Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William Bratton were right to be outraged this week when the City Council's closely divided Budget and Finance Committee voted to ignore their budget recommendation and imposed a hiring freeze on the Los Angeles Police Department.
It's true that city officials are currently struggling to close the worst budget deficit since the Depression. But the mayor and the chief are right when they argue that halting the LAPD's growth is false economy.
The problem is that you can't freeze the force at its current level; new hiring has to occur simply to compensate for attrition. The force either continues to grow toward the goal of 10,000 officers -- which is the number that reformers have long argued is essential for effective policing -- or it begins to lose the more than 750 officers who've been added over the last four years.
Villaraigosa proposed one way to pay for continued growth: privatizing the city's parking meters. By every reasonable estimate, that should generate more than $1.5 billion for the city's general fund over the next five years -- more than enough to pay for the additional officers.
Perhaps when committee members Bernard C. Parks, Greig Smith and Bill Rosendahl voted to freeze LAPD hiring and reject the new revenue stream, they weren't doing it because, by tradition, council members get to retain parking revenues for discretionary expenditure within their districts. It's probably also coincidental that they declined to reduce any part of the $228 million the council reserves for members' discretionary expenditures each year.
Still, in a crisis, the burden of justifying budget allocations ought to be shared. Here's what the LAPD has done with the extra officers it has hired over the last four years: Murder is down 32% year over year and 27% over two years; assault, down 5.6% and 10.1%; rape, down 8.2% and 13%; shootings -- the precursors to most L.A. homicides -- off 20.5% and 28.6%.
Charlie Beck, a second-generation LAPD officer, is chief of the department's detectives, and he knows these numbers from the street up. He's keen to point out that they tell only part of the story of crime suppression. The best available studies show that every murder costs the city's residents somewhere between $4 million and $11 million; an assault costs between $20,000 and $123,000; a rape between $117,000 and $283,000.
In Beck's view, every downward tick in the crime stats is more money for civic development.
