Los Angeles police are riding a crest of goodwill that has pushed the department's popularity to levels not sustained since the late 1980s as cops continue to post gains on fighting crime and building closer ties with the people they serve.
The strong endorsement of the LAPD cuts across racial and ethnic lines, according to a new Los Angeles Times Poll -- with the percentages of black and Latino voters who say they approve of how the police do their jobs almost as high as the level among white voters. That result is particularly notable given the long history of tensions between the police and the city's black and Latino communities.
The positive opinions of the LAPD stand out as a bright spot at a time when Angelenos are feeling battered by the recession, highly critical of public schools and generally pessimistic about life in Los Angeles.
Four in 10 of the voters surveyed said they had seriously considered leaving the city in the last two years, most commonly because of the high cost of housing.
More than a third said they or a member of their immediate family had lost a job; 12% said their homes had been foreclosed. And only about 1 in 4 rated the quality of education at local public schools as excellent or good.
The poll of 1,500 registered voters in Los Angeles was conducted for The Times by two firms based in Washington, D.C.: Greenberg Quinlan Ros- ner Research, a Democratic firm, and Public Opinion Strategies, which polls for Republicans. The poll was conducted from June 10 through 16 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
The findings on the LAPD indicate that Police Chief William J. Bratton has made considerable progress on a centerpiece of his tenure -- reinventing the image of the department in the eyes of the public and, in doing so, moving the department and city beyond a past marred by incidents of police brutality and corruption.
Almost 8 in 10 registered voters said they either "strongly approve" or "somewhat approve" of the police performance today. The response was 18 percentage points higher than in The Times' last survey of the city, in 2005.
The percentages of blacks and Latinos who approve of the LAPD both rose by double digits since the 2005 survey, almost closing a long-running discrepancy between white and minority attitudes. Among Latinos, 76% approved of the department's job performance while 19% disapproved. Among blacks, the split was 68% to 25% and among whites, 81% to 11%.
