The Gang Buster

By Terry McCarthy/Los Angeles

William Bratton strides into evening roll call at the police station in the Rampart section of Los Angeles, and the 50 officers in the room break into applause. The police chief cracks a smile. It is the week before Christmas, murders in Los Angeles are down 22% from the previous year, and the man whose crime-busting tactics cut New York City's homicide rate almost a decade ago, landing him on the cover of this magazine, is once again being hailed as a savior.

Ten seconds later the smile is gone, and Bratton is back on message. "We have a domestic-terrorist problem here--gangs," he says with the urgent conviction of a televangelist. Indeed, a resurgence in gang activity was one of the main reasons Los Angeles' homicide rate rose 51% in three years, making it the murder capital of the U.S. in 2002 with 658 killings. And Bratton announced they were "job No. 1" after Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn hired him in October 2002.

In the past, Bratton had produced near miraculous results in Boston, paving the way for a steep drop in crime before he moved to New York City, where, as police commissioner from 1994 to 1996, he presided over a 50% drop in homicides. But his techniques--putting more cops on the street, making individual officers more accountable for offenses in their neighborhoods and shortening the civilian-complaint process--have been controversial. The U.S. as a whole experienced steep drops in crime in the '90s. But even as cities across the nation hired more cops and jailed more young men, many academics disputed the idea that strong policing was the key to controlling crime. "It is still not clear what actually brings crime down," says Andrew Karmen, professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "There is a certain contribution the police make, but they are not the only thing." Other possible factors, he says, include the number of young men in the population, the availability of jobs and shifts in the drug market.

Bratton has little time for such theories. "Economics and demographics are influences, not causes. It is a great disservice to the poor to say they lose jobs and so become criminals," he says. "The penicillin for dealing with crime is cops. I thought I had already proved this. Criminologists who say it is economics or the weather or some other thing are crazy."

Continued success in Los Angeles will give Bratton additional bragging rights and the kind of fame he clearly enjoys. After being forced out of his New York City job by what Bratton claims was then Mayor Rudy Giuliani's dislike of his high media profile, Bratton, now 56, went into the private sector, setting up his own security consulting firm, the Bratton Group, and giving speeches around the world, particularly in South America. But he missed being in the limelight in the U.S. and even explored a run for mayor of New York in 2001. Then came the 9/11 attacks, which left him feeling helpless in the private sector and convinced him he should go back into public service--which meant the police force. He lobbied hard for the Los Angeles chief's job--not simply for the satisfaction of fixing a crime epidemic in the nation's second biggest city but also for the chance to hammer home once and for all his personal conviction that cops matter.

Bratton's vision of justice is old-fashioned. Old Testament--style old-fashioned. At a press conference in the city's gang-ridden 77th division two days after the Rampart roll call, the chief told the story of Laudeina Salazar, 39, who was decorating her Christmas tree on Dec. 12 when a stray bullet "shot by some thug" passed through her front door and killed her. Bratton's message to gangsters with guns was simple: "You use a gun, we're going to put you in jail--in federal jail. You are going to be 1,000 miles from here--in Utah, where you have no family, no homeboys, no friends and no future." Arrests for all crimes in Los Angeles are up 11% this year.

Most Angelenos have quickly warmed to their new police chief, and his campaign against gangsters has received widespread support, particularly from the black and Latino communities, which suffer disproportionately from Los Angeles' high murder rate. "He has enormous charisma, and his public articulation of the relation of policing to crime is brilliant," says Eric Monkkonen, professor of policy studies at UCLA.

Nowhere has the impact of the new policing regime been felt more strongly than in the city's 77th division, which straddles the 110 Freeway five miles south of downtown. In 2002 it was the most violent of all 18 police districts in Los Angeles, with 118 murders in its 12 sq. mi. Mirroring the L.A.P.D. as a whole, cops in the 77th had become demoralized and cynical following the 1991 Rodney King beating and the 1999 police-corruption scandal in the Rampart district. Many admit they had adopted a "drive and wave" style of policing, in which they rarely got out of their car unless an actual crime had been committed.

Reducing gang crime in the 77th was one of Bratton's priorities when he took command of the department 15 months ago. He instructed his commanders to get more patrol officers out on the street, make detectives work late nights and weekends, enlist the help of federal law-enforcement agencies like the FBI and the DEA, conduct more search-warrant and surveillance missions and generally get in the gangsters' faces more. Frequently, he would turn up at a late-night crime scene and observe how his officers handled investigations.

