Chief Rejects Demands for More Police

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates on Saturday defended his deployment policies against some pointed questions from a San Fernando Valley homeowners coalition, saying police are making strides against gangs and drugs.

The Coalition of Valley Communities, which consists of 19 Valley homeowners groups, had invited Gates to speak about crime and deployment issues and to “open up a dialogue” with the homeowners, coalition board member Kathy Lewis said.

Gates told the group that the Police Department assigns about a quarter of its 6,800 officers to the Valley, which has about a third of the city’s population.

“It doesn’t equate,” Gates said. “You should probably hope that it never does. . . . We deploy on the basis of need,” he added, noting that crime is generally worse in other parts of the city.

But the coalition posed some hard questions about whether the Valley receives its share of police services in exchange for taxes.

“I have never seen uniformed officers in great numbers anywhere in the Valley,” Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, told Gates. “I think we’re getting shortchanged or even stiffed.”

Gates replied that tax dollars support police services all over the city, and the disparity between taxes paid and police assigned to an area is greater in high-income places such as Bel Air.

Later, Silver complained to Gates that police response time is so sluggish that many Valley residents are hiring private security firms as a “second police force.”

The average response time in the Valley so far this year has been 8.5 minutes, worse than the citywide average of 8.1 minutes but better than the 8.8 minutes logged by the Valley in 1987, Gates said. Gates admitted that many police officers are embarrassed at response times, but he said citizens should lend more financial support to police, instead of spending their money on private guards.

Gates did not mention a police deployment study released earlier this year that showed the Police Department responds more slowly to emergency calls in South-Central Los Angeles than in the more affluent Valley and Westside. In the past, Gates has said the study is based on outdated data.

The concerns expressed by Silver were shared by many in the Valley homeowners’ coalition, said Lewis, president of the Encino Property Owners Assn., a group that often differs with Silver’s organization.

“There is a very deep concern” about response time, Lewis said. “The idea of a double police force is . . . the hidden cost of police protection in the San Fernando Valley,” she said, referring to the cost of hiring supplemental security guards.

During Gates’ speech, the chief said he was delighted that the City Council has authorized the hiring of 800 more police officers. The department’s use of its existing officers is also starting to pay off in the war on gangs and drugs, he insisted.

In the past four months, a citywide gang crackdown has resulted in 18,000 arrests, about 9,000 of them involving gang members, Gates said. About 16,000 of the arrests were made by uniformed officers, and in 78% of those cases, criminal charges were filed, he said. Of the remaining 2,000 arrests, most of them made by plainclothes undercover narcotics officers, about 95% have resulted in criminal charges, he said.

The arrests have disrupted gangs, who have no rigid organizational structure and plan robberies and killings much as they might organize a “pickup basketball game,” Gates said. Since the 18,000 arrests, the gangs are not selling drugs as brazenly and not wearing their colors as boldly, and many have left the city, the chief said.