Overburdened Police Struggle to Keep Up : Workload: The LAPD is understaffed, ill-equipped for the amount of crime.

VAN NUYS —  It’s Friday night in Van Nuys and things are, in Alicia Wolin’s words, going to poop.

“We’re losing it,” the 38-year-old assistant watch commander says glumly as she watches the unanswered calls pile up on the computer screen in front of her.

Thirteen calls are holding--meaning there is no patrol car available to respond--including four burglary calls, a gang disturbance, a family dispute and a loud party.

The Police Department aims for an average response time of less than eight minutes. What the LAPD doesn’t say is that only potentially life-threatening calls, known as Code 2 High and Code 3, get that kind of attention. For the run-of-the-mill burglary, or the drunk who passes out between the regular and supreme pumps, the response time averages 47.2 minutes, as an overburdened police force struggles to keep up with its workload.

Tonight, 16 cars are ranging over 30 square miles of Van Nuys, but that’s not enough, so a West Los Angeles unit is brought in to help find a missing adult who had threatened suicide. “We’re going to have to hold PMs over,” sighs Sgt. Bradley Kubela, the watch commander, referring to those on the evening shift.

It’s been part of everyday life for one of the most understaffed, ill-equipped big-city police forces in the United States. In comparison with other large cities, Los Angeles has the fewest number of patrol cars per square mile, 1.98. Philadelphia and Chicago have twice as many, and Washington, D.C., has more than three times as many. Los Angeles has 7,808 sworn officers, while New York has 30,061.

Resource problems do not only have an impact on response time and the crime rate. They also have a direct effect on the LAPD’s efforts to change and adapt to 21st-Century mandates that call for a more community-friendly style of police work.

A continuing shortage of cops only exacerbates the tension between forces advocating change and those wary of it. Critics say that giving up the aggressiveness of the old LAPD--which at least had the advantage of making potential lawbreakers think twice--is the height of foolishness when you have so few cops on the street.

Sgt. Joe Cupo, who refuses to live in the San Fernando Valley, where he works, says Los Angeles is becoming “a totally unsafe city.”

“I need another 100 officers to give the people of Van Nuys what I would call full service and a modicum of safety 24 hours a day,” says Cmdr. James McMurray, who supervises the patrol and detective divisions in Van Nuys. There are 290 sworn personnel.

At 3 the next morning, a weary Alan Hamilton frets over his Denny’s eggs and pancakes at the end of his shift. Hamilton had spent the night rushing from one call to another, and now the thin blue line was about to get thinner. “When we go off now, there will be five cars to cover 310,000 citizens,” the officer says, shaking his head.

But the staffing shortage is hardly the only resource problem. In Van Nuys, once a sleepy suburban backwater but now the third-busiest division in the city, police rely on computers so archaic that the Bunco-Forgery Unit can’t download files from a cyber-crook’s home PC. At least one, and often two of the three elevators in the station are regularly out of service.

Combined with air conditioning that has a tendency to go out on the hottest days of the year, and windows in the station that don’t open, it becomes obvious that police work, Van Nuys-style, can be an uncomfortable job.

Sometimes the little things chafe most:

* The captain of the patrol division, Richard Eide, was so frustrated by the buildup of dirt--the janitors clean only one of the three floors each day--that he brought in his own vacuum cleaner to sweep up the watch commander’s office.

* A $5 solenoid that went out on a 20-year-old generator nearly crippled a field command post set up in November to keep an eye on Proposition 187 demonstrators.

* Homicide Detective John Edwards bought his own thermometer to take the temperature at murder scenes because the city doesn’t supply them.

“We’re reverting to the Old West, where you go out and hammer up wanted posters with the butt of a gun,” says Edwards.

The situation is not all bleak. Within the past few months, the department has been steadily replacing their dinged-up old Fords with brand-new Chevy Caprices. Now, only about 10 of the 48-car Van Nuys fleet consists of cruisers with more than 100,000 miles on them.

But critics say the department has a lot of catching up to do after too many years of neglect.

