ValleyVote Update for 2-7-01 |
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More on Pay Raises, Crime and the behind schedule and over cost 911 Centers.
Re "Riordan OKs Hefty Raises for Top Officials," Jan. 30.
The pending pay raises for LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks, Department of Water and Power head David Freeman and harbor department head Larry A. Keller . . . are a slap in the face to the citizens of Los Angeles.
It is especially so to the citizens of West Hills when the city will not install some requested center line striping because the cost would be prohibitive (about $100 for installation and $80 for upkeep), and the loss of sworn officers to other city areas. The windfall for Parks would pay for a lot of overtime that the LAPD continues to complain that it does not have enough money for.
CHARLES E. GREMER West Hills Property Owners Assn. President
Re "Big bucks for top brass":
I think it is outrageous that the mayor and key City Council members can come up with a new raise in salary for the chief of police, Department of Water and Power's S. David Freeman, Larry Keller of the Harbor Department and librarian Susan Kent -- and retroactive yet.
All of these department heads earn much more than those of other major cities, and none have done an outstanding job in my opinion. The Police Department is in shambles, and the other departments are barely holding their own. The citizens of Los Angeles deserve tax increases for electing council members and officials who are bent on giving away taxpayers money. Someone has to pay for these bad decisions.
B.W. Schmidt Pacoima
Bravo for Councilman Joel Wachs, who wants a review of Mayor Richard Riordan's recent raises for already overpaid heads of L.A. city departments. It's about time that someone with fiscal responsibility becomes mayor to replace one who is focused on gaining more power through charter reform, through bankrolling candidates, and by rewarding his department head pals and steering contracts to the "proper" places.
Bruce Campbell Brentwood
THE LAPD has developed an extraordinary program to deal with the shortage of officers -- it just doesn't answer when people call 911 for help.
The Los Angeles City Council learned last week what much of the city already knew: 220,000 calls to 911 went unanswered last year because the city has yet to complete construction of two new 911 emergency centers, including one in West Hills, that were promised a decade ago. In 1992, voters approved a $235 million bond issue to build new emergency dispatch centers -- one in Canoga Park and one in Westchester. The plan was to have the new centers up and running by 2000, but the project has faced repeated delays.
Last week, the council learned that the LAPD may have wasted $11 million on a custom communications system that will be obsolete by the time it is installed, Councilwoman Laura Chick said. That $11 million is the tip of the iceberg.
Three years ago, Mayor Richard Riordan and the LAPD's top brass convinced the City Council to build the main 911 police dispatch center downtown instead of in Westchester, adding $3.2 million to the cost on top of the $2.5 million for replacement parking at the downtown site.
To her credit, Chick had originally opposed the move to build downtown instead of in Westchester. But no one listened. That's because the downtown real estate interests behind the switch in locations have the ears of most of the city's elected leaders.
With city elections just three months away, maybe these elected leaders and those hoping to win a seat on the council will find the time to start listening to complaints that the city can't manage its business properly. There's no question the LAPD needs help. But so does the entire city bureaucracy.
By Erik N. Nelson Staff Writer
Los Angeles police have mismanaged the creation of two new 911 emergency call centers -- one of them in West Hills -- to the point where they may have wasted $11 million on a custom communications system that will be obsolete by the time it is installed, Councilwoman Laura Chick charged Sunday.
Chick lashed out at the Los Angeles Police Department in the wake of reports that 220,000 calls to 911 went unanswered last year and that working conditions in the call center at police headquarters downtown were so bad that police officers are routinely assigned to answer calls.
The problem surfaced Friday when, over Chick's opposition, the City Council approved paying TRW more than $5.3 million for a communications system at the call centers -- one at former police headquarters and the other in West Hills. "After $11 million was spent going in this direction, now we're being told that we need $5 million to go in that direction," Chick said at a news conference in front of the LAPD's West Valley station.
The problem is not that the department is changing course technologically, but that it first spent $11 million heading in a different and apparently wrong direction, she said. Chick is pushing a measure she introduced six months ago calling for a top-to-bottom examination of the way the city manages its technology projects.
