By the end of the week, the Los Angeles Police Department will deploy additional Metro officers to areas with the highest rates of violent crime across the city, with many of them likely to end up in South Los Angeles, where gang violence has spiked in recent weeks.
The LAPD’s Metro officers are not stationed out of geographic police divisions, but are assigned as needed to areas based on the level of violent crime, Capt. Jeff Bert told City News Service.
“We deploy metropolitan division where violent crime has spiked, traditionally,” Bert said.
The Metro division has grown by 200 officers in the past six months, reaching an unprecedented 482 officers, he said. The division is graduating its latest batch of officers, which will enable the Metropolitan Division to send out as many as 100 officers per night, “more than in a very long time,” Bert said.
Metro officers have specialized crime-suppression training, which includes identifying potential criminal activity such as drug transactions, enforcing laws, conducting warrant checks, running vehicle license plates and conducting pedestrian and traffic stops, Bert said.
Bert said the officers are not necessarily there to respond to calls, but will serve as backup when needed, and they will also “engage community members, find out what people are afraid of and try to help them.”
Many of the 100 Metro officers being deployed citywide will likely be assigned to the South Los Angeles area where there has been a recent spike in killings, he said.
South Los Angeles neighborhoods — served by the LAPD’s South Bureau — saw 60 shootings in just the last two weeks of August, with 50 people hit and 15 people killed, Bert said.
Other high-crime areas where the Metro officers may be deployed include the area served by the Newton Division, which is part of the Central Bureau. That area has also seen a large percentage jump in crime, he said.
Violent crime across the city has seen a jump, with Police Chief Charlie Beck reporting this week that as of Saturday, homicides in Los Angeles were up 7 percent to 185, compared with the same first eight months of last year.
About half of the 39 homicides in August occurred in South Los Angeles, according to LAPD officials. Beck has said that with gang crime up 15 percent, many of the killings appear to be driven by gang activity.
Bert said South Los Angeles is a major focus for extra police resources. In addition to the Metro officers, the South Bureau has set up a command post that will monitor criminal activity across each of its divisions, which are Southwest, 77th Street, Southeast and Harbor.
Crime is traditionally tracked by each division, so the command post will centralize the monitoring of crime activity in the South Bureau, Bert said.
A high-ranking officer will also be sent to the South Bureau to give oversight and make decisions about how to deploy resources, he said.
Gang units and city gang intervention workers will also be focusing their attention on the area, Bert said.
The LAPD hosted a community meeting in South Los Angeles last week, and officers are meeting with local religious leaders and youth development workers, Bert said.
— Wire reports