Los Angeles’ new police chief hopes to increase public trust and thus boost morale

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her newly appointed police chief, Jim McDonnell, signaled something unusual and important on the day of their announcement Friday: Officer morale matters and comes from conversations with the community outside the department.

This may sound obvious, but it is a simple truth that has eluded or eluded many mayors and chiefs before them – and not just in Los Angeles.

Across California and the country, cities are struggling to recruit and retain police officers. That’s a well-known problem in Los Angeles, where recruiting became difficult after the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots in 1992. Scandals in the years that followed have repeatedly reignited these difficulties.

The city’s response has often been aimed at improving salaries and benefits for officers, such as salary increases, pension increases and flexible work schedules. The LAPD’s so-called “3-12” of three days of work for twelve hours a day, followed by four days off, was seen as a gift to the rank and file.

The 3-12 was just a bad idea, but police deserve to be paid well for their vital, sometimes dangerous work. It is important, however, that salary and social benefits only contribute to a limited extent to restoring esprit de corps.

That’s why I was encouraged last week by the way McDonnell addressed morality. I asked him if he could remember a time during his past 28-year career with the LAPD when morale was good and why that was.

He did not refer to a salary increase, an increase in benefits, or a better work schedule. Rather, McDonnell was referring to the time in the early 1980s when the LAPD and the city were preparing for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Back then, McDonnell said, the LAPD had a clear focus and mission. The officers understood the job and were proud of the work.

McDonnell expanded on that thought, acknowledging that the LAPD lost some of that drive later in the decade and into the 1990s, when “we didn’t do the best job of asking what the community wanted.”

While Bass nodded at that answer, the chief-designate and his potential new boss expressed important truths about how best to improve the LAPD and its officers. Yes, they deserve pay and benefits, but what they really need is community support and a sense of purpose.

Discovering this purpose means engaging with communities – and listening.

Drive and wave

The LAPD of the late 1980s and early 1990s all too often assumed that policing was a police job and that communication meant explaining that to residents. This overlooked a key aspect of security: each community has its own needs and priorities. Police must listen to learn. They don’t learn as they go along.

In practice, this means that the problem for a neighborhood may be that an illegal dump or abandoned building encourages crime; in another case it may be a series of burglaries or car thefts. For some, deterring crime could be as simple as improving street lighting. Decay leads to criminal behavior – this observation was the great genius of James Q. Wilson, whose “Broken Windows” theory and articles revolutionized policing in the cities they carefully studied.

The LAPD was once at the forefront of listening. Chief Ed Davis pioneered proto-community policing in the 1970s. But those lessons were forgotten in the days of Daryl F. Gates and the department as an occupying army.

McDonnell watched as those lessons were lost and then found again. As Bass said last week, “Law enforcement has evolved, and he has evolved.”

In important respects, police work is like teaching or social work or, dare I say it, journalism. Those who are drawn to the work come from a sense of civic responsibility, a concern for their communities, and an opportunity to contribute—in different ways, of course, but by leveraging core beliefs.

They serve – in the case of the police: “protect and serve” – and find it fulfilling.

However, these jobs lose their luster when the public turns against them. It’s one thing to protect people from crime and make neighborhoods safer. It’s another thing to be perceived as an insensitive criminal or an armed intruder bent on locking people up. That’s exactly how the LAPD was viewed in the early 1990s, and it helped explain why many good officers left the department during those years.

Nobody likes being called names, and a 3-12 work schedule isn’t going to fix that.

Read more: “Catastrophic staffing shortages” hit California rural police first and hardest

The results were predictable and tragic. Crime increased. Driven by crack cocaine and militant policing, the late 1980s saw a surge in homicides, assaults and other violent crimes. The riots were the apotheosis of this time.

The officials withdrew in the early 1990s. They made fewer arrests, hired fewer suspects, and didn’t work as hard. They even had a name for it: “Driving and Waving.” The police followed up on the requests. The city suffered.

Upward spiral

It took sustained effort, but the LAPD was able to reverse these troubling trends. By the late 1990s, community relations were stronger, the department was more diverse, and officers—not all, of course, but many—placed an emphasis on listening to residents and responding to their neighborhood’s concerns. The number of homicides fell from 1,092 in 1992 to 425 in 1999.

Life also got better for the officers. Police officers who work in hostile environments face greater danger than those who enjoy community support. They are less likely to be attacked and use less lethal force against others. Some history again: In the early 1990s, LAPD officers shot more than 100 people per year; in the 2020s there were fewer than 30.

The importance of community trust highlights an aspect of police reform that is often intentionally distorted. Community policing, which aims to include residents and businesses in police priorities, is not a left-wing political imposition on police. This doesn’t mean you have to be soft on crime.

On the contrary, it encourages officers to be creatively aggressive and develop strategies that protect communities rather than just round up suspects.

Some districts may require faster response times. For others, a bike patrol may be best. Some respond to street cleanups. When implemented well, this approach protects police from harm, engages the community in reducing crime, and makes neighborhoods safer. And it improves morale, which then helps retain officers and recruit more.

It’s an upward spiral.

McDonnell understands that. He’s seen the LAPD suffer and thrive without them. He adopted the principles at Long Beach, where he was chief, and at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which he led for four years. When he lost re-election to a bombastic jerk, Alex Villanueva, that department’s regression and collapse of goodwill served as a reminder of the importance of those principles — but also their fragility.

Police departments are expensive and cumbersome. They are hotspots of public anger and black holes of public resources, often the most expensive service that local governments provide. In the past, it has been too easy to respond to problems with police morale by throwing money at solving the problem, and the result is often good money after bad.

What Bass and McDonnell show in the new boss’s first appearances is that they understand the issue better than many of their predecessors. They appear willing to work together to retain experienced police officers and recruit new ones by creating an environment that gives police work meaning.

That’s an encouraging first sign for a new boss and his smart boss. California needs this to function.