Bratton pursues book deal on fighting crime

Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton is in talks with a national policing expert about collaborating on a book that would offer solutions to the increase in crime in much of the United States, drawing on the success of a handful of cities, including Los Angeles, where crime remains in decline.

George L. Kelling, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, said this week that he and Bratton hope to finish the book by the end of 2007.

Bratton, whose 1998 autobiography “Turnaround” was a critical success, said he is in the formative stages on the new book after publishers turned down his pitch for a book on terrorism, saying the market on that subject is glutted.

“It’s just as well,” Bratton said. “The Kelling book is much more timely because one of the things we are looking to raise nationally, and we are confident that with the Democrats taking control it will be raised, is the issue of crime growing in the country. We are something of an anomaly here with crime declining for four years,” Bratton said.

Serious crime has declined for four years in Los Angeles and is down 8% this year. Homicides are down 5% .

In contrast, the FBI reported this week that violent crime, including murders and robberies, increased 3.7% nationwide during the first six months of 2006, compared with the same period the year before.

Based in part on his success, Bratton was recently given a pay raise and vote of confidence by the Police Commission and is expected to have no problem winning a five-year extension of his tenure when his first term ends in October.

The chief said that if he writes a book, it would not take away from his job as head of the LAPD.

The book would explore policing strategies, including the success of the “broken windows” theory of public safety championed by Kelling and Bratton that says if cities address the small problems, such as broken windows or graffiti, they head off bigger crime problems that occur when criminals move into an area perceived as neglected.

One issue Bratton would like to raise in a book is the federal government’s declining aid to local police departments. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration pushed an initiative to help pay for 100,000 more police officers on the streets of U.S. cities.

When officers were plentiful, cities were able to use innovative strategies to drive crime down, he said, but that money has dried up and the federal government, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, has focused on preventing another such attack. Bratton said the change is notable not just in the lack of federal funds to hire more police officers but also in the transfer of FBI agents from their traditional bank robbery, kidnapping and organized crime details to units looking for foreign terrorists.

“One of the tragic fallouts of 9/11, the post-9/11 focus on terrorism, is that the federal government stepped away from significant involvement in fighting local crime after they had been engaged with us in the ‘90s,” Bratton said.

Kelling said the federal government has the wrong approach in separating anti-terrorism from local crime fighting.

“It’s focused on the wrong set of assumptions. That is, crime control is different than terrorism control. There is significant overlap.”

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