She said the city's Information Technology Agency doesn't have enough authority to deal with long-running technology problems, such as the 911 system, purchasing system and the city's payroll system. "At the rate the city of Los Angeles is going, we are going to be so far behind the eight ball that we are not going to be able to communicate with the people we serve."
Police spokesman Lt. Horace Frank said he could not directly address Chick's concerns Sunday because Roger Ham, who directs the department's technology programs, was not available. But Frank said that, in general, "we're not doing anything that is inconsistent with the directions that we're getting" from the council.
"Even though we switched direction, the switch was certainly for the benefit of the community," Frank said. "We switched according to the new technology, without its costing us more or its taking anymore time."
Frank also noted that while the volume of 911 calls increased last year, some of the pressure has been relieved by the new 877-ASK-LAPD number for nonemergency calls.
Safety: Abandoned calls hit a five-year record while bond-funded construction of two new dispatch centers, including one in the Valley, is years behind schedule.
By SUE FOX, Times Staff Writer
Nine years after Los Angeles voters approved $235 million in bonds to upgrade the city's outdated 911 system, the new emergency dispatch centers are still under construction and more than 200,000 calls a year are going unanswered. That's the worst tally for abandoned calls that the 911 system has logged in five years, according to Los Angeles Police Department records.
The problem got so bad--almost 12% of 911 calls rang until the caller hung up in 2000--that the LAPD assigned 15 police officers to help operators answer the phones. Meanwhile, the city's promise to build twin 911 centers downtown and in the San Fernando Valley has slipped years behind schedule, knocked off track as officials haggled over where to build them. The duplicate centers are necessary, according to police, to ensure public safety in the event that one facility is disabled by an earthquake or some other disaster.
Officials say both centers were supposed to have opened last year, but they now say the Valley site won't be ready until 2003, with the downtown Los Angeles center set to debut about six months earlier. "It's an extremely complex project," said Lt. Dan Keefe, the LAPD's project manager for the 911 centers. "No one has ever built a dual-dispatch system of this size before."
The ailments afflicting the 911 system, considered overburdened and understaffed almost as soon as it was installed in 1984, are as persistent as the calls for help tumbling into the dispatch center. One major problem is that four out of five callers are not reporting true emergencies, police say, clogging the lines with gripes about noisy parties, requests for street repair and crank calls.
Working conditions at the 911 dispatch center are so poor--picture a windowless room buried four stories under City Hall and crammed with operators juggling life-or-death calls--that about half the new operators leave the job within their first year. The city has about 430 operators, trained to handle both incoming 911 calls and police dispatching. The center is staffed around the clock by a minimum of nine 911 operators. But there are more than 60 vacancies on the staff, forcing other operators to absorb larger call loads or work overtime.
The resulting strain on the system means thousands of calls are abandoned as nervous callers hang up before they can reach an operator. Last year the 911 system received 1,854,149 calls and answered 1,369,041 of them within 10 seconds. Another 100,175 were answered within 20 seconds. The total number of abandoned calls was 219,733, according to the LAPD.
Police believe that the new 911 centers, featuring
more than twice as many dispatch consoles, will help drive down the number of
unanswered calls.
From the moment voters approved the 911 bond
measure in 1992, the massive project has lumbered behind schedule. City
officials said they were unprepared for the bond's passage because two similar
ballot measures had failed in 1990 and 1991.
But in 1992, riots sparked by not-guilty verdicts
for four LAPD officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King helped convince
voters that the time was ripe to upgrade police equipment and finance the
construction of two dispatch centers.
Plodding Construction
Improvements have since been made on other parts
of the emergency system, an intricate web of radios, telephones and computers
that links dispatchers and police officers in the field. The LAPD has
distributed more than 7,500 new hand-held radios to officers, added dozens of
radio frequencies to its network and upgraded mobile data terminals in police
cars. But debates over where to build the 911 facilities
and squabbles over contracts have slowed work on the dispatch centers--the
hallmark of the bond measure.
