Ties to the community

Deepa Bharath

For Police Chief John Hensley, change needs to be visible.

One of the first changes he made after taking charge in June was

to get all detectives to wear business attire, complete with ties --

previously unheard of in the department.

It was a widely unpopular decision, Hensley admitted with a smile.

“But it had to be done,” he said. “It’s no different than officers

wearing uniforms. I know it hasn’t been a popular decision. But I’m

not going to apologize for putting them in ties.”

It has to do with the community looking at its police department

as a professional organization, Hensley said.

“People look at everything, right down to our police cars,” he

said. “Are they waxed? What’s the condition of the tires and the

paint? When they see a sharp-looking police car parked in a corner,

it has its visual impact. And it sends a positive message.”

Hensley also refuses to accept visual blight in local

neighborhoods.

“When I started here, people said I couldn’t do anything about

some of the issues, like the shopping carts, the homeless people and

the day laborers,” he said. “But I don’t think that’s true.”

Hensley believes that such “quality-of-life issues” and many more

problems that plague the community can be solved with efficient

community policing.

“It’s about not waiting for people to complain about problems in

their neighborhoods,” he said. “It’s about being proactive and

attacking issues before they become problems.”

The chief has started implementing several changes within the

department to achieve that end, he said. To start with, he has taken

community policing from the hands of a few officers and made it a

department-wide concept.

“Earlier, we had a few problem-oriented policing officers doing

what the entire department needed to do,” Hensley said.

Now, those officers will serve as mentors to the rest of the

department. Each officer now works a beat so they can become familiar

with the area and the members of that community can become familiar

with them. Since Nov. 1, two foot-beat officers have been assigned to

the Westside.

These officers, however, will not remain permanently in the

Westside but will be rotated to other areas, Hensley said.

“The Westside is traditionally associated with problems,” he said.

“But other parts of the city need attention, too.”

Each beat officer has also been asked to “adopt a school” in his

or her area, Hensley said. This, he said, is in addition to the

school resource officers in the city’s high schools and middle

schools.

“What happens is, we have no one in the elementary schools, and we

need to be hooked in there as well,” he said.

The arrangements with the schools have already started to pay off,

the chief said. He said one was was able to help a school principal

who had problems with soccer players’ urinating on and otherwise

damaging freshly sodded areas during the weekends.

“One of our officers was able to pool in some resources, inform

the players not to go into the sodded areas and also get a portable

restroom there,” Hensley said. “It’s that kind of problem-solving

skills that we’re hoping to develop in our officers.”

What Hensley is proposing is community policing on a much larger

scale, said Capt. Tom Warnack, who oversees the department’s Field

Operations Division.

“As a patrol commander, I see it as a real benefit to the

community and the city as a whole,” he said.

The key to problem solving for officers is to open up a dialogue

with the community, Warnack said.

“When officers assigned to geographic beats get to know the

residents, it becomes a collaborative effort,” he said.

The department is trying to build relationships not only with the

community, but with other city departments, such as code enforcement,

the fire department and the planning department, Warnack said.

“We’re using these relationships to address issues that are not

traditional challenges to law enforcement, but more quality-of-life

issues,” he said.

Fire Chief Jim Ellis said Hensley is continuing where former

police chief Dave Snowden left off as far as working with other city

departments.

“John is taking community policing to a new level,” Ellis said.

“And we’re going to help the Police Department by keeping our eyes

open in the community and working with them to make sure we keep

crime down in our city.”

Warnack says he has begun to “see some real changes.”

Piles of mattresses and rubbish are beginning to disappear from

alleyways, he said.

“We had shopping carts littered throughout the community,” Warnack

said. “Now, we have that under control. It’s nice to drive around and

not have to see visual blight in the community.”

The officers’ beats will also likely be redesigned, Hensley said.

“Some of them do seem to be out of alignment, and we’re studying

that right now,” he said. “We’re basing that on calls for service.

What we’re trying to do is to avoid overloading one officer when

another has nothing much to do. That would improve response time.”

Hensley is also working on other projects such as sprucing up the

department’s Web site, which he believes “is woefully inadequate.”

“It needs to have a lot more information such as crime statistics,

our ongoing projects, updated wanted posters and pictures of our key

staff members,” he said.

The chief is also having complaints from residents directly sent

to him, he said.

Hensley doesn’t believe Costa Mesa can get “too big for community

policing.” Some of the models for this kind of policing in Southern

California are big cities such as San Diego and Santa Ana, he said.

“It works well for Costa Mesa because we’re a big and growing

city,” he said. “But we still have that hometown feel. I don’t want

to run a big police department that’s faceless.”

* DEEPA BHARATH covers public safety and courts. She may be

reached at (949) 574-4226 or by e-mail at deepa.bharath@latimes.com.