Stop L.A.'s Crime Engine
Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton announced last month that violent crime fell 13% in 2004 -- criminals assaulted, robbed or raped about 6,500 fewer Angelenos. That drop is impressive, and good news for James K. Hahn's reelection campaign, which promotes the mayor's crime-fighting record.
But I doubt that many black and Latino residents in the city's poorest neighborhoods feel any safer today than they did a year ago, or will five years from today, unless radical changes are made in the way we think about crime prevention. Arrests in L.A. have risen 13% in the last four years. Yet despite the fact that tens of thousands of young men and women have been imprisoned, areas like South Los Angeles remain plagued by a cycle of violent crime that began in the mid-1960s. The smallest decrease in crime last year was in South L.A., whose residents are caught in a double bind. They want more police protection but despair as their sons are arrested, convicted and sent off to prison in record numbers. If national trends continue, one in three African American males born today will spend at least one year in state prison.
A fixation on arrest and crime statistics to gauge police effectiveness is standard in law enforcement -- and politics. But the question police chiefs should be asking is what strategies will both prevent crime, short-term and long-term, and help stabilize L.A.'s communities.
Most experts agree that between 15% and 25% of the historic national drop in crime from 1992 to 2002 was attributable to harsher sentencing. Demographic changes -- the decrease in the number of 18- to 25-year-olds, who commit most crimes -- a healthy economy and other factors account for the rest.
A 15% to 25% decline in crime is significant. But consider the cost. With 162,000 inmates, California has the second-largest prison population in the world (behind China), and a $6-billion-a-year corrections budget. In 2001, the cost of fighting crime in California -- cops, courts, jails and prisons -- was $17.5 billion.
The heart of the crime problem in the state is its prison and parole systems. Last year, a panel commissioned by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger described the corrections system as "dysfunctional," lacking "uniformity [or] transparency," burdened by "too much political interference, too much union control, too little management courage" and the highest recidivism in the nation. Until last year and the appointment of the reform-minded Jeanne S. Woodford as director of the Department of Corrections, the department's sole mission was to punish prisoners, and its $1.5-billion-a-year parole program reflected exactly that. Currently, 65,000 to 70,000 parolees a year end up back in prison, with one-third of them from L.A. County. An additional 35,000 county residents are on parole.