At least four locations were considered for each center, a time-consuming process requiring myriad city reports and site visits. At one point in 1999, Mayor Richard Riordan held a news conference to demand that "faceless bureaucrats" stop analyzing yet another option for the Valley site--an option that might have saved $7 million but required more time--and begin construction immediately.
The 911 measure isn't the only city bond measure to stumble. In 1989, voters approved bonds to pay for two new police stations and place sprinklers in six public buildings. More than a decade later, the new stations have not been built and sprinklers have been installed in only one building. The spotty track record may have contributed to the failure of more recent proposals such as a 1999 bond measure for police and fire stations.
The dispatch centers now being built are almost 30 miles apart, one next to Parker Center downtown and the other at the corner of Roscoe Boulevard and Fallbrook Avenue in West Hills. On Friday, the protracted project came under fire as City Council members questioned the LAPD's handling of a $5.3-million contract to design communication systems for the 911 centers, a pair of matching $21-million hubs engineered to withstand earthquakes and provide a backup network if one center should falter.
Roger Ham, the LAPD's chief information officer, told the council that the police department had decided to switch directions and buy a system that differed from the one originally approved, to take advantage of the latest technology. He then told the lawmakers that the overall effort remained "on target and on budget."
"In my opinion, the city has once again made
very costly mistakes," objected Councilwoman Laura Chick, former chair of
the council's Public Safety Committee. "I find it insulting for [LAPD
officials] to come in here and say, 'Don't worry, we're on budget.' Well, one of
the reasons we have the money is because we're moving so slowly . . . that we're
collecting interest on the people's bond money."
In fact, the city has reaped about $23 million in
interest over the years, said project manager Keefe. The new money will help buy
improved dispatching software for the 911 centers, he said.
The council approved the contract over Chick's
protests after Ham warned that any delay would throw the project off the current
schedule.
As work on the new 911 centers plods on, the city has launched several initiatives aimed at improving emergency response. In the summer of 1999, police set up a new toll-free number (877-ASK-LAPD) to handle nonemergency calls. A year later, they unveiled a $500,000 public relations campaign to promote the service--and hammer home the difference between life-threatening emergencies and not-so-serious problems--with catchy slogans such as "Are you in cardiac arrest? Or is your neighbor a pest?"
City officials are also working on a longer-term project to siphon nonemergency calls away from 911--a 311 number to handle requests for services such as tree trimming and pothole plugging. Funding for the 311 system is still uncertain, said Councilman Mike Feuer, who led the push for that system.
A Difficult Workplace
The ASK-LAPD operators are steadily getting more calls as the new number catches on, officials said. Last year, the service handled nearly 370,000 calls, a 70% jump over the previous year. But 911 calls also increased, a change at least partly a result of the recent spike in crime. The city has also revamped the hiring process for new operators, said Lillian Brock, a longtime supervisor in the 911 center. Applicants are now tested on their ability to follow rapid-fire bursts of information--waitresses, for example, tend to make excellent 911 operators--and the city has stepped up efforts to recruit at job fairs.
"It's all cyclical and we're in a real bad
cycle right now," Brock said. "Right now, the working conditions these
people deal with are terrible. It's dark, it's damp, sometimes it's too hot. . .
. It's very bad for morale."
Mike Boylls, a young LAPD officer temporarily
assigned to the underground warren to help answer 911 calls, said he's already
grown tired of listening to kids cursing at him from pay phones the minute
school gets out. And he's only been here two months.
"This is 911 emergency," he tells one
caller wearily. "It's not 411. Try again."
Eager to hit the streets again, Boylls said he's
glad his three-month stint on the headset is almost up.
"It gets kind of old," he said.
"Most of the 911 calls aren't real emergencies."
The numerous and justified letters to the Public Forum complaining of the daily releases of ridiculous and stupid proceedings from the chambers of the Los Angeles City Council serve to point out a very fundamental difference between those seeking productive employment and elected officials.
Elected officials are not required to submit themselves to a drug test or to
take an IQ test.
