Chief Bratton at South Bureau Town Hall Meeting at the new Exposition Park Intergenerational Community Center Police Chief William Bratton, Deputy Chief Earl Paysinger and other LAPD officials reported to the community on gangs, homelessness, and police reform.

by Leslie Evans

More than 200 people from the community turned out Thursday, August 21, to hear Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and a lineup of top LAPD brass at the new Exposition Park Intergenerational Community Center at Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and Menlo Avenue. There was standing room only for the event, sponsored by LAPD's South Bureau, which covers a large part of South Los Angeles, with its four police stations stretching down the Harbor Freeway from the 10 freeway to the South Bay: Southwest, 77th, Southeast, and Harbor. The street outside was jammed with police vehicles and the people standing around the walls of the auditorium included a large component of black uniforms.

The master of ceremonies for the evening (the meeting started only about 20 minutes after its scheduled opening of 6 pm) was Deputy Chief Earl Paysinger, who laughed it up with the largely minority crowd and displayed a definite talent for stand-up comedy, if he ever decides to give up police work.

Though not mentioned from the platform, the new multimillion dollar facility has had a troubled beginning because of tensions there between the Rollin 40s Crips and the Fruit Town Brims Bloods. The mantra of the evening was voiced early by Paysinger: "I have made a vow that this facility will stay as nice as it is today." This was repeated in slightly different words later in the evening by Chief Bratton.

The agenda included a report on the Consent Decree by attorney Gerald Chaleff, a report on efforts to contain the street gangs by Deputy Chief Mike Hillmann, a discussion of terrorism preparedness by security specialist John Miller, some awards to the community, followed by brief remarks by Chief Bratton followed by a question and answer session chaired by Karen Bass, head of the Community Coalition.

A few notables turned out the for meeting, including Councilwoman Jan Perry; David Cunningham III, president of the Police Commission; and Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who arrived near the end.

How Close Is the LAPD to Compliance with the Rampart Consent Decree?

The Consent Decree was an outgrowth of the Rampart scandal, when Clinton administration officials threatened a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles if it did not agree to a series of reforms to be carried out under direct federal oversight. "We negotiated for about 6 months," Gerald Chaleff told the audience, "and came to a 187 paragraph agreement." It was signed by a federal judge on June 15, 2001, and is supposed to run for 5 years. "Now there are federal monitors of the LAPD on performance in relation to the agreement. The decree is for a five year term, but we must be in compliance by 2 years before end of five years. That is due by June 15, 2004, less than one year away."

What does the decree do? "It specifies how we investigate use of force, how we investigate complaints, it requires transparency, and civilian oversight and supervision of the department."

For transparency, Chaleff told the audience to check out the department's website, www.lapdonline.org, which publishes quarterly reports of the monitors. "We have had 8 reports so far, which are posted on the website. We post every 6 months field data reports on traffic and pedestrian stops: who was stopped, why, what happened."

New Steps to Fight the Gangs

Deputy Chief Mike Hillmann said the department has sought to build multiagency antigang task forces: "A word I use frequently is collaborative," Hillmann said. "We have worked very closely with the FBI, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the District Attorney's office, Los Angeles County gang prevention agencies. We work with a number of such agencies day in and day out. We have been seeking grants. One will be to have a gang symposium to bring in experts from other areas for discussions."

He reported the formation of gang impact teams that will gather information from the community on gang activities.

Hillmann said there will be greater coordination across jurisdictions, in the many nearby cities to Los Angeles and in the unincorporated sections of the county that are policed by the Sheriff's Department. "Gangs move across boundaries. We are going to tell them that there is no place to run, no place to hide. A gang impact team will becoming to your neighborhood soon."

The LAPD has participated in the creation of the Los Angeles County Regional Gang Information Network, a collaborative effort with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, to be located in the City of Commerce. "The focus of that is to look at the regional approach to gangs: what is happening in Compton, at Century Station in Lynwood, and places like that. It is a 24/7 operation." He said the South Bureau has just appointed a new contingent of gang enforcement officers who will be in charge of antigang action by bureau.

