Los Angeles Police Department

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"LAPD" redirects here. For other uses, see LAPD (disambiguation).

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is the police department of the City of Los Angeles, California. It is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States, with over 9,000 officers and 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of 467 square miles (1209 km²) with a population of nearly 4 million people. The LAPD has had a rich and controversial history, including incidents of brutality and corruption. The agency's exploits have been heavily fictionalized in numerous movies and television shows.

For decades, the department has suffered from chronic underfunding. In comparison to most large cities, it has one of the lowest ratios of police personnel to population served; the current chief, William J. Bratton, has made enlarging the force one of his top priorities. (Bratton has been quoted as saying, "You give me 4000 more officers and I'll give you the safest city in the world.")

As a result, Los Angeles residents subscribe heavily to private security services, which in turn are a far more common sight on the streets of Los Angeles than in any other city in California.

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History

The first specific Los Angeles police force was founded in 1853 as the Los Angeles Rangers, a volunteer force that assisted the existing County forces. The Rangers were soon succeeded by the Los Angeles City Guards, another volunteer group. Neither force was particularly efficient and Los Angeles became known for its violence, gambling and "vice".

The first paid force was not created until 1869 when a force of six officers under City Marshal William C. Warren were hired. Warren was shot by one of his officers in 1876 and to replace him the newly created Board of Police commissioners selected Jacob T. Gerkins, he was replaced within a year by saloon-owner Emil Harris, the second of fifteen police chiefs from 1876-89.

The first chief to remain in office for any time was John M. Glass; appointed in 1889, he served for eleven years and was a driving force for increased professionalism in the force. By 1900 there were 70 officers, one for every 1,500 people; in 1903, with the start of the Civil Service, this force was increased to 200, although training was not introduced until 1916. The rapid turnover of chiefs was renewed in the 1900s as the office became increasingly politicized; from 1900 to 1923 there were sixteen different chiefs. The longest-lasting was Charles E. Sebastian, who served from 1911-1915 before going on to become mayor.

During World War I the force became involved with federal offenses, and much of the force was organized into a special Home Guard. In the postwar period, the department became highly corrupt along with much of the city government; this state lasted until the late 1930s. Two police chiefs did work within a anti-corruption and reforming mandate. August Vollmer laid the ground for future improvements but served for only a single year. James E. Davis served from 1926-1931 and from 1933-1939. In his first term he fired almost a fifth of the force for bad conduct, and instituted extended firearms training and also the dragnet system. In his second term Davis instituted a "Red Squad" to attack Communists and their offices.

With the replacement of Mayor Frank L. Shaw in 1938, the city gained a reformist mayor in Fletcher Bowron. He forced dozens of city commissioners out, as well as more than 45 LAPD officers. Bowron also appointed the first African American and the first woman to the Police Commission. The modernizer Arthur C. Hohmann was made chief in 1939 and resigned in 1941 after the notorious strike at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, in which he refused to use the LAPD as strikebreakers.

During World War II, under Police Chief Clemence B. Horrall, the force was heavily depleted by the demands of the armed forces; new recruits were given only six weeks training (twelve was normal). Despite the attempts to maintain numbers the police could do little to control the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. War Emergency personnel were given a "WE" designation with their badge numbers to distinguish them from other officers.

Among the department's more notorious cases of the Horrall years was the January 15, 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia.

Horrall and Assistant Chief Joe Reed resigned in 1949 under threat of a grand jury investigation related to the Brenda Allen scandal. One of Horrall and Reed's more enduring actions was to approve a radio show about the LAPD titled Dragnet.

Horrall was replaced by a retired Marine general, William A. Worton, who acted as interim chief until 1950, when William H. Parker was chosen in tight competition with Thad Brown. Parker advocated police professionalism and autonomy from civilian administration, especially as concerns internal affairs. The Bloody Christmas scandal in 1951 led to calls for civilian accountability and an end to police brutality.

Parker served until his death in 1966, the longest period in office of any Chief. Fortunately for the LAPD, Parker was an excellent leader, reorganizing the LAPD structurally but also making demands of his force in areas of honesty and discipline. The motto "To Protect and to Serve" was introduced in 1955. During this period the LAPD set the standards of professionalism echoed in the contemporaneous TV series Dragnet and Adam-12. The most serious challenge in this period was the 1965 Watts riots.

Parker was succeeded by Thad Brown as acting chief in 1966, followed by Thomas Reddin in 1967. Following an interim term by Chief Roger E. Murdock, the outspoken Edward M. Davis became chief in 1969; despite his occasional lapses, he introduced a number of modern programs aimed at community policing as well as the SWAT unit (1972); he retired in 1978.