“When I came on the department, the general level of support for emergency services was 33%,” says McMurray, referring to the share of the overall city budget that goes for police and fire protections. “Today it’s 25%.

“To a large degree, I think there’s been some benign neglect on the part of the city administration in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Maybe because they thought they could get away with it.

“When you run an engine at too high r.p.m.’s too long, it will throw a rod. And I think we’ve done that. We fooled them for too long.”

After years of talk about the problems, the resource crisis in the LAPD reached a critical mass with the election of Mayor Richard Riordan. He promised to add 3,000 police officers. But after the first year of a five-year program, the department had grown only half as fast as needed, adding only 192 officers.

One reason is a continuing crisis in morale, which helps explain the departure of about 400 officers annually. “We lost 11.2% of our personnel since November” of 1993, Eide said.

Scenes like the one at Kavanaugh’s bar, where more than 50 cops had gathered to drink Rolling Rocks and eat lobster flown in live from Boston, are becoming more and more common.

“My heart lies with Van Nuys morning watch,” says Eric Eitner, who is being toasted as he heads for greener pastures. Eitner is going to work for the Sheriff’s Department at the Wayside Honor Rancho. “I decided to sit on my ass and get paid more money,” he said.

The most troubling aspect of the exodus is that the officers who are leaving tend to be the younger ones trained in the new style of policing. Eitner was widely considered one of the best street cops in Van Nuys.

Last year, things got so bad in Van Nuys, with personnel losses and the growing workload, that Eide took what some of his colleagues thought was a reckless gamble with his career. He stopped agitating for help and began hectoring.

With backlogs as heavy as 22 calls, it could take hours to get a car to an incident. Cops tell stories such as the one about a citizen calling in a stolen car that was idling in the street. By the time the police arrived, it had run out of gas.

Eide, a tall, ex-serviceman with a ramrod bearing, went to Assistant Chief Bernard Parks three times. “Van Nuys is sinking,” Eide warned.

“I’m not sending you any more people and that’s it,” Parks said, according to Eide.

Ignoring the warnings of friends, Eide decided to call attention to the crisis by announcing plans to hand out commendations to all of his officers for working so hard under impossible conditions.

Van Nuys immediately got another 12 bodies on loan, then more later.

That helped but did not solve the problems. Things still happen like the domestic squabble Linda Gotham is called to settle one afternoon.

Gotham, 35, a tall, serious woman, pulls up to an apartment building and finds Steve Unger sitting on his car, slump-shouldered. Unger says he called two hours earlier. Gotham apologizes.

Unger wants to get his duffel bag from an apartment he shared with a girlfriend. “She asks me to move in with her and she flips out,” Unger says.

“I don’t want him near me,” the woman says when Gotham goes to the door. “He smashed my face into a car.”

Unger denies it. Gotham doesn’t take sides. She gets the bag and takes it to Unger, warning him to stay away. Then she heads off to her next call, thankful that the situation did not deteriorate into violence before she arrived.

Although Los Angeles cops like to think of themselves as the few and the rugged, it’s easy to feel envious of their suburban colleagues.

Once their pay was first in the nation. Although rookie Los Angeles cops still make more than their counterparts in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, they have fallen behind many other jurisdictions.

The beginning pay for a patrol officer with a high school diploma in Los Angeles is $35,000. The beginning pay for a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy is $40,344.

And the city spends only about half as much per resident for policing as Detroit and 64% as much as New York, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Lt. Stan Embry says Santa Monica has a police officer on the scene of a call within five minutes. “A cat in a tree, they’re there,” he says.

“I have a [police] buddy in Simi Valley,” agreed Russ Carr, formerly a training officer, with long experience in the street. “Party calls are a big deal. They get out of the cars and use tactics. We drive down the street and say, ‘Break it up,’ and leave.”

Carr, who has since been promoted to sergeant and moved on to the Pacific Division, questions two young men drunkenly chasing each other down the street one evening. He made sure it was not a robbery and let them go. He could have taken them in for public intoxication, “but that’s so far down the priority list.”