Watching for Car Bombs in Your Neighborhood

John Miller of LAPD's Counterterrorism Bureau opened by saying that we have not had a major terrorist attack in Los Angeles only because the terrorists haven't gotten around to us yet, not because our defenses are so good that they can't do it. He told the gathering that Los Angeles has the second most ambitious counterterrorism program in the country, after New York, where 1,000 officers are on the case, too big to match for L.A.'s 9,000 member police force.

The L.A. bureau investigates domestic and international terrorism groups "from the American Nazis to Hamas." To give his presentation a personal touch, Miller reminisced about the hour he spent 6 years ago on a mountaintop in Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden. He was then an ABC news reporter. "At the time few people really focused on this man on top of a mountain as someone who could take on the United States and do real damage." Now we don't take foreign terrorists so lightly.

Like the other units, the counterrorism group is working to consolidate a number of related efforts: "So what we have created is an infrastructure: the bomb squad, the hazardous material division, the counterterrorist group, all under one command."

Miller said the greatest risk is from large vehicle bombs, and that the most likely target is the Port of Los Angeles, which moves 8% of the total product entering the United States each year. Of course, he added, they could always go after some lesser target like the DWP. He asked citizens to be vigilant and to call in suspicious activities to the phone number 1-677-ATHREAT.

He added, "One of the best informations we got came not from the FBI but from a lady who was walking her dog."

Bratton Speaks

Chief Bratton, like those who had spoken before him earlier, stressed leveraging the strength of LAPD with partnerships. "With our limited resources, and we have extraordinarily limited resources in a very large city," he said, "we are attempting to engage in partnership. There are very few places in America that can assemble the range of partners that we have in this room: city officials, clergy, community representatives, the FBI. We are partners."

He acknowledged the sometimes embitered relations between the force and minority communities. "We understand that for a variety of reasons that in some communities of the city we have lost the trust of the community. We have to win it back."

He promised additional resources for the South Bureau, which operates in principally poor and minority areas of the city. "We have prioritized the South Bureau. We have assigned over 100 additional officers to the South Bureau, we have the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Dept.), the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), the FBI. We are beginning to see results. The beginning because we have a long way to go." He pointed out that the 318 murders to date in Los Angeles this year are down 22% from last year. But it was still an unacceptable loss to the city, he added. "We have the 318 murders, and we have lost not only the 318 who were killed, but those who did the killings are largely lost to us. We need to defend the victims but we need to change the culture that has produced that loss."

He returned indirectly to the Rampart scandal and the loss of trust it created. "We need to work with you in a variety of ways, not just law enforcement. We want to learn what we did wrong, what did we do that allowed us to develop in our midst criminals who are just as violent as the gangs that we are working against. We are working to build the trust that will allow you to work with us."

Some Hard Questions

At this point Karen Bass took over the microphone and invited members of the audience to line up to question the chief and his officers. One man who claimed he had been a police officer in Arizona, said "I have been pulled over, stopped, yanked out of my car, had a ticket falsified courtesy of LAPD. I went to file a complaint and the sergeant said they do not accept complaints on this kind of matter." Bratton rose to his feet in a fury, and after warning the man that he had better be able to document such a charge, he almost shouted, "If any police officer gives you a song and dance, we will make him dance!" But he added sharply, "You better have the name of that sergeant."

Betty Joe McKinney from one of the neighborhood councils complained about illegal street vending on Crenshaw near Slauson. Earl Paysinger responded, "Illegal vending is a plague in this city. It robs us of our dignity, it robs businesses that are established of their economy. We will try to respond to your complaints before you leave here tonight."

David Hicks of Baldwin Village asked "Why don't we have foot patrols in our neighborhood?" Paysinger answered that the department does make a little use of foot patrols, but "Los Angeles spans some 467 square miles. It is a huge area. We try to respond as quickly as we can to your calls for help. If we put out foot patrols this reduces our ability to respond quickly."

