Bernard Parks was appointed Chief of Police of Los Angeles in 1997, his term lasted till the year 2002. During his time in office Parks was very strict on his officers, some officers stated they were scared to do their jobs, due to the indiscriminate punishment and lack of concern for the officers. Parks stripped the Captains’ authority and created “community policing.”
Despite Parks’ public praise for community policing, it was common knowledge inside the
Department that he was not an advocate. Parks would later remove the senior lead officers from community policing and reassign them to the field. Removing the senior lead officers came as a surprise to many of the department’s advocates of the community policing, and many residents regarded this as a huge step backward, many captains felt the same, one captain stated “The impact was devastating. It was a real blow to community policing.” As the pressure grew to reinstated the senior lead officers, Mayor Riordan ordered parks to reinstate the senior lead officers in March 2001. In April 2002, after a national search for a new Chief of Police, Chief William J. Bratton was appointed to the new Chief of Police. When
Chief Bratton to over leadership he spent his first year surrounded by eleven consultants from New York and Boston, trying to learn the department as quickly as he could. Bratton studied the problems Williams and Parks had faced. Quickly Bratton reached out to the union and included its leadership in his staff meetings, something that no chief had done recently.
In his first year as chief, Chief Bratton gave the LAPD the most positive attention than it had received in years past. Within a year, the confidence of officers had been restored, with 85% agreeing that Chief Bratton was leading in the right direction, as opposed to 18% with Chief
Parks. Chief Bratton introduced computer statistics (CompStat), which is an analytic process to reveal patterns of crime so officers can be quickly and accurately be deployed. While in
CompStat public meetings, captains were aggressively questioned about crime in their areas, added transparency and accountability that had been lacking prior. With CompStat violent crime rates reduced significantly year after year. If police forces are to develop the kind of leadership that serves citizens, the inevitable updraft of power must be balanced by citizen power. In Chief Bratton’s first five years as Chief of Los Angeles Police Department, major felonies have been reduced by thirty percent, with homicides reduced by thirty-eight percent, also overall violent crimes have dropped by forty-six percent. Chief Bratton became the first LAPD Police Chief to be appointed to a second term since the 1980’s. Los Angeles is on track to experience four-hundred homicides this year, opposed to five-hundred eighty-eight in 2001.
Policing in the city of Los Angeles has changed dramatically since 1999.