During the term of Chief Davis, the LAPD became notorious for its policy of routinely using chokeholds for any reason – or for no reason at all – during arrests, Terry stops, and even traffic stops. The holds were often applied until the suspect passed out. By the time the policy was halted in May 1982 by the Police Commission, 15 people had died. The U.S. Supreme Court blocked a lawsuit seeking a injunction to halt the practice permanently, because Adolph Lyons could not prove that there was a substantial and immediate likelihood that he personally would be choked again. City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95 (1983).

Under Davis, the LAPD and its vice squad were known for active policing against gays. Zealous officers are purported to have dangled a youth over a cliff to try to make him reveal names of a pedophile ring[1]. On April 10, 1976, over a hundred officers, with Davis present, raided a charitable "slave auction" event and bragged to reporters that they had freed the slaves. Dozens of men were detained on charges of violating an 1899 anti-slavery statute, but the expensive raid was criticized by the city council and no one was convicted [2].

The successor to Davis, Daryl F. Gates, came into office just as Proposition 13 reduced the department's budget, cutting police numbers to less than 7,000 in seven years just as drug and gang crime reached unprecedented highs. To combat the rising tide of gang-related violence, Gates introduced Operation Hammer in 1987, which resulted in an unprecedented number of arrests, mostly of African-American and Hispanic youths. Gates retired in 1992, just after the Rodney King-related 1992 Los Angeles riots in April and May and the damaging Christopher Commission Report, and was replaced by Willie L. Williams, the fiftieth chief, the first black person to hold the office and the first non-internal appointee for almost 40 years. In 1997 Williams was replaced by Bernard Parks, during whose term the LAPD was rocked by the Rampart Division/CRASH corruption scandal. In 1997 one of the biggest challenges for the LAPD and LAPD SWAT was the North Hollywood shootout. Two robbers robbed a bank with AK-47s and shot twelve officers and seven bystanders but result in no deaths aside from the suspects. In 2002, William J. Bratton replaced Parks.

Presently, the Los Angeles Police Department is divided into four bureaus (Central, South, Valley and West) and into the following patrol divisions:

  • Central (01)
  • Rampart (02)
  • Southwest (03)
  • Hollenbeck (04)
  • Harbor (05)
  • Hollywood (06)
  • Wilshire (07)
  • West Los Angeles (08)
  • Van Nuys (09)
  • West Valley (10)
  • Northeast (11)
  • 77th Street (12)
  • Newton Street (13)
  • Pacific (14)
  • North Hollywood (15)
  • Foothill (16)
  • Devonshire (17)
  • Southeast (18)
  • Mission (19)


The Mission Division began operations in May 2005; the first new division to be deployed in more than a quarter of a century. The division covers the eastern half of the old Devonshire and the western half of the Foothill Divisions in the San Fernando Valley.


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Force composition

During the Parker-Davis-Gates period, the LAPD was virtually 100% white, and much of it lived outside of the city. Simi Valley, the Ventura County suburb that later became infamous as the site of the state trial that immediately preceded the 1992 Los Angeles riots, has long been home to a particularly large concentration of LAPD officers, almost all of them white. The Santa Clarita area and the South Bay beach cities are also popular destinations. Hiring quotas began to change this during the 1980s, but it was not the Christopher Commission reforms that substantial numbers of qualified black, Hispanic, and Asian officers began to join the force. Minority officers can be found in both rank-and-file and leadership positions in virtually all precincts, and the LAPD is starting to reflect the general population. As of 2002, 16.5% of the LAPD is African American, 34.2% is Latino, and 6.9% is Asian or Pacific Islander. [3]

The LAPD hired the first female police officer in the United States in 1910. Since then, women have been a small, but growing part of the force. In 2002, women made up 18.9% of the force.

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LAPD in the media

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Books

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Novels

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Motion pictures

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Television programs

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Video games

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
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LAPD Chiefs of Police


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See also


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References

  • Corwin, Miles (1997). The Killing Season . New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-6848-0235-X.
  • Corwin, Miles (2003). Homicide Special: A Year With the LAPD's Elite Detective Unit. New York: Henry Holt and Co. ISBN 0-8050-6798-1.
  • Domanick, Joe (1994). To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD's Century of War in the City of Dreams. New York: Pocket Books. ISBN 0-9727-6255-8.
  • Gates, Daryl F. (1992). Chief: My Life in the LAPD. New York: Bantam. ISBN 0-553-56205-3.
  • Sjoquist, Art R. (1984). History of the Los Angeles Police Department. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Police Revolver and Athletic Club.
  • Starr, Kevin (2004). Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2003. New York: Knopf.
  • Stoker, Charles (1951). Thicker'n Thieves. Sutter.
  • Wambaugh, Joseph (1973). The Onion Field. Delacorte.
  • Webb, Jack (1958). The Badge: The Inside Story of One of America's Great Police Departments. New York: Prentice-Hall.
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External link

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