One speaker asked if it was true that Chief Bratton was in favor of giving driver's licenses to undocumented aliens. Bratton answered, "Until 1996 individuals were able to get such licenses. We have endorsed bill SB60 [the California Illegal Alien Driver's License Bill]. We have a phenomenal problem with hit and run accidents. There are some 2 million unlicensed drivers in California, mostly illegal immigrants. They flee accident scenes because they fear the city. Most of these people are law abiding. When we issue a driver's license we get a photograph, a thumbprint. We believe it will reduce hit and run accidents. We believe that it will not add to the risk of terrorism. We spent six months researching this issue."

Another speaker complained about "deviants and delinquents" on the Hoover street walkway near an elementary school in the USC area. The chief replied, "We will be meeting next month with USC at the invitation of President Sample to try to grow the university and the parks and this area of safety out into the outer neighborhoods to make them as safe as we can." He added, echoing Earl Paysinger, pointing to the community center we were gathered in, "We will do everything we can to see that this gem survives."

A questioner asked what LAPD is doing to counter gang recruiting in elementary, middle, and high schools. Deputy Chief Mike Hillmann answered, "We are working very closely with the LAUSD in this county approach that we are currently engaged in with the gang impact teams. On a countywide basis they will be brought in to help us with that. What we are aiming to do is to identify at-risk youth. We are working closely with members of our own department and the Sheriff's Department to have police officers identify at-risk youth, to get them out of that environment, to get them out of the gang culture."

An elderly man from San Pedro lamented the loss of a local substation manned by volunteers where "we had a Senior Lead Officer at the substation much of the time. We would call the substation and talk to the SLO and get a response quick." This was a no sale to Chief Bratton. "I am not a fan of substations," he replied. "I want the police out on the street, not sitting in the substation. Having them manned by volunteers is good. If your community can provide the space, then our officers can visit, but I am not going to assign officers to sit in the substations."

Little Sympathy for the Homeless Here

Two speakers complained about the growth of homelessness in their area. One was a white woman from a historic district in Wilmington near Long Beach, and the other a black woman from Watts. It was pretty clear that fear of the homeless transcended race and class. The woman from Wilmington protested the appearance of an RV camp of the homeless in her neighborhood, saying "The SLO says we do not have the tools or the legal authority to address this issue." The woman from Watts was more blunt: "They are opening a homeless center but we don't want more coming to Watts. The city of Los Angeles is turning into a dumping ground. We are not going to allow homeless tents in Southeast [Southeast police station within South Bureau]. Sheriff Lee Baca is not going to be allowed to export his homeless into Southeast. We have enough problems as it is. Can you imagine trash day with a homeless encampment out here?"

Chief Bratton took more time with this issue than any other of the evening and spoke with considerable feeling. His main point was that this should not be a police problem: "We are part of the effort to deal with the issue of homelessness but we are not the solution. Los Angeles has the worst homeless problem in America. The amount of money spent by government is infinitesimally small compared to other cities. There are 10,000 homeless people in downtown Los Angeles living, not in third world conditions but in fifth world conditions.

"The Los Angeles Police Department is not going to be the scapegoat for a city policy that has been an absolute failure. The problem was intended to be contained in skid row, but it is a cancer that is spreading to other areas and communities in the city. This is a huge problem and the resolution is not going to be done by the Los Angeles Police Department. The resolution is going to be by all of you getting together and convincing your elected officials to do something. In New York City a lot was done in the city, in the subways in the 1990s. New York spends about $1 billion a year on homelessness. Mayor Hahn has brought on board George Kelling who was the author [in a joint article with James Q. Wilson] of the broken window idea." That is, the idea that if you don't fix small problems in neighborhoods they grow into bigger problems.

Just as the meeting closed Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas arrived, taking the platform to urge everyone to register and vote on October 7 in the controversial California recall election.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Leslie Evans is the President of the Van Buren Place Community Restoration Association and also serves as Webmaster for a wonderful community website in the Historic West Adams section of town, where this article originally appeared.

LACP is grateful for his active participation here in Los Angeles Community Policing.

He can be reached by email at: vanburen-assoc@westadams-normandie.com

Be sure to visit the Van Buren Place Historic West Adams website at: www.westadams-normandie.com

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