More than 400 Los Angeles police officers now assigned to administrative tasks and other desk-bound jobs should be returned to patrolling the streets in order to bolster the city's meager police force, according to a report released Monday by City Controller Laura Chick.
The 203-page study comes as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William J. Bratton continue their aggressive push to hire 1,000 officers by 2010 despite a severe budget shortfall facing the city. Bratton largely endorsed the report's findings but made clear he was girding for a fight with City Council members, whom he expects to use the review as a justification to slow down the hires.
"Let's make it perfectly clear, I have no intention, the mayor has no intention, of retreating back from the hiring," he said at a news conference with Chick. "We actually need 12,500 police officers. . . . Even with the 1,000, we're still short almost 2,500 police officers from what we need in this city."
The study, conducted by an outside consulting firm for Chick, identified 565 jobs in the Los Angeles Police Department -- many administrative in nature -- that are now assigned to sworn police officers and should be phased into civilian posts over a three-year period.
One of the report's more striking recommendations was its call to overhaul the department's crime data analysis unit into an almost entirely civilian operation. Firearm experts in the LAPD, who do forensic examinations of guns and ammunition used in crimes, should also be civilians, the study found. A point of contention, Bratton said, was Chick's recommendation that the operation of the city's jail be turned over to non-police officers.
The controller and Bratton acknowledged that the conversion plan would be hampered by the 163 injured or otherwise incapacitated police officers in jobs that should be given to civilians. Those officers, who are exempted from a 2006 policy that allows the LAPD to remove officers from the force who cannot fulfill police duties, will be allowed to remain in their positions until they retire.
Nonetheless, the plan would mean putting more of LAPD's estimated 9,720 officers on the streets -- something that Bratton, who has bemoaned the department's undersized force since taking over in 2001, wants to achieve. The department has 24 officers for every 10,000 residents -- about half that of New York, Chicago and Baltimore. And, charged with covering the city's sprawl over 466 square miles, the LAPD has fewer than 20 officers per square mile, compared with nearly 60 in Chicago and 120 in New York.
