The Los Angeles Police Department has lost hundreds of civilian staff members in recent years and their ranks need to be restored, an assistant chief official told a Los Angeles City Council committee Wednesday.
“We need civilian workforce back up to snuff,” LAPD Assistant Chief Sandy Jo MacArthur told members of the council’s Public Safety Committee.
Having adequate numbers of civilian support workers is “very, very important to the functioning of the police department,” she said, especially considering the department’s 22 divisions are each “larger than the majority of police departments in the state of California.”
The department had 2,747 civilian workers as of Sept. 22, down from the 3,251 workers employed in June 2009, according to the LAPD. The department has about 9,900 sworn LAPD officers.
LAPD’s civilian employees handle evidence storage, perform administrative duties and work in labs. A civilian employee with the LAPD told the committee the evidence storage staff has been cut from more than 100 people in 2007 to less than 50, while the number of evidence storage locations shrank from 21 to five.
Councilman Mitch Englander, who compared civilian LAPD workers to the pit crew for a race car driver, said crime rates continue to decline, but “the second we see some upticks, we’re in trouble.”
The LAPD civilian staff has been “decimated” in recent years, he said.
The ratio of sworn to civilian employees is 3.6 to 1 in Los Angeles, according to an LAPD report, compared with 1.27 to 1 in Burbank and 4.5 to 1 in San Francisco.
Councilman Mike Bonin expressed concern the decrease in civilian workers would create a “patrol suck,” in which officers must spend more of their time on desk work, rather than out patrolling.
Police officers spend about 40 percent of their time on administrative duties, according an LAPD report. But MacArthur told the committee the amount of time sworn officers spend on desk work has not seen significant increases recent years.
She added that an automated reporting system could soon decrease the amount of time sworn officers need to spend on desk work.
The Public Safety Committee forwarded without recommendation the LAPD’s reports to two other council committees handling personnel and budget issues.
— City News Service