LAPD's Office of Operations Goals and Crime Fighting Strategies for 2004 The following article is from LAPD's Beat Magazine and comes to LACP courtesy of Assistant Chief George Gascón. We wish to acknowledge and thank the Department for helping us keep the community well informed. This thoughtful article concludes with six specific goals, meant to reflect a belief that new technologies and improved crime-fighting strategies mean LAPD will be able to work much more effectively and efficiently than it has in the past.

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OFFICE OF OPERATIONS:
"Goals and Crime Fighting Strategies for 2004"

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The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had a tremendous year fighting crime in 2003. Our sworn and civilian employees worked extremely hard to reduce homicides by 21.6 percent, rapes by 9.3 percent, robberies by 3.6 percent, aggravated assaults by 7.3 percent, domestic violence by 6.1 percent and Total Part I Crimes by 4.2 percent.

While these reductions in crime are clearly worthy of praise, we will need to work "smarter not harder" this calendar year to reduce crime even further and meet Mayor James Hahn's stated goal to make the City of Los Angeles the Safest Big City in America.

This will be a tremendous challenge, especially given the poor financial state of the City and the real possibility of budget cutbacks. But we are confident we can achieve this with unprecedented teamwork and a clear understanding of the nature of crime and how to successfully reduce it.

This article will begin with why the LAPD needs to be proactive in reducing crime. It will then outline some proven strategies to combat crime. The article will end with a discussion of the Office of Operations goals for 2004. Hopefully, the article will clarify any concerns surrounding our efforts to reduce crime in 2004.

NEED FOR PROACTIVE CRIME REDUCTION

Most police officers can immediately identify with the human cost of crime. They have been at the scene of homicides and personally understand how these senseless acts of violence can ruin families and whole neighborhoods. The average person is also familiar with this concept as they are exposed night after night to news reports describing various acts of violent crime and showing police officers chasing criminals in vehicular pursuits. Clearly, in our society, the public understands the human cost of crime.

However, most persons fail to recognize that crime has many other costs to society. One of these is the economic cost of crime. Many studies have calculated a dollar-cost associated for individual types of crimes. These studies focused on calculating Tangible costs such as medical costs, damage to property and the cost of stolen goods etc. They also identify Intangible costs such as the reduction of tourism, property values and retails sales. These studies are important because they identify the true economic impact of crime upon a city or neighborhood.

In 1996, Professor Mark Cohen from Vanderbilt University studied the LAPD and determined the cost for various crimes. If you take his calculations and project them against crime comparisons between 2002 versus 2003 for homicides, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, the LAPD saved the City over $493 million dollars by reducing these violent crimes during 2003. Undoubtedly, our crime fighting efforts had a tremendous impact on the economic cost of crime for the City of Los Angeles.

Crime can also cause citizens and businesses to act differently than they normally would. The fear of crime can keep citizens and businesses away from certain areas of the City that are perceived to be crime ridden, creating a situation where businesses defer investment in these areas (Intangible cost). This clearly punishes the very areas that need community development the most.

Finally, crime can also dramatically reduce neighborhood cohesion and make our crime reduction goals extremely difficult to achieve. Simply put, we need community involvement in our efforts to fight crime and any factors that reduce the foundation of our neighborhoods, essentially hurt our crime fighting efforts, too.

STRATEGIES TO REDUCE CRIME

The Department has a long history in successfully fighting crime. We have developed crime-fighting methods that have been adopted by law enforcement agencies worldwide. Our reputation is second to none in this endeavor and we need to encourage this sprit while unmistakably maintaining our commitment to uphold constitutional law and protect the civil rights of those we serve.

With this in mind, here are some strategies to reduce crime:

The 10 Percent Factor

It is extremely important that we focus our limited resources on strategic solutions to combat crime. One effective method to achieve this is called the 10 percent factor.

The National Institute for Justice (NIJ) has completed numerous studies that provide us with a framework to strategically deploy resources to combat crime. They have determined that 10 percent of our criminals account for 50 percent of all crime, that 10 percent of our victims account for 40 percent of all victimization and that 10 percent of all places account for 60 percent of all crimes.

This provides us with an extremely powerful strategy to reduce crime. By focusing on the top 10 percent people, places and activities associated with crime and deploying accordingly we can have a greater impact on crime reduction. For instance, a 25 percent success rate against the 10 percent factor concerning suspects and victims would lead to a 25 percent reduction in crime citywide.

Best Practices Depository

The Office of Operations is in the process of establishing a "best practices" depository for crime-fighting strategies. It is our intention to document outstanding examples of Department crime-fighting efforts. These strategies will be shared with all commands on a regular basis and we will encourage innovation and creativity in developing new and effective crime-fighting methods.

CompStat - Smart Crime Analysis

If we are to truly focus on fighting crime, we need to understand it and live it on a day-to-day basis. This is the essence of CompStat, a philosophy that is based upon smart analysis of crime statistics. We need to use the CompStat process to take crime analysis functions from a purely reactive reporting mechanism to a proactive process using basic statistical analysis to predict criminal behavior and direct resources.

Innovative Technology

The Department is in the process of implementing new technologies that will increase the effectiveness and efficiency levels of our employees. One of these is a software program called "COPLINK" that has the ability to instantly scan numerous Department "stand alone" databases for potential links to the crime. It is estimated that COPLINK will dramatically improve our criminal investigations and crime solvability rates.

Enhanced Cooperation with Other Criminal Justice System Members

The Department will significantly increase its efforts in working with other criminal justice members. We simply cannot fight crime by ourselves and need to work more effectively with other law enforcement and criminal justice system stakeholders. A great example of this was the recent joint LAPD and FBI Gang Symposium. This symposium brought together gang experts from around the country to discuss the best methods to reduce gang violence. As a result of this symposium, some new crime reduction strategies are already being implemented within our Gang Impact Teams.

Enhanced Community Involvement

The Department will continue to aggressively pursue Community-Based Policing, with an emphasis on forming partnerships and improving community problem solving. This is an area that shows tremendous promise and we need to develop more strategies to utilize the community in our efforts to reduce crime.

OFFICE OF OPERATIONS GOALS FOR 2004

The Office of Operations Goals for 2004 were developed after considerable thought and discussion. While they are certainly aggressive in nature, they reflect a belief that with our new technologies and improved crime-fighting strategies, our sworn and civilian employees will be able to work much more effectively and efficiently than they have in the past.

Provided below are the Office of Operations Goals for 2004. Let us work together to meet this tremendous challenge and make the City of Los Angeles the Safest Big City in America.

.Goal No. 1:	20 Percent Reduction in Citywide Part I Crime (Including 20 percent Reduction in Homicides)
.Goal No. 2:	Reduce Citywide Response Time to 8 Minutes
.Goal No. 3:	Achieve Full Federal Consent Decree Compliance
.Goal No. 4:	Improve Overall Part I Crime Clearance Rates to 25 Percent
.Goal No. 5:	Reduce the Backlog of Category 1 Cases by 25 Percent (2500 Cases)
.Goal No. 6:	Continued Re-engineering of Work Processes to Improve Operating Efficiencies

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