Police Community Relations

On the last afternoon of his life, Bernard Monroe was hosting a cookout for family and friends in front of his dilapidated home in this small northern Louisiana town. Throat cancer had left the 73-year-old retired electric utility worker unable to talk, but family members said he clearly was enjoying the commotion of a dozen of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren cavorting in the grassless yard.

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.

Transit police Monday wrapped up their investigation into the controversial shooting death of an African American man by an officer and, just hours later, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District board created a panel to oversee police department activities. BART Police Chief Gary Gee said his department forwarded the investigation results Monday morning to the Alameda County district attorney's office, which will decide whether to charge transit Officer Johannes Mehserle in the death of Oscar J.

After several years of court-ordered reforms, the Los Angeles Police Department has heightened its image among Angelenos and made significant improvements in the performance and attitudes of its officers, according to a new Harvard University study released Monday. In asking for the study and giving researchers unusual access to the department, LAPD Chief William J.

To some police officers, President Obama was merely speaking the truth about how a certain department behaved in a difficult situation. To others, he committed the unpardonable sin of sticking his nose where it does not belong. When Obama accused Cambridge, Mass., police officers Wednesday of acting "stupidly" when they arrested his friend, Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

The Santa Monica Police Department on Sunday launched a revamped method of patrolling the beach-side city, a community-oriented approach that assigns officers to a particular beat for a longer period of time and reshapes decades-old beat boundaries. Under the plan, the 8.5-square-mile city of about 88,000 has been divided into eight areas with nine or 10 officers assigned to each, said Lt. Clinton Muir, the program's manager.

On New Year's Eve, La Habra police shot and killed Michael Cho in a strip mall parking lot when he allegedly threatened officers with a tire iron. The killing of the UCLA graduate and artist has set off criticism of police not heard in Southern California's Korean American community since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when shop owners complained that officers never showed up to stop looters, and they picked up guns to defend their stores.

Special Order 40 is hobbling police. That's the view of an LAPD officer who writes about the department for National Review Online and other publications under the pseudonym "Jack Dunphy." Although the order states only that officers can't stop people solely to inquire about their immigration status, "the policy and the reality are quite different," he said in an interview with The Times. The officer asked that his real name not be used.

Father Richard Estrada, an associate pastor at the 189-year-old Our Lady Queen of Angels Church in downtown Los Angeles, is obviously not in a gang. But the dark-skinned Estrada, who speaks softly and wears his hair tied back in a ponytail, jokes that under the proposed changes to Special Order 40 he could "look like a gang member" and be stopped by police and forced to prove he is a legal resident.

"You just come in to Laguna Beach, brand new?" Police Officer Jason Farris asked the weathered man in the brown, floppy hat. Lolling at the edge of the city bus depot -- bedroll, canteen and cane plunked by his side -- the man stiffened warily. But Farris was undeterred. Less than 15 minutes later, Johnny, as the man calls himself, was chattering about life as a tattoo artist as he flashed the cop photos of his former wife.