The Trouble with Charlie: Murders Are Up, Cop Attacks Are Up, the Politicians Own Him

Charlie Beck fits the bill of what this mayor looks for in a top manager: Speed and obedience to the will of corrupt politicians like himself and his colleagues in other city offices.

What makes it so difficult for Beck as Chief of Police is that he is filling the shoes of someone who didn’t give a damn what anyone in L.A. thought or said. Bill Bratton had his eye on bigger this than this small-minded little town out in the desert somewhere; he was conquering the world and making an unbelievable fortune as its Top Cop.

Beck is now in trouble inside the LAPD where his only goal — other than serving his political masters by leaving unlicensed, uninsured illegal immigrants behind the wheel of unregistered vehicles — is to make sure he keeps the decade-long local and national trend of falling violent crime on downward line.

That is not proving as easy as it has been, perhaps because all the tricks of statistical manipulation have been overused so much and because so many people are becoming financially and emotionally because of the neverending recession.

As of midnight Monday, Beck’s numbers are not as good as they have been but he claims roughly a 6 percent drop in Part 1, violent and property crime citywide

Murder is his problem.

There have been 288 homicides this year versus 287 last year at this time — a difference of only one, a miniscule 0.35 percent.

But it might as well be 10 or 50 or 100 in Beck;s world because it destroys just about the only claim to a positive legacy that Antonio Villaragosa has as he nears the end of his political career: Every category of crime went down every year during his eight years as mayor.

That sounds a whole lot more important than being living with a boast that nearly every category went down, all except murder. It’s a shallow way for the mayor and his retinue of hundreds of paid and indirectly paid servants and advisers to think but that is who they are.

For Beck, it was enough of a concern that he pulled 70 cops out of the San Fernando Valley and assigned to lean hard in the city’s poorest areas to try to keep people from killing each other and his commanders leaned hard on the troops to keep the numbers down for the yearend reports.

The trouble with Beck’s plan was — coincidence or not — three people got killed in the Valley almost immediately after the cops left.

And more importantly to the rank-and-file cops on the street, they are increasingly the targets of what seems like the beginning of a crime wave.

Just last week, Beck told the Police Commission assaults on officers are up 26.7 percent over last year and officer-involved shootings have soared by 58.8 percent — numbers nearly double national trends.

The result is growing number of cops want Beck fired and their union, the Police Protective League, is stepping up its attacks on the chief, particularly on his order to look the other way on lawbreaking by illegal immigrants and his failure to enforce the law against Occupy LA protesters at City Hall Park until the politicians gave him the green light.

With former Chief Bernard Parks, former PPL official Dennis Zine already on the City Council along with reserve officer Mitch Englander and another cop in Joe Buscaino likely to be elected from San Pedro, Beck could be facing increased political pressure from different directions.

Here’s the statistics to date:

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As of

Monday

12/19/11

at 2400 hours, the year to date citywide Part I crime rate is:

2011:

100,679

285.21

per day