• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Thursday, March 19, 1998

Class gives students chance to watch the watchers

ACADEMICS LAPD hopes program will stimulate student interest in policy

By Katie Sierra

Daily Bruin contributor

The Rodney King beating and the ensuing riots of 1992 were two major events that pressured the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to reform.

This interest in reform will be the subject of a new class at UCLA called "Public Organizations at the Crossroads: Transforming the Los Angeles Police Department."

The class will be offered spring quarter through the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies along with the School of Public Policy and Social Research.

Professor Wellford Wilms and Deputy Chief of Police and Chief of Staff of the LAPD David Gascon will co-teach the class.

Wilms felt that this class was necessary because large public organizations have very little theory to guide them when it comes to implementing changes.

"I've been studying the LAPD for the last four years. It's a fascinating, big, public organization struggling to adapt to a changing environment," Wilms said.

Wilms and Gascon met through their work studying the LAPD. Wilms created the class and recruited Gascon to help him because of his vast experience with the LAPD.

"Gascon's been on the force for 25 or 30 years. He's been in the hot seat a lot. He's a very serious senior guy who students can learn from," Wilms said.

The class will focus on the differences that exist between private and public organizations.

Private organizations such as businesses and industries are strongly affected by a changing environment. The lecturers will try to determine how these same environmental changes are translated to public organizations, with the LAPD as a prime example. The class is specifically interested in looking at how public organizations such as the LAPD respond to outside pressures for reform.

"Whether we want to look at reengineering, redesign or strategic planning as key issues that the LAPD must consider in improving its public image, we must necessarily look at the changing environment of the Los Angeles area and the public policy area," said Xochitl Perez, a student enrolled in the course.

The class will also look at specific changes that are occurring in the LAPD and try to determine how these changes are carried out at the street level patrol. The public has called for a larger and more technologically competent police force.

One large change within the department has been the gradual move away from their more traditional policing techniques.

"The department has been criticized in the past for being very rigid and distant from the community. They are starting to move away from this sort of traditional policing towards more community policing," Wilms said.

Community policing refers to the practice of letting the public be more actively involved in protecting their environment. An example are the neighborhood watch programs that exist throughout the city.

After the outrage that resulted from the Rodney King beating, the LAPD saw the need for wide-scale changes.

A Community Police Advisory Board now exists for each of the 18 stations throughout the city. There has also been pressure to move authority down to the captains of each stations, to individualize the policy changes for each specific station.

However, many obstacles still exist before community policing can be fully implemented. There is a struggle going on within the department because community policing has never been defined before.

Also, traditional attitudes of the community towards policemen could present a problem.

Some feel that the bitterness resulting from the Rodney King incident will keep the public from actively cooperating with the LAPD.

Gascon hopes that this class will spark an interest in students who want to know more about public management.

"With this class, we are trying to help people really understand what's going on in the formation of public policy. We'll take a look at the day to day workings of the police department and watch and listen to all the key policy makers," Gascon said.

Wilms stresses that this will not be a textbook course. On two occasions the class will travel to LAPD headquarters and to one of the Department's 18 area stations, where they will be able to see how different policies are carried out. The class will also get a chance to hear from different speakers who are involved with the LAPD such as Chief of Police Bernard Parks.

"It's such an interesting group of people that the students get to spend time with. The LAPD is an agency that's really trying to change with all sorts of influences from inside and out," Wilms said.