9-1-1 response time and community safety at all time low due to sheriff understaffing

Steep budget cuts over the years have diminished staffing at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department; as a result response times to 9-1-1 calls have slowed, compromising crime solving and more importantly Officer and community safety. Avoiding hiring replacements for those who retire resign or are fired on top of slowing recruitment and classes offered at the academy the department has shrank by 500 deputies to about 7500, the lowest in almost a decade.
“The understaffing also puts deputies’ lives in danger, and forces them to do without needed reinforcements; this has resulted in their reaching for their gun and resorting to force”. Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs President Floyd Hayhurst admitted.
To cope with the loss of deputies and a $128-million budget cut that fiscal year, Baca began implementing the Cadre Administrative Reserve Personnel (CARP) program in 2010. The program aims to reduce overtime costs by having the department’s administrative, investigative and training staff set aside 8 hours of their workweek to carry out front line jobs, such as patrol duties. Clearly a catch 22 using this program and staying within the budget has caused hundreds of investigative hours lost each month as well as postponing follow-ups on leads of active criminal cases, including homicide investigations.
“I can tell you this: if your house got broken into and nobody actually saw someone coming out of it, deputies don’t have the time or the ability to go door-to-door asking neighbors if they saw any strange cars,” he said. “And you’re not going to get a fingerprinting team out there for at least two weeks” Hayhurst admitted.
Since the implementation of Carp Baca reported “we have experienced a notable decrease in departmental efficiency”.
With an increase in average response time to an emergency call up to 5.8 minutes the community and crime victims can no longer automatically expect detectives to immediately investigate their cases resulting in Jail staffing, gang suppression, parole/probation compliance checks, community-oriented policing, and many other services also taking a hit.
“..Some cases may never be solved” said Hayhurst.
The department’s Administrative Services Division Director Glen Dragovich said $36.6 million in funding would be enough to do away with CARP and Supervisors Michael Antonovich and Zev Yaroslavsky waste no time as they were concerned enough about understaffing to file a motion asking for a review of CARP’s “unintended consequences.”
“It’s not a sustainable long-term policy,” Yaroslavky said, in an interview.
“Between March 2010 and April 2013, CARPing has resulted in 1,517,360 hours of lost investigative, training, administrative, supervisory and specialized services,” Antonovich’s spokesman, Tony Bell, said in an email. “A plan that phases out CARPing is critical to the Sheriff’s delivery of quality law enforcement services.”
The board briefly looked into the case last week, further actions are pending.

Story by Emani Payne

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