LA challenge for 'Hollywood Bill'

LOS ANGELES -- It's 11 o'clock on a Wednesday night, and the city's police chief, William J. Bratton, is ensconced in the corner of a trendy West Hollywood bistro called Ago, nibbling on a gourmet pizza, schmoozing with a filmmaker named John Herzfeld.

Herzfeld has directed the likes of Robert DeNiro in movies with multimillion-dollar budgets, but Bill Bratton is looking for a freebie, a series of commercials in which the Los Angeles Police Department would be the star, part of Bratton's plan to rebrand the scandal-plagued LAPD.

In a town where nobody works for nothing, Bratton's pitch falls on receptive ears.

"This guy is getting it done," Herzfeld said, indicating Bratton with a thumb. "He's reached out to the [entertainment] industry, and people are responding. People want to help."

Seeking stars to appear in the commercials, Bratton said he is going to visit Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks on the set of a film they're shooting, and Tom Cruise is an old pal. As Bratton and Herzfeld discussed the plan, Al Pacino's 82-year-old father ambled up to shake Bratton's hand.

Dorchester's Bill Bratton, who went to New York and became Broadway Bill, is now Hollywood Bill.

But if Bratton is to have the impact he wants, his challenge isn't really to win over the Hollywood crowd, he said. What the former Boston and New York City commissioner wants is credibility in places like South Los Angeles, where riots flared in 1992 after the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted. And in districts with nicknames like Shootin' Newton, where gangs control whole blocks. And in police divisions like the one called Rampart, which have become synonymous with police corruption.

One year into his tenure at a department with a reputation as one of the nation's most troubled, Bratton has wasted no time in making waves.

He has presided over a 24 percent drop in homicides, relieving the City of Angels of the title of murder capital of the United States. That title for 2003 will most likely go to Chicago.

But Bratton, who oversaw dramatic crime drops as commissioner in New York City in the mid-1990s, has run into a wall in his quest to make Los Angeles the safest big city in America. Citing fiscal constraints, the City Council balked at giving him 320 more officers.

So, in his typical brash style, Bratton has decided to go over the council's head with his plan to add 3,000 officers to a department that historically has been stretched thin. While saying he'll make do with the 9,300 officers he has, Bratton is pushing for a referendum next November, telling Angelenos that if they want safer streets, they will have to pay for them.

Bratton's outspokenness, considered a strength with blunt New Yorkers, has rubbed some in more laid-back Los Angeles the wrong way. City councilors were furious last spring, when Bratton suggested their refusal to pony up more money for more police showed how out of touch they were with the daily carnage on some streets. Bratton compared the rebuff to turning back General Eisenhower on D-Day.

No one had to ask who was cast as Ike.

But Bratton's plain-speaking has won him many fans. In November 2002, just a month into his five-year term, Bratton was confronted by a group of demonstrators angry over the deaths of two teenagers in a car that crashed after police had shot at it. As protesters demanded, "Control your officers," Bratton fired back, "Control your kids."

Mayor James K. Hahn, who hired Bratton, looks back at that confrontation as a turning point.

"We haven't had that kind of candor in this city," Hahn said.

Even some who early on bristled at Bratton's rhetoric now give him high marks.

"Hey," said City Councilor Cindy Miscikowski, "he apologized to us. We've never had a police chief apologize for anything."

Bratton said he regrets his verbal attacks on the council, but nothing else. In a place where everyone wants to be a star, he has quickly made his mark.

"This knock I take, `Hollywood Bill,' being attracted to the bright lights. Well, I am. It's a skill," he said. "Why not cultivate it and use it to accomplish something positive?"

Gangs outnumber police When it comes to policing in Los Angeles, so much of it is about the numbers. There are six times as many gang members as police, and gangs account for more than half the city's murders.

The biggest challenge facing Bratton is how to police a relatively large area with a relatively small force. Los Angeles has 9,300 officers patrolling an area of 464 square miles and 3.6 million people. That's about one police officer for every 400 residents and about 20 officers per square mile.

Boston has twice as many police officers per square mile. In New York, Bratton had a force of 37,000 -- about one for every 200 residents and 128 per square mile. Among the nation's five biggest cities, Los Angeles has the thinnest coverage.