Roy Dahlson
Arleta
Why is crime on the rise in Los Angeles? Did anyone beside me take the time to go to a few of our many city parks during the holiday break? Guess what I saw almost every day during the last two weeks of the year at our parks and recreation centers? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
It was a perfect time of year to have controlled sports or functions to help keep kids off the streets but no one thought of it.
Why is crime on the rise in Los Angeles? The Parks Department can't find the money to promote good clean fun for the kids, so the kids go find their own fun -- trouble. The Los Angeles City Council put a stop to the Boy Scouts of America, the most valuable asset the country could have in terms of reducing crime. So, where do these kids turn to fill in the time during the holidays? It does not take a rocket scientist to figure this one out.
The LAPD can't stop the gangs because our elected officials won't let them. And, the anti-gun nuts don't want innocent people to be able to protect themselves. A cliffhanger isn't it?
The local elections are coming soon. Make a difference. Vote!
Michael C. Hines West Hills
Re last Sunday's drunk driver who led LAPD on a three-hour chase through the Valley:
This is insane! When will the madness end? Is this what the LAPD brass and our brave mayor and City Council expect from our police officers, to be made fools of on national TV by playing follow the leader with a drunk driver who made the O.J. pursuit look like the Indy 500? How would the brass and city fathers rationalize it if somewhere after the first hour or two, the drunk driver had run over and killed a kid or some other innocent civilian?
This concern (fear) over not injuring a criminal engaged in dangerous, potentially deadly actions, has swung the pendulum so far out of reality that it's time someone with some common sense changed things.
There are alternatives to just letting criminals lead caravans of police all over town for however long they want, and these alternatives do a lot more to protect the safety of innocent civilians. The officers of the LAPD are fully capable of taking strong and effective action to quickly end these types of ridiculous and unsafe "pursuits" and, most importantly, to effectively and swiftly end the danger to the public.
All they need is leaders that will back them up and let them do their job.
Ed Auerbach Los Angeles
Crime shot up last year, unfortunately, just as we predicted it would.
Even as homicide, rape and robbery jumped 7.5 percent overall in the city in 2000, the number of people arrested continued to fall -- a fact that was blamed at least in part on plummeting officer morale due to the Rampart scandal and conflicts between LAPD brass and the rank-and-file. Unlike politicians and elected posers, statistics don't lie.
The crime stats released this week bear out that public safety took a hit after the City Council, Mayor Richard Riordan and City Attorney James Hahn all worked to undermine the authority of Police Chief Bernard C. Parks and the top LAPD commanders by negotiating and signing off on a consent decree that leaves officers wondering who's in charge and what rules they are playing by.
City leaders -- lacking the will and courage to fix what was wrong with the LAPD -- surrendered local control to a federal ultimatum that offered more respect for the rights of criminals than victims, more concern for gangsters and drug dealers than the millions of law-abiding citizens.
What's next? Several upcoming events offer hope that Angelenos have a chance to beat back the criminals and make headway in public safety.
The first is how President-elect Bush and his pick for attorney general, John Ashcroft, view the recently completed consent decree for the Los Angeles Police Department. A Bush administration could mean a radical reassessment of the decree and how it's implemented. A new administration in Washington also affords an opportunity, that Riordan claims he wants, to get authority vested back into the department.
Second, there is the question of how the City Council will handle the police union's demand for a three-day, 12-hour shift, which in effect is a 10 percent cutback in work time. It seems ridiculous that at a time when public confidence in the LAPD is at an all-time low and crime is rising sharply that the union would call for even fewer officers on the street, instead of more.
Not only does the 3/12 shift endanger officers who are working longer shifts, but it could seriously jeopardize public safety and welfare. In addition to compounding scheduling problems, a 3/12 shift raises serious questions about an officer's readiness if something happens in the 11th hour of the shift.
It's not only a question of safety, but of efficiency, during a time when Los Angeles desperately needs more officers, not fewer, on the streets patrolling. It's an issue that needs much debate among the six mayoral candidates and the candidates running to fill eight seats up for election on the City Council.
The public wants to hear who will offer concrete plans that are necessary to protect citizens instead of criminals. We're waiting.
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