Crime & Safety

Have You Been Missing Your Senior Lead Officer Lately?

If so, you're not alone—and neither is your senior lead, who's been patrolling other neighborhoods more frequently.

Eagle Rock’s Senior Lead Officer Nina Preciado has lately been assigned to patrol duty that could deploy her outside the neighborhood anytime during her four-day work week—and “if there’s a sense that senior lead officers are being pulled away” from their primary responsibility, “the short answer is yes,” according to Los Angeles Police Department Northeast Division Capt. Jeff Bert.

Preciado’s additional duties aren’t anything out of the ordinary, however, and is part of what the LAPD does every summer to cope with the absence of officers on vacation, while trying to meet the force’s mandate to consistently have at least 85 percent of its officers on patrol duty.

“That number increases because there’s more crime in summer and more cops are needed on patrols,” Bert told Eagle Rock Patch in an interview Thursday. 

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But summer also happens to be the time when the number of officers on vacation hits an annual peak.

“At any one time in the year, no more than 11 percent of cops are on vacation—and we’re at that 11-percent level right now,” Bert said. “When you couple that with the 85-percent patrol requirement, it becomes a challenge” for senior lead officers to focus exclusively on their communities.

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“They drive around in two-person cars, taking radio calls,” Bert said. Despite the possibility that senior lead officers could spend a disproportionate amount of time outside their communities, depending on the LAPD's overall needs, they are still assigned to their so-called "basic car area" within Eagle Rock.

"We do our best to keep our senior leads in their area," Bert said, explaining that things do change "when the city goes to hell in a handbasket" in the case of, say, widespread civic unrest, or when an extraordinary situation develops, such as the recent rogue-cop Christopher Dorner incident.

“If I get a call in Hollywood, I have to go there,” Preciado told Eagle Rock Patch recently, adding that she’s been behind on answering her voicemails from community members. 

Typically, around the Fourth of July, said Bert, officers from the LAPD’s specialized units, such as the Crime Analysis Detail in the Northeast Division, don their uniforms and drive around in patrol cars.

“It’s certainly not anything new, but that’s how we flex our capabilities,” Bert explained. “When it’s quiet, officers go back to their specialized units.”

A case in point? Bert himself. “I’m the captain, and I worked on patrol last week,” he said, adding: “Every single able-bodied cop had to work patrol.”

Extra officers are also needed to provide security for the city’s annual Summer Night Lights program, a series of after-hours events in 32 public parks located in communities that have high rates of gang-related crime. (The parks remain open until midnight Wednesday through Saturday.)

The challenge of balancing community policing with the LAPD’s larger responsibilities became more acute this week in the wake of the not-guilty verdict in the Florida shooting of Trayvor Martin, which prompted civil unrest across the nation, including in Los Angeles.

LAPD officers are not getting any special days off and a good portion of the detectives in the Northeast Division have been assigned to patrol duty in areas as far off as South Central L.A.

“We’re doing all we can to keep the cops out on patrol because our primary function is to keep the city safe,” Bert said. “When you have bands of people robbing people in Hollywood we have to stop that.”

Editor's note: This story has been modified since it was initially posted. The modifications reflect the fact that senior lead officers do not spend 25 percent of their time—or a day of their four-day workweek—outside their assigned communities, as was initially and wrongly reported. In fact there is no specific percentage of time senior lead officers are required in advance to spend outside their assigned "basic car" area. However, depending on the LAPD's wider needs across the city, that figure could indeed be 25 percent—or it could be lower or higher.


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