Police Shift Top Brass at Rampart

All three watch commanders and 24 other senior officers at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division--the city’s busiest--are being transferred to bring “fresh thinking” to the area, department administrators said Thursday.

The transfers, effective Sunday, are not disciplinary in nature, according to those who recommended them.

“There’s no hidden agenda here,” said Rampart’s commander of three weeks, Capt. John D. White. “We’re just trying to do a better job and continue our service to the community.”

However, sources familiar with the transfers said the shake-up may signal efforts by department administrators to assert themselves in a division where experienced street cops have assumed a relatively high degree of authority. Those included in the transfers represent a significant number of Rampart’s most veteran officers, some of whom, the sources said, the department believes have grown stagnant after spending years in the same assignments.

Predictably, not all are pleased about being moved to what their commanders have described as comparable or better jobs in other areas of the department. Some have been at Rampart station, located on West Temple Street in Central Los Angeles, for 15 years or longer.

“Things seemed OK to me around here,” one Rampart policeman said Thursday. “We’re all wondering why the heck the change?”

Those being transferred include three lieutenants who, as watch commanders, supervise the station’s patrol activities around the clock. Also being moved out are seven sergeants and 17 patrol officers. All are uniformed personnel.

“We made a change because . . . we needed some fresh thinking,” said White, who replaced Capt. Frank J. Patchett this month as Rampart’s commander when Patchett took over the nearby Newton Division station.

“There have been people here a long time who have made their contributions,” White said. “Now, they can go to other places and make contributions. . . . This will keep us on our toes.”

With 298 officers, Rampart is second in manpower only to the Police Department’s Central Division, with 308.

In 1985, Rampart’s crime rate was the highest among the city’s 18 geographical police divisions. There were 23,441 crimes reported in the Rampart area last year, including 85 killings, 166 rapes, 2,305 robberies and 4,432 burglaries.

The division is bordered roughly by Normandie Avenue on the west, the Santa Monica Freeway on the south, Santa Monica Boulevard on the north and the Pasadena Freeway on the east.

A department spokesman, Cmdr. William Booth, said he could not specifically recall when the department last made such a sweeping change in one of its divisions.

“It’s not done often,” Booth said, “but it’s done as often as the chief of police perceives the need to do it. It’s a good management technique; you see it quite often in private industry.”

Police administrators said no more extensive transfers are planned elsewhere in the department, even though virtually every other division has its share of officers who have remained in the same jobs for comparable lengths of time.

Directors of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the department’s labor union, could not be reached for comment on the transfers.