The first half of 2009 has been a long six months for the Long Beach Police Department and its head honcho: Chief Anthony W. Batts. Gang violence is on the rise, and the department has drawn attention for its nine officer-involved shootings since January. Chief Batts now faces his toughest challenge in his 27 year career on the force as a troubled economy drives the City’s crime rate to its highest point in years. The department also faces possible budget cuts on a scale never before seen. In this exclusive interview in Chief Batts’ office, we discuss the circumstances that are creating hostile conditions, strategies for keeping the City safe, and why Batts is not in any position to just give up.
lbpost.com: With all your previous experience – you’ve been with the department for quite a while now – how do you see it today? Is it drastically different from what you’ve been used to in the past?
Chief Batts: As far as crime, or the job or the industry?
LBP: Just in general.
CB: Yes, it’s changed dramatically. I’ve been doing police work for a long time, even before I became a police officer. My parents put me in a Police Explorer program, Police Cadet program, so I’ve basically been doing this stuff since I was like 14, 15 years of age. And as a police officer I’ve been here about 27 years, and of that I’ve been chief for seven going on my eighth year. And even in my last seven years, I’ve seen a dramatic change, in a way. And I’ll qualify that: good old-fashioned police work is still good-old fashioned police work. I was having a meeting with the Mayor just the other Monday night, and we were talking about being progressive and innovative and being creative, and I said, “You know, you can do all those things. But the bottom line is, when a crime takes place, its good old-fashioned police work.” You can use other utensils to help you, but if you have an issue you’ve got to put police officers there.
The basics are still the same, they were still the same going back to when American policing started at the turn of the 1800’s. The instruments that you use, technologies – we’re pretty progressive that way, I take a lot of pride in trying new techniques and technologies. I try not to be on the bleeding edge, I want to be on the cutting edge (laughs). We’ve got a number of technologies like automatic license plate readers. It’s become one of those magnificent crime-solving things that we use in the city.
We’re on the cutting edge on an array of different things, and in that way it has changed. And we as an organization have changed because when I came on, we weren’t risk-takers as a whole when it came to technology. We took very calculated risks, very slow-moving risks and usually when we did it, the rest of the industry had been doing it for five or ten years. But today, we take calculated risks on bringing new technologies to stop the need for larger, greater numbers of police officers.
LBP: This year in particular – or in the last six months since 2009 started – has been pretty busy in the streets. Is this a challenging time for the department to keep up with what’s going on? Obviously these are hard times for people, I think that you said in the past that the economy has contributed to this quite a bit, but is this a challenging time for the department?
CB: This is a very challenging time. And I have to tell you that I saw it coming. I anticipated that this year would be challenging – it’s been more challenging than what I thought it was going to be, to be perfectly honest. There’s a lot of converging forces that took place during this year that have brought us to this point. We have removed all the elasticity that we had in our budget in years before. We’ve reduced our overtime expenditure down about $5 million a year. And then, because of budgetary concerns, we’re carrying more vacancies than we’ve carried before. Between those two things, it’s really pulled us to the Nth degree. On top of that, I think the demand is outstripping our ability to keep up with it right now. So we have to think of creative ways – which means because of some of the tensions that are going on in society, and because there’s a number of people out of work – and it doesn’t take rocket science to know that when people are out of work, they’re going to do things to survive, crimes of opportunities – those people who are in criminal aspects, if moneys are at a minimum, they’re going to come up against each other and have friction. If you have drug dealers that are out there, and people don’t have as much money to buy drugs, then you’re going to come in contact and that friction rates going to go up. We’re seeing that too, in some of the violence going up in the city.
In addition, when violence goes up, when you have shootings that go up in the city, what happens with the gang members is they feel that risk. Because if shootings are going up, they say, “I may become a victim.” So they start arming themselves at a greater degree, which means that the possibility of my officers running into a person that’s armed is greater. That small, five-percent of our community, we run into them all the time. We usually know who the dysfunctional youth are, or the criminal element of the city. So if they’re arming themselves, and we know who they are and we go after them because the crime rate is going up, those are people we start looking for – and if they’re armed, then the more likely that were going to have an armed confrontation. Our guys are paying attention to that also.