The problems in the patrol division, which includes 207 officers, are not unique. Lt. Richard Blankenship constantly adjusts his force of 45 detectives to keep up with the latest crime trends.

He moved two detectives from burglary, for instance, over to a new unit focusing on domestic violence. After that, detectives got a handle on the domestic violence problems in Van Nuys. But victories in one area always come at the expense of another, and in this case it was burglary that lost.

“The most swamped are the residential and commercial burglary” detectives, said Detective Craig Rhudy. “Many minor crimes and some relatively major crimes never get worked on at all.”

“It used to be fun coming to work,” groaned Supervising Detective Ernie Guzman, who was reading 200 crime reports every Monday morning. Last August alone, there were 255 burglaries and 309 larcenies.

He used to have a team specializing in commercial burglary. Then, that went by the wayside.

Burglary Detective Andy Malkhasian worked 60 cases at a time. His unofficial estimate is that there is just one chance in a hundred that a particular burglary will be solved. Most crimes are cleared by taking burglars who have been caught on a tour so they can point out other houses they hit.

On occasion, cops themselves feel the ill effects of their decisions. “I had a burglary two doors down from me,” says Blankenship. “But I’ve stripped [burglary] down to the bare bones. I’d like to put everything in burglary now.” with the recent addition of cash overtime, blankenship has been able to cut into the backlog of burglary cases.

The squeeze on resources led to some creative problem-solving in Van Nuys. But an initiative to computerize crime reports became embroiled in political infighting over the so-called Valley Molester, who frustrated police while preying on dozens of young schoolchildren.

The troubles began in 1990, when the city began work on a system of crime analysis that would allow police to break crimes down in a variety of ways to help the cop on the beat know what to look for.

The sheer volume of crime--in Van Nuys there are something like 1,700 repressible crimes a month--made the task more urgent.

Detective Malkhasian, who has since been promoted to another division, is one of three men who developed a system in Van Nuys.

By the time the brass Downtown got rolling, the Van Nuys system was already running. It performs electronic pin-mapping, from which clusters of crimes can be analyzed by category of crime, day of the week, method used, and the narrowest of subgroups--say, motor vehicle break-ins that target briefcases.

“[Chief Willie L.] Williams came out and saw it,” said Homicide Detective Steve Fisk, a major user of the computer. “Then they gave them a productivity award. Then they told them to take it down.”

Instead of adapting the Van Nuys system for use in all 18 divisions, Downtown’s Crime Analysis Unit went its own way, coming out with a different system two years later.

“As soon as they released their software package, they told us to shut down,” Malkhasian said. “We told them no. They said, ‘You guys aren’t being team players.’ ”

Robert Stresak, former head of the Crime Analysis Unit, said there were two problems with the Van Nuys system: It was not very efficient, and the city would not maintain it.

So Stresak picked a different system. Van Nuys resisted the new one until last year, when “it all came to a head” over the Valley Molester case, Stresak said.

Because Van Nuys was using a different database, said Stresak, they couldn’t exchange information with other Valley divisions.

“They became a product of their own parochialism,” said Stresak. “They were innovative, but they became shortsighted. They took an extreme position at the expense of the city.”

Ken Tierstein, who helped develop the Van Nuys system with Malkhasian, denied that the molester investigation was in any way compromised by Van Nuys’ computer system. “Our system brought the whole thing together,” he said.

Van Nuys now runs both systems.

The technology gap in the war on crime is most painfully apparent in the Bunco-Forgery Unit. “The thieves are ahead of us on the information highway,” says Lt. Rick Walker.

Looking around his office of 28 people--which recently declined to 24--he notes that most of the computers supplied by the city are mastodon-like 286s. The most up-to-date computer in the unit is a donated 486.

“Our computers are so outdated,” said Detective Tony Di Ruscio, “that we can’t download the hard drive information in a suspect’s computer. We can’t handle the capacity.”

The problem surfaced in a $10-million Agoura Hills fraud case. Detectives confiscated the suspect’s computer. The district attorney’s office ordered them to preserve the evidence by downloading the files. The police couldn’t do it.

