Dividend of Drop in Crime

When the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau homicide division was created 10 years ago there were so many murders in the area that, had it been a separate city, it would have ranked No. 10 in the nation in homicides. It’s the South Bureau’s relative calm now that makes the decision to disperse its investigators to other parts of the city a reasonable move.

South Bureau encompasses a huge, gang-infested swath of Los Angeles. It contains the LAPD’s Harbor, Southeast, Southwest and 77th Street police divisions. When the city’s murder rate spiraled out of control in the 1980s, the carnage in South Bureau provided much of the impetus.

By 1986, for example, one of every three city homicides was committed in South Bureau. By 1988, South Bureau accounted for 44% of all city murders and for half of the drive-by shooting homicides.

Emboldened gangs even plotted to murder a South Bureau homicide investigator, which led to the roundup of nearly 450 members of one gang. Suspected serial slayings were also a part of the mix. So too was the knowledge that South Bureau residents had been given short shrift on resources; police response there was the slowest in the city.

Much has changed with the plunge in crime there and citywide in recent years. Last year there were 150 murders in South Bureau. In the 1980s, you needed only the statistics of one South Bureau police division, 77th Street, to exceed that total.

Overall, said a spokesman for LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks, the current lack of a desperate need for a special homicide unit in South Los Angeles is something to be celebrated. We agree. Police officials insist that the department will continue to have a presence in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, where the homicide division is stationed, and that’s important.

There are concerns that breaking up South Bureau will leave too many crimes unsolved. We hope that the return of detectives to neighborhood stations will instead encourage more teamwork toward keeping a skyrocketing crime rate a thing of the past.