That lack of resources has made it impossible to engineer a dramatic drop in crime, Bratton said. In New York, in his first year as commissioner, violent crime dropped 12 percent. In Los Angeles, the drop was about 5 percent.

The mismatch between the size of the force and the sprawl of the city is also behind the LAPD's policing style, and some of its notoriety, according to Joe Domanick, who wrote a history of the force, and David Dotson, a former assistant chief.

To compensate for lack of numbers, the department adopted a more militaristic style, with less of the sort of stop-and-talk community policing that took hold in many cities in the 1990s. There was also less supervision, making more likely the kind of beatings and evidence-planting that came to light in the Rampart Division's gang unit in 1999.

Bratton has brought along some of those who helped him turn around departments in Boston and New York, including the consultant, John Linder, and George Kelling, the academic who cowrote "Broken Windows," the treatise that holds that addressing minor crimes and nuisances can reduce major ones. The Rev. Eugene Rivers, cofounder of the Ten Point Coalition of black ministers, which helped stem gang violence in Boston, has visited regularly to vouch for Bratton in African-American neighborhoods.

Last month, Bratton appointed assistant chief Jim McDonnell, a Boston native and 23-year veteran of the LAPD.

If the idea of two white Irish Catholic guys from Boston heading the LAPD strikes Bratton and McDonnell as ironic, it worried many in LA's minority community. Constance L. Rice, a Harvard-educated civil rights attorney, was among them.

But Rice was impressed when Bratton appeared before well-heeled audiences in the San Fernando Valley and said his priority was the high-crime, low-income neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. She was pleasantly surprised when Bratton ordered detectives to work nights and weekends.

"He still doesn't get LA politics," said Rice, "but he refuses to accept the way things are. He aggressively demands change -- change at the hair follicles, not just the split ends."

Bratton hasn't silenced all his critics. Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Bratton's crackdown on the homeless in areas like the city's Skid Row is cynical and ineffective. She thinks his antigang rhetoric demonizes many young people.

"He still has a New York version of `Broken Windows,' a mentality that won't work here," said Ripston, a native New Yorker whose group was among those who filed lawsuits forcing the LAPD to curtail its sweeps of the homeless. "He's smart, but this is not the city he imagined it is."

Homeless advocates such as Alice Callaghan, who heads the Skid Row antipoverty agency Las Familias Del Pueblo, accuse Bratton of criminalizing homelessness by banning sleeping and urinating on sidewalks. "They want to take the Row back so rich people can have their loft apartments downtown," she said.

Bratton is unapologetic for increased policing in homeless areas.

"We're targeting behavior, not homeless people," he said.

Wins over officers Perhaps the most important constituency Bratton had to win over was the ordinary officer. Beaten down by a decade of scandal, officers were leaving in droves; many others, wary of the department's hair-trigger disciplinary system, had adopted a "drive by and wave" attitude to crime fighting.

Bratton appealed to their pride. He asked the rank and file what they needed, and when they asked for better guns, he bought them Glocks. He also asked for their ideas. "He's the first chief who ever asked what we thought," said Bob Baker, president of the police union.

At the 77th Division, ground zero during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, police talk about getting back in the game. Arrests are up, and homicides are down, by 50 percent. District commander Jim Tatreau has 34 years on the job and could cash out with a full pension, but he's loving it these days.

"It used to be, they'd break a rookie in by having him drive around with an older guy," Tatreau said, steering his unmarked car past a group of wary gang members, an old-fashioned .38-caliber revolver tucked in his lap.

"The older guy would say, `See that woman, kid? That's a hooker. That's for Vice. You see those guys over there? They're dealers. That's for Narcotics.' . . . We got so specialized that we forgot what the mission was, which is to fight crime. . . . Since Bratton came in, I feel like I get to do what my instincts tell me."

Bratton has tended to stay only a few years in jobs he calls "turnarounds." He acknowledged Los Angeles is a bigger project, and vows to serve out his five-year term. He and his wife, the Court TV anchor and lawyer Rikki Klieman, bought a $1.3 million home in Los Feliz, and they say they're in for the long haul.

At 56, the only man to be chief of police in the nation's two biggest cities has an eye on his legacy. "This," he said, "is the last great urban experiment in America. I'm going to make it work."