On another tangent, you look at the Memorial Hospital incident that took place. Several weeks prior to that, my guys who deal with our advanced officer training started saying that there have been multiple active shooters that have started to increase since the first of the year. So we started shifting and changing our training to be able to react to it. Part of what we started doing is preparing ourselves for it, and I started taking about it at the beginning of the year when I had community meetings in February. I started spreading the word and telling people. Most people don’t know, but even after Memorial Hospital had the tragic event, we had people call us right away on other events that we were able to thwart – that people are not aware of. We were able to stop people who were probably going to be problematic in our City, but people called us early and we got them to help and we stopped that issue.
So these are all things, all that tension – the economy’s part of it, but it’s also people trying to survive at the same time.
LBP: Something you touched on is that is seems like more people are arming themselves when they go out…
CB: Gang members.
LBP: Yes, I think Deputy Chief Blair mentioned that last week as well in one of the press briefings… more people are arming themselves and that increases the probability of…
CB: The interesting thing is that the stance that was taken by the newspaper, the Press-Telegram, was that there are more officer-involved shootings. And it always goes through, “Let’s hold the police accountable,” and that comes along with the territory. But it didn’t go towards, “We’re having more activity in the city,” and “Should we be looking at that and be more concerned along those lines?”
And the reasons are, like I explained to you, if you have more shootings and the gang members know that they’re targets, they start arming themselves to a greater degree which increase the probability they’re going to run into us, and they’re going to be armed.
Its just like the 15th & Chestnut incident that took place. I put officers in the area that was having violence on a task force, they see people and they go up just to do a consensual encounter to talk to them and see what’s going on because they’re loitering n the street. They take off running, the officers are not totally sure why they’re running and they go in for a pursuit – all they know is they’re chasing gang members. And a gun pops up. In those incidents, I have a concern that may be more problematic for us, or more challenging.
We do have a challenge going into the summer. We’ve had a very busy first and second quarter. Our first and second quarters are usually not our busiest parts of the year – we’re going into the most busy part and the summer becomes extremely problematic, usually between July through September, because you have a lot of young people out and on the streets. We’re coming up with a gameplan to address that, we’ve already put out several task forces in the last week, I was very proud to say that last week we had no murders and no gang-related shootings that took place in our city at all, period. If I had my druthers, and this was my nirvana, that’s what I’d dream of ever single week – not having a life lost in this city by violence, period. That’s what I strive for.
LBP: I think part of what the media was focusing on with the number of shootings was that compared to LA, which is a much bigger force and a much bigger area…
CB: We’re about one-tenth their size.
LBP: Right, but almost the same amount of officer-involved shootings. Is there just that much more activity going on in the city? You mentioned a while ago that people are moving into other areas of the city that they’re not really familiar with – is that part of it?
CB: That is a piece. What we’re seeing in the area just off of Cherry & Junipero is – and we see this all the time, and we always pay very close attention in a very scientific way to social dynamics that are taking place in the city – when you have demographic shifts that occur in a city, that does impact crime. You have people moving into neighborhoods that are not there traditionally, which causes dramatic impacts. We’re seeing that in the Cherry-Junipero area, we’re seeing it in residents that have been traditionally in our Central area are shifting which is causing some degree of conflict that were having to respond to right now.
In North Long Beach, what we’re seeing is a demographic that has been traditionally north of our city, moving in a south-easternly direction through our city. There is a small population that is moving in that is causing conflictual issues, and we see that. We also see, just west of our community like Carson, we’re seeing a heavy influx of Samoan residents moving into our city – also on the Westside into North Long Beach – and then trying to learn that they have conflicts at times with the Tongan community. We’ve got to watch that and be careful of that.
Police forces always have to know, from a cultural base, what groups get along with what groups, and what groups have inner battles. And then try to intercede once we identify those things, and provide a calming force that brings collaborative efforts together. When we’re talking about the Samoans and Tongans, we established a relationship with the leaders of these groups to try to bring them together before we have problems on the front end. We’ve done a good job of making those things happen beforehand.
LBP: A lot depends on the upcoming budget. You’ve mentioned before that there is no fat in the Department.
CB: I don’t say that anymore. I say the elasticity in the budget has been changed and shifted. So, as I told you that we’ve reduced our spending by about five to four million dollars in our overtime and we’ve reduced that dramatically, that takes a toll.
LBP: I believe you’ve mentioned before that you’ve cut budgets in each of the last seven years. If the LBPD is forced to take the cuts that some of the other departments are taking, what will that do to the kind of service?
