Gates Blasts Plan to Cut Officers : Budget: Police chief says proposal would increase emergency response time and impede efforts to catch violent criminals.

Mayor Tom Bradley’s budget proposal to gut a Police Department overtime account and cut hundreds of officers from the force would lead to a disastrous increase in emergency response time and severely curtail efforts to catch violent criminals, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates told a City Council committee Thursday.

Gates made his comments during an appearance with his designated replacement, Police Commissioner Willie L. Williams of Philadelphia. Williams let Gates do most of the talking on budget specifics, and told council members to consider the outgoing chief’s remarks “very, very strongly” as they struggle to close a deficit projected to reach $183 million in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

Sitting shoulder to shoulder with Williams as they addressed the council’s Budget and Finance Committee, Gates said the city should maintain a force of at least 7,900 officers, instead of letting the staffing level drop to 7,654 by attrition, as proposed in Bradley’s $3.8-billion budget.

The police officials were followed by a parade of department heads who recited a litany of city services that would suffer under the proposed budget. Fire Chief Donald O. Manning predicted a “catastrophic” increase of more than three minutes in responses to medical emergencies in parts of the city if staffing is reduced at 14 stations. Planning Director Con Howe said the lack of equipment such as computers would hamstring some programs designed to streamline his department, as suggested this year in a management audit.

The police reductions dominated the daylong proceedings, as Gates told council members that service reductions may be greater than predicted.

Earlier assessments failed to account for the reduction of a police overtime fund from $16 million this year to $2 million next year, Gates said. That would, in effect, reduce the force by 315 officers, Gates said, in addition to the 358 officers expected to leave this year and 320 next year because of attrition.

That would leave the force nearly 1,000 officers short of last year’s level of 8,332, the chief said.

“To take all that (money) is disastrous,” said Gates, who has said he will leave office in June. “That takes away all the flexibility from our new chief and from the management of the department.”

The time it takes to respond to emergencies will increase to 10 minutes from 7 1/2 minutes, even without considering the loss in the overtime account, Gates said.

A police computer that projects response times has not been programmed to consider such a scenario “because we never thought it would get that bad,” said Cmdr. Larry Fetters, who helped assess the LAPD budget.

Reductions in overtime would not only slow emergency responses more, but hamper murder investigations, many of which are conducted largely with overtime funds, Gates said. “Then you are going to have murderers out there on the street who just go free,” he added.

Williams, before his committee appearance, said he had not been aware that the department was facing the possibility of such severe reductions. Still, he added, “I can’t say that I’m upset. It’s the chief’s job to come in and live with what’s there.”

Williams, in Los Angeles to meet with various community groups, said he faced a similar dilemma in Philadelphia as the mayor prepared to cut 400 officers just as Williams was being sworn in.

The chief-designate also acknowledged that his earlier pledge to shift officers out of “soft” desk jobs and into the field may be difficult to achieve.

“That is a slow change,” Williams said. “It will not occur overnight. It has to be programmed over two or three years.”

After the hearing, Williams added that Los Angeles already has put more civilians into jobs once held by officers than has Philadelphia. “I know that Los Angeles already has about twice the ratio of civilianization,” he said.

The question of civilianization came up several times during the hearing as a possible solution to some of the staffing woes anticipated under the new budget. Gates reacted angrily, telling the committee he was “irritated as hell” at such questions, which he claimed unfairly imply that he has been a bad manager. The department has led all others in the nation in using civilians in desk jobs, he said.

As he hurried to his office later, Gates said he did not blame Williams for saying he would attempt to put more officers in the street. “I think it is a question of not really knowing what has taken place in the past,” Gates said.

Department heads who spoke after Gates and Williams said they were equally distressed at proposed reductions in their departments.

Fire Chief Manning said that cutting staffs roughly in half at each of 14 stations around the city would lead to slow responses to medical emergencies--from about five minutes per call to more than eight minutes per call.

Manning called this catastrophic, noting that the American Heart Assn. recommends that initial life-support teams should arrive at emergencies in less than six minutes.

“We are going to bring this to a crisis if we go to any lower level of service,” Manning said.

A decrease in staffing, rotated among the city’s fire stations during the last year, delayed several emergency responses. In one highly publicized case, a man died during a fire at the Jordan Downs housing project. He might have survived if the so-called “rolling brownouts” of fire stations had not been in effect, Manning said.

The fire chief renewed his call, first directed to the mayor, to form a citywide assessment district to let property owners increase their taxes to maintain fire service.

Manning suggested that the action might cost about $14 per household yearly.

But council members said that their constituents would look dimly on new taxes. “If we charge people for every damn service, they are going to wonder: ‘What am I paying property taxes for and what am I paying utility taxes for?’ ” said Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who chairs the Budget and Finance Committee.