The place, as they say in Van Nuys, where the rubber meets the road on resource problems is on the beat. Back in the watch commander’s office on that Friday night, Sgts. Alicia Wolin and Brad Kubela were still struggling to get a grip on things.

Besides watching the calls pile up, Wolin, who, along with Kubela, has since moved over to take charge of vice operations, is riding herd on an attempted murder case involving a man who strangled his girlfriend until her face turned blue. While reading the report on that crime, Wolin cradles the phone on her shoulder, trying to reach someone from the department’s anti-terrorism division about a woman at the front desk who claims to have been kidnaped by a terrorist group that plans to disrupt--of all targets--an upcoming Elton John concert.

It’s almost 10 p.m. The watch came on at 2 and they still haven’t had dinner.

On top of that, another cop relays word that the captain thinks the watch commander’s office “looks terrible” and needs vacuuming.

“I can only do so much,” says Kubela. “I’ve got a Van Nuys headache.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

LAPD Resources: Thin Blue Line

Though L.A. cops get paid better than counterparts in some other large cities, expenditures on police as a whole are markedly less. The police force is more thinly spread as well. Van Nuys Capt. James McMurray attributed the gap to “benign neglect.”

PERSONNEL

Number of reserve officers, 1987-1994:

1994: 916

Number of sworn officers, 1987-1994:

1994: 7,873

HOW THE LAPD STACKS UP

Statistics from a 1993 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Justice:

City: Los Angeles

Sworn in (Officers per 10,000 residents): 22 (7,808 total)

Expenditures (Expenditures on police per resident, in dollars): $158

Salary (Officers’ annual starting salaries, in dollars): $33,030*

Marked Cars (Number of marked police cars, per department): 925

Cars/Officers (Number of police cars per 100 sworn officers): 34

****

City: Chicago

Sworn in (Officers per 10,000 residents): 44

Expenditures (Expenditures on police per resident, in dollars): $247

Salary (Officers’ annual starting salaries, in dollars): $32,250

Marked Cars (Number of marked police cars, per department): 1,047

Cars/Officers (Number of police cars per 100 sworn officers): 19

****

City: Detroit

Sworn in (Officers per 10,000 residents): 38

Expenditures (Expenditures on police per resident, in dollars): $306

Salary (Officers’ annual starting salaries, in dollars): $27,856

Marked Cars (Number of marked police cars, per department): 505

Cars/Officers (Number of police cars per 100 sworn officers): 23

****

City: New York

Sworn in (Officers per 10,000 residents): 38 (30,061 total)

Expenditures (Expenditures on police per resident, in dollars): $248

Salary (Officers’ annual starting salaries, in dollars): $25,977

Marked Cars (Number of marked police cars, per department): 1,178

Cars/Officers (Number of police cars per 100 sworn officers): 10

****

City: Philadelphia

Sworn in (Officers per 10,000 residents): 38

Expenditures (Expenditures on police per resident, in dollars): $192

Salary (Officers’ annual starting salaries, in dollars): $25,010

Marked Cars (Number of marked police cars, per department): 638

Cars/Officers (Number of police cars per 100 sworn officers): 17

****

City: Washington, D.C.

Sworn in (Officers per 10,000 residents): 70

Expenditures (Expenditures on police per resident, in dollars): $388

Salary (Officers’ annual starting salaries, in dollars): $25,108

Marked Cars (Number of marked police cars, per department): 472

Cars/Officers (Number of police cars per 100 sworn officers): 20

****

City: Houston

Sworn in (Officers per 10,000 residents): 28

Expenditures (Expenditures on police per resident, in dollars): $187

Salary (Officers’ annual starting salaries, in dollars): $25,786

Marked Cars (Number of marked police cars, per department): 1,430

Cars/Officers (Number of police cars per 100 sworn officers): 54

****

* 1995 starting salary: $35,000

Source: LAPD

Researched by ABIGAIL GOLDMAN / Los Angeles Times