The Fight Against Crime: Notes From The Front : Police Will Continue to Get By With Less

Driving from Sepulveda and Roscoe boulevards to Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Parthenia Street is a headache most mornings.

Try doing it with a human life on the line.

That’s what Los Angeles Police Officer Floyd Toledo did one recent day--drive across the San Fernando Valley with siren blaring to head off a Canoga Park woman threatening to kill herself. It’s a 15-minute drive, and 15 minutes is a long time for someone who’s suicidal. “It took me forever,” said Toledo, a patrol officer at the Devonshire station.

If a bond issue rejected by voters at the polls earlier this month had passed, 10-mile dashes such as Toledo’s would someday be history. The $171-million bond issue would have financed construction of a Mid-Valley station on the site of the closed Panorama City General Motors plant, among other things. Supporters say that station would reduce the area covered by the Devonshire station, giving patrol officers more time to concentrate on local problems and community-based policing.

Even though 62% of the voters supported the measure, it needed almost 67% to pass.

Although there were some grumbles in the roll-call rooms the morning after the election, officers say they are still ready and able to fight crime with rickety stations, wheezing cars and outdated radios.

“Nothing changes,” said Sgt. Bruce Cowan of Devonshire. “We’re still going to provide the best service possible.”

But, Cowan added, “what we realize at our level is that our best service is no longer world-class.” The bond issue was “something we could have done to get the service level back up.”

Police pointed out that the department has been making do with less for many years, and that it still manages to battle crime effectively. For example, Toledo’s ride across the Valley was certainly hair-raising. But he and his partner arrived in the nick of time, to aid a supervisor who had delayed the suicidal woman long enough for Toledo and his partner to subdue her.

Political observers say low turnout and strong anti-tax sentiment contributed to the measure’s defeat. Also dogging it was the memory of a 1989 bond issue for the LAPD which passed, but which city officials acknowledge raised money that was poorly spent.

Even “one or two of the officers said they didn’t vote for it,” Toledo said, “which is a sad thing, but I guess it’s those kind of times.” Those officers, he said, resented the tax as much as any other homeowner.

But Toledo said that from his perspective on the beat, the voters have hurt themselves. “The money they’re investing goes directly back to them,” he said. “It’s just kind of sad for them to not want to invest in their own safety.”

Cowan said added equipment and personnel could free beat officers to respond faster to local calls and spend more time dealing with them.

Because Valley officers have to cover such a large geographical area, officers are frequently called away from lower-priority calls to deal with emergencies, Cowan said.

“They can be talking to someone whose house has been burglarized, and that’s a very traumatic thing and officers respect that, but they have to listen to the radio for a high-response call,” Cowan said. When one comes, they jump in the car and vanish.

“This oftentimes makes people feel like, ‘Gee, the police don’t really care,’ ” Cowan said. “Well, the police have to do what they’re told.”

But Joe Brazas, a sergeant in the Van Nuys Division, cautioned that even passage of the bond issue would not have been a magic bullet for Valley police. The new station, he noted, would have been staffed by officers from the other five Valley divisions, reducing their rosters.

Although the measure called for hiring additional officers, Cowan said the LAPD already is hiring nearly as many people as it can train.

“You start out with an eight-inch pie tin, and it doesn’t matter how you slice it,” Brazas said. “What we’re going to have to do is put some more berries in that pie.”