Fighting Crime Doesn’t Pay
Make a wrong move today, Al Sharpton’s on your lawn tomorrow.

Mr. Dunphy* is an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department
July 3, 2001 8:40 a.m.

he Seattle Times reported last Tuesday that police officers are becoming increasingly reluctant to confront criminals in that city's black neighborhoods, for fear of becoming involved in controversial, racially charged incidents. The story, by Times staff writers Alex Tizon and Reid Forgrave, quotes several Seattle cops who admit to holding back in their enforcement efforts rather than risk being labeled as racial-profilers or worse. One officer, 17-year veteran Eric Michl, put it this way: "Parking under a shady tree to work on a crossword puzzle is a great alternative to being labeled a racist and being dragged through an inquest, a review board, an FBI and U.S. Attorney's investigation and a lawsuit."

Saturday's Cincinnati Enquirer reports a similar trend among that city's police officers. In April, Cincinnati endured days of rioting after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man during a foot pursuit. The officer, Stephen Roach, was indicted for the shooting and is awaiting trial, but there has been another, more subtle impact on the rest of the city's cops: Arrests have decreased by 35 percent. The Enquirer article makes no mention of it, but experience tells me this decline in arrests is mirrored in a similar rise in crime.

Keith Fangman, president of Cincinnati's Fraternal Order of Police, issued this warning in the organization's newsletter: "If you want to make 20 traffic stops a shift and chase every dope dealer you see, you go right ahead. Just remember that if something goes wrong, or you make the slightest mistake in that split second, it could result in having your worst nightmare come true for you and your family, and City Hall will sell you out."

And that, gentle readers, fairly well sums up the state of law enforcement in United States of America at the dawn of the 21st century. Police officers everywhere are coming to realize that if they leave their shady spots and their crossword puzzles only for as long as it takes to take a few crime reports every day, their pay will be exactly the same as it would have been had they risked their hides by going out and arresting the people committing the crimes. Lingering somewhere in the recesses of the typical street cop's mind is the chilling thought of being run through the wringer Officers Michl and Fangman so aptly describe. Make a wrong move at work today and you might have Jesse Jackson or — shudder! — Al Sharpton leading a horde of no-justice-no-peace lunatics across your front lawn tomorrow. Imagine opening your front door to get the paper some morning only to be greeted by a pompadoured fat guy in a sweat suit carrying on and leaving Krispy Kreme wrappers all over the yard. The very thought of it is enough to put you off your feed.

In addition to the horrors cops everywhere are facing, we in the LAPD have been burdened with an additional disincentive to proactive police work: a disciplinary system gone mad. Officer Mitzi Grasso, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, writes on the impact of the system in the June edition of The Thin Blue Line, the Protective League's newspaper. She cites a case in which two officers on patrol saw some suspicious activity in an alley, then made a U-turn to investigate. The people in the alley fled as the officers approached, but the officers were later summoned to the station to be accused of making an illegal U-turn and driving too fast in the alley. One officer was suspended for ten days — at a loss of about $1600 in salary. His partner, an exemplary officer and former Marine, refused to lie down and accept such punishment; he resigned from the LAPD and accepted an offer from a suburban police department. Ask yourself: How eager will that suspended officer be the next time he sees something suspicious in an alley?

One hears these tales everywhere LAPD officers gather these days. Approach any group of cops in the hallways of the downtown Criminal Courts Building and they'll regale you for hours with similar stories. And in any such gathering you're sure to find at least one cop who has applied for a job with some other department. Even at full strength, the LAPD has one of the lowest officers-per-capita ratios in the country. But the department is currently at least 1,000 officers below its budgeted strength, and every month we lose more officers to resignations and retirements than we can hire to replace them. The official line parroted by LAPD chief Bernard Parks and his sycophantic command staff is that the robust economy has made private-sector jobs more attractive than police work, but this canard ignores the fact that the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, presumably operating in the same economic environment as the LAPD, has had no difficulty filling its vacancies. Indeed, there are reports that as many as 1,000 current LAPD officers are attempting to trade their blue uniforms for the Sheriff's Department's green and tan.

I'm hoping to hold out for better times, but Dunphy may soon be one of them.

(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management .)