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Your Voice - May 2017

Lou Turriaga
Treasurer

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When was the last time you did something you were really proud of? Did you score the game-winning touchdown? Maybe you finished your master’s degree. Or maybe you completed a very complicated assignment at work that took days or weeks or maybe even months to complete. Whatever it was, you took pride in the work you put in and the result that came because of it.

It’s no different for police work. Now you and I know that the real work in this Department is done by the worker bees who have their boots on the ground. It’s the hardworking police officers, sergeants, detectives and lieutenants who do the actual work. We catch the criminals. We investigate the crimes. We take the risks in the field.

Which leads us to the logical question: What is command staff’s job? They’re charged with taking that work and making sure that the right decisions are made with it.

About three years ago, Detective Bureau was assigned to complete a work study of all 21 geographical detective divisions. The study looked at things like a detective’s caseload, the time it took to do certain tasks such as filling out paperwork, report writing, interviewing witnesses and even travel times. The study took over a year but was a very thorough attempt to ascertain the workload of our detectives in the patrol divisions.

Despite getting an accurate assessment of detective workload, the study was even more important because one had not been completed in many years. Since that time, we’ve added dozens of categories of special interest, such as human trafficking and electronic crimes, to our already long list of crimes we investigate.

The study would give our command staff the information it needs to understand how to allocate detective resources across the city. It would give the command staff the ability to identify needs and communicate those needs to decision makers with the power to address those needs, such as the City Council and the Mayor.

So what did the study say? Good question. Here we are almost one year later, and that workload study has failed to resurface. It’s been banished to the dark corners of PAB, where good work goes to die. Even though the keepers in PAB have taken someone’s hard work and shoved it in a drawer, we need the results.

Based on my last count, we are down over 200 detectives. To make matters worse, our divisional patrol detectives are being buried in an onslaught of administrative work sent down from on high without any end in sight.

As a Department, we need to get our priorities straight. Attention must be given to the backbone of this Department, and by that, I mean the work done by the men and women in our geographic patrol and detective divisions. It is frustrating to see efforts like this workload study pushed to the side, and then see the unintelligent allocation of our resources and personnel while you all are told to do more with less.

I am very proud of the efforts of our members who work in the geographic detective divisions. While their work does not go unnoticed by the citizens in the communities they serve, their daily struggles to do their job and do it well is being ignored by our leadership. We must make sure they have the resources they need to do the job that they love to do.

So to our command staff, I have a daily double special for you. You can stop killing spirits and stop killing trees by releasing the work study and allocating the resources we need to do the jobs our citizens expect of us.

If you have any questions, please contact me at [email protected] or (818) 416-6495.

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