CB: It’s funny when you talk about budgets. My job and my response is not to focus on the budget so much, because I don’t have control of that. I’m kind of like, the City Council are the front office for a baseball team, and my job is to make sure that with the resources that we have, that we play a very good game. So whatever we end up with, that the city can afford, the number of employees, my job is to make sure that we work as efficiently as we possibly can to make sure that we meet those challenges.
Our job and responsibility is to try to adapt and respond as quickly as we possibly can and use the resources in the most efficient way that we can. No matter what comes out of that, we’ve still got to get the job done. And I think hat I have a very creative command staff – some of the brightest people that I get a chance to work with. We come op with outstanding ideas and concepts, we will continue to look at automation to be force multipliers for us. And continue to try to keep this city being a safe place where I live and have raised my family.
LBP: Long Beach Unified [School District] recently said they’re going to cut a lot of their summer school services, does that crate a strain if kids are not in school or have some place to be?
CB: Well, yeah, it is fortunately and unfortunately a double-whammy because the City is probably going to have to reduce some of their resources. I’ve had to shut down our Police Athletic League, which was housed in the summertime at different locations, and that’s two thousand kids that are not on the streets. With the Boys & Girls Club doing that, and kids being in summer school, that takes a huge amount of kids and keeps those hands active. I told you that I started in law enforcement at the age of 14 because my parents wanted to keep my hands active, so they always had me in something all the time – especially in the summer time. And when you have kids who are going to be idle this summer, does that provide a challenge? Absolutely it provides a challenge for us.
We’re going to have to react to those things too. I think if there any volunteer programs that are out there or people have time on their hands, to give to the kids. I think this is the time to outreach our hands and give to the community to stand up. Unfortunately, I know there are some people who are being impacted in a negative way who don’t have a job, and if they do have that spare time and want to help out, I’d ask for our community to get involved with kids this summer. Come out and set up a volunteer program. A basketball program, teach kids how to play baseball.
Because right now, the reality is that government is shrinking, and that it has to live within its means. Which means our community has to come together and people have to step up to make our community safe. Just don’t count on the police, just don’t count on the Mayor, just don’t count on these programs. This is our community and we’re going to live and survive by how much we get involved in our community. To make it safe.
LBP: What would you say to some residents who may be worried about the things they’re reading about violence in their neighborhood?
CB: I’d say that we are responding. I’d like to give you some numbers on how many guns we’ve taken out, how many people we’ve arrested. We’ve put a pretty big charge towards the city over the last two weeks – it’s paying off. We will continue our task force going into June. I think we’re seeing the results in a very positive way. We’re preparing, we are planning, and we will meet the challenges to come. We’ll be innovative and creative about it. But we darn well won’t give up.
LBP: What do you see for the future of the department?
CB: Well, you know what budgetary issues bring? Great opportunities for growth, evolution and change. I think for our city, the opportunity to downsize is coming. If this was your own personal business and you had to make this work and feed your family, you’re going to do whatever it takes, creatively, to make sure that you keep a roof over your head and keep this business running. That’s how I look at this. I think there are some great opportunities that come on with budget issues, and we’ve taken advantage of those for seven years. My first year that we had budgetary concerns, it allowed me to take one unit called Special Enforcement and another unit called Gang Detail, and combine those together. I took 72 officers in administration positions and pushed them all to the street to fortify our black and white cars.
Every year, we’ve taken those opportunities and done creative things with them to become more efficient. I think this is the same thing. We look at it as an opportunity. We have an opportunity to do more civilianization, which is where I think most municipalities are going to have to go. There are things within departments that civilians can do, retired officers can do, citizens at a lower rate that you can put in positions – so we have to look at those things as opportunities to make the organization faster. If I can get officers off the desk and into streets, then those are opportunities to shift and change, too.
I think there are a lot of great opportunities. There’s a little shaking going on right now because not everyone is clear what’s going to happen with the state budget, we’re not clear what’s going to happen to the county budget, which means we’re not clear what’s going to happen to municipalities. But I think all of its going to work out. This is not the end of the world. It’s not the last time the state’s ever going to have budget concerns – or the city. For a guy whose worked in municipalities for 27 years, we’ve dealt with budget cuts, issues and crises so many times that you’ve got to look at them as opportunities. When you get through them, the evolution still takes place. We still provide services and the city still moves on, so well be ok. We’ll all be ok.