Statistically, the results are impressive. Homicides in the 77th dropped 45%, to just 65, last year. But the precinct's experience also provides a case study of the effect that Bratton's more concerted policing can have on a neighborhood suffering from high crime rates. TIME went on night patrols with officers of the 77th at regular intervals over the past 12 months, and it was clear the cops were becoming a lot more aggressive, routinely frisking suspected gangsters on the street on the basis of little more than how they were dressed. But the positive effects are rippling through the neighborhood. Stores that used to close at nightfall are starting to stay open later, and the level of fear among ordinary citizens is, at least for now, on the decrease.

"There has to be hope in a community, and I think we have that now," says Helen Coleman, who has lived in the 77th for 35 years and works for a local nonprofit organization, trying to bring businesses and leisure facilities for kids to the neighborhood. She says new injunctions against gangsters gathering in public have reduced the number of them hanging out on the streets--and the resulting shootings she used to hear. She has seen relations between the police and the community improve too, and she says Bratton deserves a lot of the credit for that. "The vibes I'm getting from the officers at the 77th--it's like the whole atmosphere is changing for the better."

The cops from the 77th station feel the change too. "Bratton promoted kick-ass take-names people--no more touchy-feely stuff," says Officer Perry Griffith, who has been in the L.A.P.D. for 14 years. "Before, the cops were just not getting out on the streets, and the bad guys knew that." Now, he says, cops have been told not to turn a blind eye when their authority is challenged. "We had someone tell a police officer, 'I'll kill you,' last week in front of a group of people," says Griffith. "Now he is in jail. Before, they would have just told him to go back into the house."

The danger, of course, is that the cops will become too assertive and stray back into the brutal behavior that plagued the L.A.P.D. in the past. Bratton has repeatedly said his cops may not "break the law to enforce the law," but complaints against officers are 4.5% higher than they were in 2002. That merely indicates that his men are doing their job, the chief argues, and he points out that there has been a 28% increase in shots fired at officers in the same period. "The gang bangers don't like the game being taken to them, and they are hitting back," says Bratton.

The single biggest gripe that cops had about the pre-Bratton era was the proliferation of citizens' complaints that blocked promotions and pay increases, even though many claims turned out to be frivolous. So Bratton has moved quickly to simplify the complaint process. Now a division captain can decide whether or not a charge is unfounded, rather than send every file downtown for a lengthy investigation that could last for months. "I feel I am O.K. to do my job again," says Griffith.

In 2003 Griffith's job included fielding complaints from neighbors about drug dealing out of a house seven blocks from the police station. The house had a shed in the back where, they said, crack was sold, and over the summer there were two murders nearby that Griffith thought were linked to the drug trade. He went to the city attorney and the DEA, had some covert surveillance put on the house, served several search warrants and finally found the evidence he needed to evict the drug dealers and send at least three of the ringleaders to jail. After Griffith executed one search warrant, an occupant of the house filed a complaint against him, alleging improper treatment of a female and undue harassment in the course of the search. The complaint remains in his personnel file, but Griffith was quickly cleared of any wrongdoing. "In the old days, that would have counted against me," he says.

Downtown, Bratton is continuing his efforts to make Griffith's job easier. He has replaced all but one of his assistant and deputy chiefs and is installing new technology so cops can access information more quickly while on the street. But Bratton's highest priority is finding money to hire new officers. "The L.A.P.D. has been historically understaffed, and it puts officers at risk," he says, noting that New York City has 36,720 officers, or 1 for every 218 residents, while Los Angeles has 9,320, or 1 for every 429. A request for extra funds was rebuffed by the city council last May, so Bratton has been thinking of launching a ballot initiative in November to appeal directly to voters. To get such a measure passed in the midst of California's fiscal crisis, he will need the public to accept his claim that better policing is the reason for the drop in crime rates. As he put it to his officers at the Rampart roll call, "It is going to be a hard sell, quite frankly, but the harder you work, the better story you give me to tell--that the only thing that works against crime in the U.S. is you." He means to prove the moral of his tale by reducing Los Angeles' murder rate an additional 20% this year. It's a big goal, but Bratton is a man who loves big challenges.