Why the LAPD Can’t Hire Everyone

Of all the major cities, Los Angeles has the lowest ratio of sworn officers to residents--about two per 1,000. There’s scant disagreement that the city doesn’t have the police protection it needs.

Thus it could be frustrating to hear the story of former LAPD officers who want to rejoin the department as full-time officers but cannot. The suggestion is that it’s strictly because they are white males. True, the department, under a longstanding legal ruling, must focus much of its recruitment and hiring on women and minorities. But it’s the old law of unintended consequences that has come into play--not any reverse racism.

--Consider LAPD budget constraints. Although the department continues to garner almost half of the city general budget, violent crime is on the rise and 7,900 authorized officers are just not enough. Yet Los Angeles voters have three times since 1987 failed to give the needed support to ballot measures that would have greatly increased the number of officers. Most recently, voters failed in April to give adequate support to Proposition 1, which, for an average increase of a mere $6 a month in property taxes, would have beefed up the force by 1,000. So the strapped LAPD simply can’t hire every good officer it wants.

--Job competition is fierce as the LAPD continues to attract top candidates, typically better educated and more qualified than ever.

--At the same time, the department is under a 1981 historic consent decree that required that 25% of sworn personnel hired each year be women, 22.5% black and 22.5% Latino; such hiring practices are to continue until women make up at least 20% of the force (the council more recently increased the goal to 44%) and the combined percentage of blacks and Latinos is at least proportionate to their numbers in the Los Angeles-area labor force.

There’s a reason for that consent decree: It all started when a white female sergeant sued in 1973 after she was denied permission to take the exam for lieutenant because of promotion restrictions. Even today, although white men make up about half of the department’s officers, they hold three-quarters of its top jobs.

So the law of unintended, and sometimes intended, consequences often ends up meaning that outcomes aren’t perfectly fair to a lot of folks. Too bad that the police union, the Police Protective League, and then-candidate Richard Riordan opposed Proposition 1 in April, which could have expanded opportunities in the LAPD for everyone. Now we all have to hope that Mayor Riordan’s plan to add 3,000 officers finds funding from somewhere so that all of the qualified men and women who seek to join the LAPD will be able to be hired.