To restore morale, new pick for LA police chief embraces a strategy California desperately needs

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her newly appointed police chief, Jim McDonnell, signaled something unusual and important on the day of his announcement Friday: Officer morale is important, and it is created in conversation with the community outside the department. 

That may sound obvious, but it’s a simple truth that has eluded or slipped away from many mayors and chiefs before them — and not just in Los Angeles. 

Across California and the country, cities are having trouble recruiting and retaining police officers. That’s a familiar problem in Los Angeles, where recruiting was made difficult in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and ensuing riots in 1992. Academy classes were half-full while senior officers took retirements to flee a foundering ship. Scandals in the years since have periodically rekindled those difficulties.

The city’s response has often been directed at improving the pay and benefits for officers, such as salary hikes, pension enhancements and flexible work schedules. The LAPD’s so-called “3-12,” with three days on 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. Importantly, though, salary and benefit perks only go so far toward rebuilding esprit de corps.

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

He did not cite a pay increase or a boost in benefits or a better work schedule. Rather, McDonnell pointed to the period in the early 1980s, when the LAPD and the city were gearing up for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Back then, McDonnell said, the LAPD had a clear focus and mission. Officers understood the job and were proud of the work.

Expanding on that notion, McDonnell went on to acknowledge that the LAPD lost some of that drive later in the decade and in the 1990s, when “we didn’t do the best job of asking what the community wanted.”

With Bass nodding as he delivered 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 require is community backing and a sense of purpose. 

Discovering that purpose means engaging with communities — and listening.

Driving and waving

The LAPD of the late 1980s and early 1990s too often assumed that policing was a job for police, and that communication meant explaining that to residents. That missed an essential fact about safety: Each community has its own needs and priorities. Police need to listen in order to learn. They do not learn while they are holding forth.

In practice, that means that for one neighborhood, the problem may be that an illegal trash dump or an abandoned building is fostering crime; in another, it may be a string of burglaries or car thefts. For some, deterring crime may be as simple as improving street lighting. Dilapidation breeds criminal behavior — that observation was the great genius of James Q. Wilson, whose “Broken Windows” theory and article revolutionized policing in the cities that studied it carefully. 

The LAPD once was 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 those lessons be lost and then found again. As Bass said last week, “law enforcement has evolved, and he has evolved.”

In important respects, policing is like teaching or social work or, dare I say it, journalism. Those drawn to the work come out of a sense of civic responsibility, care for their communities and a chance to contribute — in different ways, of course, but by tapping core convictions. 

They serve — in the case of police, “protect and serve” — and find it fulfilling. 

Those jobs lose their luster, however, when the public turns against them. It’s one thing to protect people from crime and make neighborhoods safer. It’s another to be received as an insensitive thug or a gun-toting interloper eager to lock people up. That’s precisely how the LAPD of the early 1990s was viewed, and it helped explain why many good officers left the department in those years. 

No one likes to be reviled, and a 3-12 work schedule wont fix that.

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The results were predictable and tragic. Crime spiked. Driven by crack cocaine and militant policing, homicides, assaults and other violent crimes skyrocketed at the end of the 1980s. The riots were the apotheosis of that period.

In the early 1990s, officers retreated. They made fewer arrests, engaged fewer suspects and didn’t work as hard. They even had a name for it: “Driving and waving.” Police went through the motions. The city suffered. 

Upward spiral

It took sustained effort, but the LAPD reversed those dismaying trends. By the end of the 1990s, community relations were more solid, the department was more diverse, and officers — not all of them, of course, but many — made it a point to listen to residents and respond to the concerns for their neighborhoods. Homicides fell from 1,092 in 1992 to 425 in 1999. 

Life got better for officers, too. Police officers who work in hostile environments are in greater danger than those who enjoy community support. They are attacked less often and use less lethal force against others. Again, some history: In the early 1990s, LAPD officers shot more than 100 people a year; by the 2020s, it was fewer than 30. 

The significance of community confidence highlights an aspect of police reform that is often deliberately distorted. Community policing, which is to engage residents and businesses in police priorities, is not a lefty political imposition on cops. It does not mean being soft on crime. 

To the contrary: It encourages officers to be creatively aggressive and to develop strategies that protect communities rather than merely rounding up suspects.

Some neighborhoods may need faster response times. Others might be best served by a bike patrol. Some respond to street cleanups. Practiced well, that approach protects police from harm, engages the community in reducing crime and makes neighborhoods safer. And it improves morale, which then helps keep officers and recruit more. 

It’s an upward spiral.

McDonnell gets that. He’s seen the LAPD suffer without it and prosper with it. He embraced its tenets in Long Beach, where he was the chief, and at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which he led for four years. When he lost his reelection bid to a bombastic dope, Alex Villanueva, that department’s backslide and collapse of goodwill served as a reminder of the importance of those principles — as well as their fragility.

Police departments are expensive and troublesome. They are flashpoints for public anger and black holes of public resources, often the most expensive service that local governments provide. Historically, it has been too easy to respond to police morale issues by throwing money at the problem, and the result is often good money after bad.

What Bass and McDonnell are demonstrating in the new chief’s first appearances is that they understand the issue better than many of their predecessors. They seem prepared to work together to retain veteran officers and recruit new ones by fostering an environment that gives purpose to the work of police. 

That’s an encouraging first sign for a new chief and his shrewd boss. California needs this to work.