Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the creation of a new community safety bureau within the Los Angeles Police Department Monday.
The Community Safety Partnership Bureau, funded through existing LAPD resources, will expand a city initiative that places officers on five year assignments in one place, with the intention of building relationships with the communities that they serve and in an effort to reduce crime and develop trust, according to Mayor Garcetti.
“It is a set of policies and procedures and people, but it’s also an approach to how we police,” the mayor said. “We want every Angeleno to feel secure, not only in the parks or in the streets of their neighborhoods, but in the presence of those in uniform… We’re taking this step for a clear reason: to build on our leadership in 21st century law enforcement, rooted in greater accountability and transparency and relationship-based policing.”
Rather than having just sworn personnel, the top leadership of the bureau will consist of a sworn deputy chief partnered with a civilian commander, who will oversee a council of community leaders, city council representatives and program funding partners.
The mayor said the initiative is part of a wider strategy of reducing the use of force through tactics, training and recruitment, and through changing the culture “where we have to,” as well as looking “beyond policing.”
“I’m struggling with how we describe this new paradigm, but I think it’s community-driven policing,” Garcetti said. “It is about the co-ownership of public safety, not just by a police department, but by all of us, and a feeling that we own that mission.”
The announcement comes after weeks of civil unrest in L.A., and much of the U.S., in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody as well as the killings of other Black Americans including Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, fueling a broader national reckoning with issues of systemic racism and police violence.
Cpt. Emada E. Tingirides of the LAPD, a Black woman and one of the program’s founding officers, was named Deputy Chief of the Bureau, a move that LAPD Chief Michael Moore called “one of the most critical decisions I’ve made for the future of this department.”
“This is about understanding the cultures of the communities and adjusting how we work and responding to conflict within communities,” Tingirides said. “It’s about getting certain training for the officers, like gang intervention; having teenagers come to their training to explain to them why they fear the police; doing roleplay where the children and people from within the community feel what it’s like to be a police officer, and vice versa. It’s that deep embedded understandings of culture, and then responding to it, because every community is different.”
The LAPD released a statement following the announcement, expressing support for the program.
“The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) recognizes the role it has played in the national narrative surrounding the need for police reform,” the department said. “As an organization, we are committed to further engaging in meaningful reflection about our prior missteps, but we are also eager to embrace changes that move us in a new direction…”
A yearlong evaluation of the program, focusing on Nickerson Gardens in Watts and Ramona Gardens in Boyle Heights, was conducted by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. It found through data collection and analysis that the model effectively works by building trust and relationships between officers in program, community residents and stakeholders.
“As trust increases between residents and the LAPD, the evaluation research indicates that residents do reach out to officers when there are problems,” a report on the findings states. “This also contributes to a greater sense of safety, further reflected by the decreases in violent crime.”
Chief Moore said Monday that the program is dependent on a more meaningful integration with community voices.
“This model represents a pivot, if you will, a strategy of moving ourselves away from a containment and suppression model to one that is increased community capacity, a sense of overall safety, where you see the lower levels of crime in concert with lower number of arrests, but increased trust,” Moore said.
Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said Monday that people deserve to have leaders that they trust.
“Trust is a fundamental part of what we need to make sure that members of our community have when it comes to their Los Angeles Police Department,” she said. “What is going to be a core value of this department: understanding that trust is not just given it is earned, and that is a fundamental part of the CSP program.”
The program originally began in 2011 in four public housing developments with high crime and gang problems: Ramona Gardens in Boyle Heights and Imperial Courts, Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens, all in Watts.
The briefing comes after LAPD officers and protesters broke out into violent clashes Saturday in downtown L.A., one of several cities across the nation with demonstrations the same night. The protests were in solidarity with Portland, where federal agents deployed tear gas on demonstrators following weeks of civil unrest in many U.S. cities in the wake of George Floyd’s death in late May.
In early June, Garcetti announced that he would not increase the LAPD’s budget, and a few weeks later, the city council agreed to cut the budget by more than $133 million, slashing overtime pay and cutting the size of the force below 10,000 officers.
