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INSIDER TRACK - Transit police is a unique force requiring specialized training, a prerequisite ignored by both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department when they snatched a funding stream established for transit safety on the Metro system.
In truth, the in-house police force vanished because of a grab for money and politics played on the back of passengers whose safety was compromised.
Metro already had a Transit Police, and Sharon Papa was the chief. Officers were specifically recruited, screened, and hired to work exclusively for the transportation system, received precise transit police training, and were State-certified. They not only policed the system, but they also added an effective high-profile foot-beat team.
Papa had said that most large police agencies must be response-oriented, without much time left for many prevention programs. Hers did not simply catch people breaking the law, they prevented laws from being broken.
Metro recently reported that crimes against people using the system had risen by 17 percent from January to February.
Fortunately, 28 years later, a return to normalcy has arrived.
Last week the Metro board of directors approved a new police and emergency management department and named Bill Scott as chief. After eight years as San Francisco’s chief of police, Scott retired to assume his new duties at Metro in June. Previously he had spent 27 years with the LAPD and was a finalist for chief in 2018.
Metro will now terminate contracts with outside law enforcement and give Scott time to implement a $193 million plan. He must also prepare for the upcoming World Cup, Super Bowl and Olympics.
Let's take a look at the historical facts. In 1997, Metro policing was to inherit a dedicated funding stream for transit security due to an earmark in the Transportation Sales Tax. With millions of dollars available, Sheriff Sherman Block saw an opportunity to form the largest department in history, both in size and revenue, and easily swayed the votes, since five on the MTA board came from County Supervisors..
Mayor Richard Riordan had promised in his mayoral campaign to expand the LAPD with 3,000 more police officers. He had difficulties to fulfill that promise, because of slow recruitments. Aptly, he saw immediate police increase through the merging of MTA officers to the LAPD. He controlled four votes on the MTA board. He also seized the opportunity to funnel transit dollars into the LAPD budget.
Request for Proposals from the LAPD and LASD for police services was conducted, which clearly showed those agencies to be far more expensive. Their pay and benefit packages were far more costly than the MTA Police Department. The justification to move forward anyway was the "economy of scale' argument, that MTA would no longer have the overhead of their own command staff and police chief, and MTA would ger additional services such as bomb squad and SWAT, as needed. No one wanted to acknowledge that those services were already provided at no cost, as part of existing mutual aid agreements.
Consequently, both police agencies won contracts and killed the operative transit police force.
The anticipated good policing results, as promised, never came. At first, and with the news media watching, both police and sheriff officers were visibly involved monitoring the system. But with time, few officers wanted that work assignment, and the job turned into an overtime detail with no long-term commitment.
An editorial in the Los Angeles Times in March 2023 stated, “disorder, rising crime and declining confidence in the system pose an existential crisis for Metro.” The police were not policing. Out of 178 sheriff department weekly shifts only 12 were assigned to Metro, according to the Metro Inspector General`s audit. Sheriff Robert G. Luna, speaking on the lack of safety on Metro buses and trains at the Jonathan Club candidly replied, “I’m short staffed.”
Scott is a good choice, Papa told me. He worked for her for several years and is an independent thinker. While he may lack transit experience, she said he is familiar with both LAPD and the Sheriff’s department, which is an asset since they will not hold undue influence over him.
(Nick Patsaouras is a longtime civic advocate, he ran for Mayor of Los Angeles in 1993, promoting his vision of using transportation as a catalyst to rebuild the city post-riots. He has served on key public boards, including the LA Department of Water and Power, Metro, SCRTD, and the Board of Zoning Appeals. He is the author of the book “The Making of Modern Los Angeles”.)
