Peter Repovich
October, 2008
Police officers never have it easy. For the most part, the people we encounter on a daily basis are not pleased to see us—our jobs are dangerous and we are responsible for making life-and-death decisions in a matter of seconds.
What makes our jobs even more difficult is when the community or advocacy organizations align against us and make attempts to impose unnecessary restrictions in the name of curbing what they characterize as across-the-board police behaviors.
The latest in these attempts comes from a few members of the Police Commission. Commissioner Mack expressed concern over the fact that the categories of discrimination, racial profiling and unlawful searches have no sustained complaints. President Tim Sands said it best when he told a reporter, “… in the absence of any evidence of racial profiling within the LAPD, the Police Commission seems to be determined to create facts to fit their assumptions. We should be spending our limited City resources to make Los Angeles safe from gang violence, not auditing closed adjudicated personnel complaints.” As part of the Consent Decree, the LAPD has collected racial data on all pedestrian and vehicle stops its officers make. As I have pointed out in past articles, unfortunately the data is not reviewed or analyzed in a constructive manner – the numbers are posted publicly in a raw format, leaving people to (mis)interpret them in whichever way they see fit.
Frankly, it is circular logic to think that just because there are complaints against LAPD officers that some of them must be found guilty of wrongdoing. In the case of the number of racial profiling complaints, thorough investigations uncovered that they had no merit.
What would be more effective is, rather than making the police the enemy, embrace them as partners,working on programs and tactics to help quell crime in our communities.
Our primary mission is to protect the people that we serve. Our thoughts are not focused on engaging in altercations with people in the community – if a situation escalates, it is because the other party causes it to. When someone pulls a gun on an officer or flees in a car, he/she is making a conscious choice to challenge law enforcement – and causes us to move into a whole other mode of policing. Suddenly we are in a situation where people in the community and our own lives are in danger. We call upon our training and experience to resolve the situation with as little impact on all parties involved.
We try to communicate to people within the community that when they are in a situation involving a police officer, they need to listen to police instructions and comply – for their own and our protection. This message, and messages about reducing violence, will be the ones that eliminate unfortunate circumstances where officers or other parties get hurt or killed.
It’s important for some members of the Police Commission to stop looking at the LAPD as a problem and instead view us as the solution that we are to Los Angeles’ crime problems. We also must be viewed as partners in this process, and rather than being singled out and attacked with broad generalizations about our motivations and behavior, be looked to as collaborators in the war against crime.
The police are not the enemy. The criminals on the streets – of all races, genders and backgrounds – who commit murder, rape, assault and other criminal acts and promote fear within their communities are the enemy. <br>There are processes in place that weed out the so-called problem officers. It’s unfortunate that some activist groups characterize all law enforcement as rogue and apply unfair stereotypes to LAPD officers. They are asking us not to stereotype certain people within the community – and all we ask for is the same treatment of the men and women who proudly protect the people of our City by serving as law enforcement officers.