Patch Blog: When City Leaders Sell Low-Crime Soap

When I worked as a firefighter assigned as the public information officer for the Los Angeles Fire Department many moons ago, we had a term that people familiar with City Hall politics might know of: “Selling the soap.”

At a time when the Internet had yet to suffuse our lives to the extent that it does today, it was an era when the use of Madison Avenue advertising methods was the institutionally accepted way to maintain the LAFD’s historically good relationship with the public—while the LAPD worked to establish some kind of trust with the same customers it so often alienated.

One of the legendary figures in LAFD public relations explained the business to me with these memorable words that could yet belong in a Pulitzer-prize book about 21st-century postmodernism: “Everyday, you need to find a way to sell the soap. If you don’t tell ’em everyday what we’re doing right, they won’t support us when we do something wrong.”

Crime and Soap-Selling

In today’s high-volume, low-efficiency age of emerging media, selling soap has become as fluid as the liquid body wash most of us have in our bathrooms. Each time a report vomiting crime and public safety statistics is released, I feel as though I’m being manipulated into believing something that may or may not be true.

More to the point, each time I hear L.A. Police Chief Charlie Beck, I wait to here a more believable version of events from the Police Protective League. Each time I hear a quote from anyone in the LAFD other than Public Safety Officer Brian Humphrey, I feel like I just heard another boy who cried wolf.

This past Thursday, January 5, for example, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Chief Beck proudly took credit for what they described as the lowest crime numbers in Los Angeles since 1957 or 1959—depending on which version of the facts you choose to believe.

L.A. Fire Chief Brian Cummings—whose mere presence made Villaraigosa and Beck avoid the "law and order" spiel and speak in the broader terms of “public safety”—reported palpable increases in the number of emergency responses and patient transports.

Both Villaraigosa and Beck pointed to an LAPD that has nearly 10,000 officers—a force unscathed by budget cuts—as the primary reason for the so-called decline in crime. In contrast, these same city leaders would laugh off the notion that fewer resources in the LAFD have a negative impact on their own ever-increasing call load.

Soap in hand, the City’s caretakers want us to believe that more folks in blue—not in patrol cars but merely on the police force—means fewer people were raped, robbed, maimed and murdered in L.A in 2011. They want us to believe that no matter the spike in calls in the fire department, as long as the majority of them are medical in nature, there is nothing about which to worry.

'Accidental' Society? (Who Cares!)

It should come as no surprise that during the public safety love fest, the mayor and his folks put no emphasis on the number of traffic-related injuries and deaths that occurred in the City. There was plenty of talk about assaults and medical response, murder and civilian fire fatalities—but nothing newsworthy about “accidents” that affect the quality of life in L.A. just as much, if not more, than snatch-and-grab robberies.

Apparently, our public officials think that only the gory crimes matter. Everything else falls under some cryptic category that we used to employ back in grade school: It doesn’t count if you didn’t mean it. In other words, accidents don’t matter.

I look forward to seeing an unvarnished edition of 2011 from a public safety perspective. Perhaps that hard copy report, which can be combed through more vigorously, will give us a better idea of how 2011 looked. Until then, I’m not buying the bubbles—let alone the soap—from this latest media stunt.