Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell discusses how law enforcement leadership can promote new “smart” strategies–including community engagement and prevention-oriented diversion approaches–that can effectively and efficiently keep communities safe, address the symptoms and causes of criminal activity, and alleviate prison overcrowding. (August 2014)

SARAH SCHWEIG: Hi, I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation and today I’m speaking with Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell. Chief McDonnell was appointed to the U.S. Attorney General’s national task force on children exposed to violence, and has served in executive sessions on law enforcement and public health, and police legitimacy and racial reconciliation. We’re currently at an executive session in Los Angeles, California, sponsored by the California Endowment, Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS Office), and the Center for Court Innovation. We’ve brought together public health experts and law enforcement representatives for a conversation about public health approaches to public safety. Thanks for speaking with me today.

JIM MCDONNELL: Thanks for having me.

SCHWEIG: So just to start off, you know we’re in an environment where crime is relatively low and yet resources are pretty tight across the country, as well as in California. And community policing, involves as engaging residents to keep neighborhoods safe. How can police in this sort of climate engage residents to help keep crime low in this kind of tight budget atmosphere?

MCDONNELL: I think a big part of it is an educational process—it kind of drove the point home to me last night. I spoke at a public park in Long Beach and there were hundreds of kids in that park playing every different kind of sport. And I think back, I was impressed with that because I think back to the late 80’s and early 90’s when you could drive back that park and it would be empty because people were afraid to go into the park, and a generation of kids missed the opportunity to grow up and exercise in that fashion. And that’s a giant missing piece, I think. It’s looking at how far we’ve come. I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit as a society and celebrate where we are today. We finished out the last year, really, in Los Angeles County with the lowest violent crime numbers in 40 years. We’re down dramatically this year from last year, and all of us together were able to achieve something that I think was seen as unachievable just a few short years ago, but yet we’re not taking advantage of that. By that, I mean we’re not reengaging, we’re not taking back the streets and, and you know the parks public spaces in a way that we should be. We are seeing what I saw last night, people back in the parks, but we’re not doing it consciously. And I think we really need to do that and talk to each other about that in our communities, and encourage people to get out and take full advantage of the cities that we live in. We’re very fortunate to live in this country and be able to have the freedom that we have. We kind of limit ourselves, I think, by not being aware of what the threat levels actually are versus what they are perceived to be. So education is a big part of that—creating a dialogue and talking openly about where we are and what we can do to make it even safer.

SCHWEIG: So how can law enforcement take an active role in new thinking around how we can make communities safer?

MCDONNELL: Well you know you look at just basic crime control tips that sound so common sense that we too often, I think, don’t talk about them because we don’t want to insult people by giving them something so basic. But yet we look at our property crime in Los Angeles County and when you look at the property crime reports, over and over again, people left iPads, iPods, computers, laptops, whatever, in an unlocked car because they were only going into a store for a couple of minutes and they figured that it’s safe there. And over and over again the themes are the same. My house was burglarized. Was the door left open? Well, yeah because I never lock the door—or the windows were left open because I didn’t feel there was a threat. And it sounds very basic, but we have the ability to protect ourselves by using the basic tools that we don’t take advantage of. And so I think we become complacent and, as a result, we become victims. So by just creating a dialogue around this, those are the little things that don’t cost a dime but really can change the outcome of what we’re doing. So I think education is a tremendous piece that I think we undervalue. And just the opportunity to be able to get out in front of a group and be able to talk about, you know, how do you keep your family safer, is priceless.

SCHWEIG: Speak a bit about prison overcrowding in California and what you think, from a law enforcement perspective, can be done towards solving this problem.

MCDONNELL: Right. I’ll talk about both prisons and jails, but I look at the issues that we’ve studied very closely here in Los Angeles County. In the L.A. County jail, the population is estimated to be between 15 and 20 percent of the people incarcerated are there because of mental illness, their behavior, not taking their meds or whatever the issue is that caused them to find themselves in custody. If we have an ability to be able to re-evaluate the way we treat people in this regard, and to be able to develop community-based mental health clinics, community-based mental health courts, so an assessment is done and rather than using incarceration as a default treatment plan, we have options that keep the person in the community where they are more likely to be monitored, and hopefully helped, and treated as a medical issue as opposed to a criminal issue, I think we’d be in a different position. In addition, to look at the jail environment, who’s in custody awaiting trial, that could have been bailed out if they only had the money. And what we find is often times the jail system is not based on a risk assessment, but rather if they can come up with whatever the prescribed bail is. And we have people sitting in custody at great expense to society, that would be less of a threat, potentially, back in their community, than somebody who was able to make bail and is now back out in the community. So in looking at some of, just the different ways we have taken things to just the way it is, and reevaluate those and say what other opportunities are there to reduce the population of jails and prison, holding people accountable for their behavior, but at the same time doing it in a way that is least harmful to society and a more efficient and smarter way of doing the same job we’ve been trying to do for a long time.

SCHWEIG: As you know, crime prevention can start in many different arenas and agencies. What advice would you give to police departments who may want to reach out to partner with their local public health departments, or school systems or other agencies to sort of help in, you know, maybe education efforts or you know, innovative initiatives.

MCDONNELL: Yeah. I think that we have to reach out to our partners in different disciplines, to be able to bring them, the various sectors, into play, to have a tremendous outcome on what the end game will be. It’s easier to do that where there’s an education piece, where there’s minimal investment, where you just get in and you work together, and you’re able to put together something for a presentation or so forth. The harder part is to get people to come together on a daily basis to address the issues that we face, and to see what role each of us can play in that. And in order to affect that in a positive way, we need to look at it—bring in the various players at the city level, the county level, the state level, and maybe even the federal level, depending on the issues we’re dealing with. And that takes a lot of work because everybody’s got their own goals, everybody’s held accountable for different standards, and what might be a police goal at the end of the day isn’t in alignment with the health department’s goals or and other of our partner agencies. So we need, as heads of agencies, to be able to take the initiative and meet—to come up with an alignment as to—we’re dealing with the same audience over and over again, but we’re not doing it in a way where we each bring some strength to the table to be able to address their needs. Rather, we’re looking at it through our own lens to see what’s our responsibility in this? And then moving on. Rather than, in the medical model, to be able to say, this person is our patient. Did we put them on the road to cure, or did we just address the symptom and send them back on the street. So to be able to look at it in a more comprehensive, which will ultimately be a smarter, more efficient, and more effective way of dealing with the problem. I think we need a re-engineering of the way we’ve been doing business, and you know, when it comes right down to it, I think it will be a more efficient way because when you look at the population that we’re dealing with in this county, there’s a relatively small number of people coming into contact with all of the various agencies on a routine basis for care. So if we can triage those individuals and identify what their needs are, and rather than just symptoms, look at the causes and put together, as a medical model would, a diagnosis and a plan for getting better, I think we’re on a much better track.

SCHWEIG: I’m Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking with Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell, and we’re currently at a roundtable session on public health approaches to violence prevention, looking at ways that public health and law enforcement can partner up to fight crime. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation please visit www.courtinnovation.org.