LAPD Admits It’s Less Assertive

After more than 10 months of internal debate, a top Los Angeles police official acknowledged Tuesday that LAPD arrests have dropped dramatically in recent years, in part because officers are afraid of confronting suspects--a fear that has bred a new, derisive definition of local police work, “driving and waving.”

“Since the Rodney King incident, the indictments of the officers, the attacks in the press and the political pressure on this organization to change the way we do business, I think officers truly have pulled back from an aggressive, self-initiated activities approach to police work,” Assistant Chief Bayan Lewis told the city Police Commission. “We have to admit that because that is a factor of life.”

In a turnabout from past official LAPD assessments, Lewis said department leaders would have to be naive not to recognize that officers today are more reluctant to do assertive police work than they were in the past. Still, he also said the decline in arrests can be partly attributed to the LAPD’s growing embrace of community policing.

Lewis and other LAPD leaders maintain that because community policing emphasizes problem solving over racking up large numbers of arrests, the shift to the new approach has naturally produced a drop in arrest statistics.

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That belief is not universally shared, however. Some top community policing experts, including renowned criminologist James Q. Wilson, maintain that although the shift to the new philosophy might eventually cause arrests to drop, the LAPD’s progress so far has been so minimal that it cannot account for a reduction of about 100,000 annual arrests since 1990. According to LAPD statistics, arrests fell from 290,000 in fiscal 1990-91 to 189,000 in fiscal 1994-95. Officials said Tuesday that the final figures for last year will show an increase in 1996, but the totals remain far below those of the early 1990s.

“What I am most concerned about is that we don’t buy into statements like: ‘We’ve shifted to community policing, so that must explain it,’ ” Police Commission President Raymond C. Fisher said of the drop in arrests. “I would hate the department to be engaged in crime-fighting techniques based on supposition and hypothesis that they haven’t been able to validate. . . . We could be going down the wrong path.”

Moreover, the decline in arrests has been accompanied by drops in other measures of officer productivity. Cleared cases and traffic citations are down dramatically since 1990, for instance, as are field interviews. And because field interviews represent officer contacts with members of the public, the shift to community policing might be expected to cause that number to increase; instead, it fell from 368,017 in 1990 to 195,729 in 1995.

The debate over why arrests and other productivity measures have dropped since the early 1990s has preoccupied top LAPD officials since March, when The Times first documented those declines. In the months since that article appeared, Mayor Richard Riordan has demanded answers from the LAPD, and police officials have consistently and angrily objected to the suggestion that police officers are not working as hard as they should.

In their written report to the Police Commission, for instance, Police Department leaders cited the King beating, the 1992 riots, the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the tape-recorded racist comments of former Det. Mark Fuhrman as factors affecting police morale. But the department resisted tying those and other problems to the decline in productivity, saying only that “the direct impact of these events on officer productivity [is] largely intangible.”

As a result, Lewis’ comments to the commission Tuesday seemed to take some by surprise.

Fisher said Lewis had “candidly acknowledged that some officers feel inhibited making arrests,” and later added that the assistant chief’s appraisal was an honest attempt to grapple with the issue.

Although Fisher and other commissioners praised Lewis for his candor--and commended other top LAPD brass who addressed the board during a lengthy and far-ranging discussion--they continued to express unhappiness with some aspects of the LAPD’s study.

For instance, Lewis said the shift to community policing was driving down arrests, but also boasted that 1996 figures will show an increase. Last year’s figures, which Lewis touted as a success, show a jump of more than 30,000 arrests over 1995, the assistant chief said.

That prompted Commissioner Edith Perez to remark: “They must be doing less community policing.”

Lewis disagreed, but later admitted that the Police Department does not fully understand why arrests would drop because of community policing and then increase because of it. Lewis speculated that officers may be feeling better protected by their supervisors and more confident in doing their jobs. Rebuilding that confidence, Lewis added, is a long, slow process, but one he believes is underway.

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Department officials also struggled with another explanation for the decline in arrests: Although they maintain that the raw numbers are down in part because officers are concentrating on “quality” rather than “quantity” of arrests, officials stressed that they do not believe the LAPD ever has made low-quality arrests. If that is the case, some commissioners wondered, why would the number be dropping?

Complicating the debate still further is the LAPD’s inability to produce reliable data regarding the various measures. The Times’ original article noted that police officials generated four different sets of numbers regarding annual arrest statistics; none of those numbers conformed with the statistics presented in the LAPD’s budget requests.

Tuesday, Bill Russell, who supervises computer operations for the LAPD, told commissioners that the department’s numbers were accurate, but conceded that department officials were struggling with computer systems that did not always integrate data from different parts of the organization. Russell did not defend errors in the LAPD’s arrest reports--including such obvious problems as figures that were reported differently from one document to the next or graphs that presented different findings than the reports to which they were attached.

“One frustration is trying to get accurate information,” Fisher said after the meeting.

The arrest issue is coming to a head just as Police Chief Willie L. Williams is trying to persuade the Police Commission to support his bid for a second term. And underlying many of the questions about the drop in officer productivity is the issue of LAPD management’s responsibility.

That topic frequently bubbled to the surface Tuesday, though Williams himself was ill and missed the meeting.

Commissioner Herbert Boeckmann raised the issue most pointedly, suggesting that officers continue to feel that their supervisors, including the chief himself, do not support them.

“Would you say that the vast majority of police officers that are on patrol today feel that if they do right . . . that they will be supported and protected by the chief of police and by the management of this department?” Boeckmann asked.

“If the question is, ‘If you do the right thing as you’re trained to do and do it properly, will you be supported?’ my response would be yes,” Lewis said. “They would say they would be supported.”

But Dave Hepburn, the newly elected president of the city’s police union, expressed a strikingly different view.

“I have a lot of respect for Chief Lewis, and I think he’s a good staff officer,” Hepburn said after the meeting. “But I vehemently disagree with him about that. I talk to street officers all the time, sometimes dozens a day, and the overwhelming response they would give is that they do not feel supported.”

The Police Department analysis of the arrest issue was forwarded by commissioners to the mayor and City Council on Tuesday. Riordan had requested the report in March and had asked for it within 60 days.