the (community policing) concept has value, people will put weight on their closeness to the police officers and think they can get better responses by perhaps calling the station or calling the police officer at the number he gives them on his card, rather than running everything through 911.

Q: Can you have the same rapid response and community policing with the same size force?

A: I can’t answer that question, but I certainly think they ought to try. And if we can’t, then we ought to increase the size of the force. I do not think it’s necessary to sacrifice good policing in order to have these other values. Indeed, I think these other values are the essence of good policing. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be prompt responses to emergencies.