L.A. Crime Fills a Power Vacuum

     Explaining the ups and downs of crime rates is a precarious business. It's a happy exercise when crime has dropped, as in the eight-year decline that Los Angeles and the nation enjoyed through 1999. The growth of the L.A. Police Department to nearly 10,000 officers was among the reasons cited, along with the booming economy, an aging criminal population and California's three-strikes law.
     Now comes the opposite. Violent crime in Los Angeles rose sharply in 2000, up nearly 10% over 1999. The biggest jump was in homicides--a 27.6% increase to 545, with most of the increase involving gang victims in South and Central Los Angeles, even though, at least in the first half of the year, much of the rest of the state experienced only small increases or even decreases in murders.
     Again, the experts lay out their explanations: crimes by newly released parolees; the start of a long-predicted young-adult crime wave; the 800-officer drop in the LAPD; low morale in the force related to the Rampart scandal.
     One other possibility also deserves airing--that Los Angeles is suffering the results of a wrongheaded approach to fighting gangs that dates back to at least the mid-1980s. In the current shift to a new and, we hope, much better-controlled anti-gang effort, street gangs may have taken temporary advantage of a vacuum in LAPD enforcement. If so, that means the rise might be quelled before it spirals out of control.
     Fourteen years ago, under Chief Daryl F. Gates, the LAPD's "total suppression" policy included stopping, frisking and questioning just about everyone who looked like a gang member. At the time, a much smaller anti-gang effort by the Los Angeles County sheriff, targeting the most criminally active gangs, was seeing noticeably larger drops in crime. The LAPD's response was to make a bad situation worse. Having already placed the lion's share of gang suppression in the hands of just 145 anti-gang officers, the LAPD brass moved the gang units into separate station houses around the city, isolating them from the rest of the force.
     Regular LAPD patrol officers were largely not involved with the gang suppression business, and the so-called CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) units operated with too much freedom and too little supervision.
     One painful result was the Rampart Division matter. Another was the sudden disbanding of the gang units in the wake of the corruption scandal, even though the rest of the force had little experience with controlling gangs. The LAPD had to begin, in March of last year, recruiting and training for a new anti-gang effort, with better screening of officers and sharper supervision. This was a necessary step, but understandably it caused something of a power vacuum on the streets, where young felons aged 14 to 24 have fueled the rise in gang homicides.
     At least there is still an opportunity for the department to get its new units up to speed before Los Angeles sees a further increase in murderous violence.