LOS ANGELES — Angelenos are split in their views of the Los Angeles Police Department, showing a sharp generational divide on how they rate the force's performance and on whether officers generally treat people of all races fairly, a new poll shows.
The Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll also found that residents of Los Angeles are more supportive than those of several other large cities about shifting money away from police and using it to fund community-based approaches to public safety.
About a third of Angelenos rated the LAPD's performance as excellent or good. The largest share of those polled, 4 in 10, rated the department's work as fair, while just under a quarter rated it as poor.
A clear generational divide emerged.
Among residents under 35, about 2 in 10 rated the LAPD's performance as excellent or good, while nearly 4 in 10 rated it as poor.
Among residents 55 and older, just over half rated LAPD performance as excellent or good, and 1 in 10 rated it as poor.
A similar age divide came on the question of whether police generally "treat people of different races fairly, even if there are a few bad apples on the force" or are "racist in the way they treat people, even if some of them try to do a good job."
Overall, more than half of Los Angeles residents said the police are generally fair, while about one-third said they are racist.
Angelenos younger than 35 were more than twice as likely as those 55 and older to say that Los Angeles police are racist.
The generational split on that issue presents a challenge to Mayor Karen Bass and other city leaders seeking to mend relations between police and the community after a series of high-profile killings and periods of unrest, said David Paleologos, who runs the Political Research Center at Boston's Suffolk University and oversaw the poll.
"There's a stark difference in how they view police versus middle-aged or older people," he said. "When basically 1 out of every 2 [younger] people or residents in Los Angeles are saying the police are racist ... that's a different view, and if a mayor or city councilor or police chief want to heal racial divisions, that's the place they need to do it."
While many Angelenos believe crime is on the rise, younger people are less likely to view police as the only response, the survey found.
Overall, nearly 6 in 10 residents said they would prefer to see more LAPD officers in their neighborhoods, versus 1 in 4 who said they want to see fewer and 1 in 6 who said they want the number to stay the same.
Los Angeles residents younger than 35 were close to evenly split between wanting more officers or fewer in their communities.
Views on whether the police are racist strongly shape how residents rate the department overall. About three-quarters of those who rate the LAPD's performance as poor said they believe the force is racist.
By contrast, Los Angeles residents' views of crime had much less impact on how they rated the LAPD's job performance.
Those who felt crime was going up gave the LAPD roughly the same approval marks as those who believe crime is on the decline. Those who reported feeling unsafe in their neighborhoods — about 1 in 5 Los Angeles residents — were somewhat more likely to rate the LAPD as doing a poor job.
The share of Los Angeles residents who have an unfavorable view of police is larger than in other cities Suffolk has surveyed recently as part of a series of polls of major metro areas — a finding that did not surprise Paleologos.
"You've had some high-visibility, high-profile tragedies that have happened at the hands of Los Angeles police officers, and I think those memories are etched in the minds of people and have been for quite some time," he said.
That may be part of the reason Los Angeles residents were more likely to support diverting some police funding to social services (56%) than those of other cities Suffolk has surveyed, including Detroit (49%), Louisville, Kentucky (47%), and Oklahoma City (41%).
"That speaks to the dissatisfaction," Paleologos said. "There's a lot of work that needs to be done to bring Los Angeles even in line with other cities, regarding policing and perceptions of police."
Louis Rabaso, 29, a high school instructor in the San Fernando Valley, was one of the poll respondents who agreed to a follow-up interview. His views of law enforcement were mostly negative as a child, he said, but have softened over time.
His dealings with police have been "very civil" as an adult, and he has never felt as though he was unfairly targeted or being punished, he said.
Yet he acknowledges his privilege as a "white-appearing" multiethnic person, suggesting that he may have benefited from more favorable police treatment than members of other minorities.
"I think it really depends on what community you live in," he said.
Steven Simons, a freelance photographer who lives in Hollywood, rated the LAPD's job performance as fair and said he has had numerous run-ins with police that left him feeling that officers can be racist.
Simons, 57 and of Chinese and Dutch heritage, said in a follow-up interview that he believes police are sometimes asked to do too much and to serve as a catch-all solution for many social problems.
"I get it — there's a lot of stuff that gets put onto them. From my understanding, they're being called out for calls that should be handled by social workers rather than them," said Simons. "And so I guess that's why I gave them a fair [rating]. I just feel that the whole culture needs to be changed."
The poll results come as some categories of violent crime continue to decline in parts of the city.
After an election cycle that was dominated by concerns about rising crime, Los Angeles ended 2022 with fewer homicides and shootings than in 2021, sparking hope that the surge in violence over the previous two years is flattening. The rate of killing remains considerably higher than in 2019, however.
Police officials have attributed the turnaround in part to improved community involvement and closer cooperation with other law enforcement agencies.
Some experts argue that with the U.S. emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, the likely causes of the spikes in violence nationwide are easing. Many social services are back up and running, and most schools are back to in-person classes, leaving fewer adolescents unsupervised.
But criminologists, police officials and other experts caution that the causes of the 2020 and 2021 spikes may never be fully understood.
Bass last month laid out her expectations for the LAPD and Chief Michel Moore in a wide-ranging plan that calls for beefing up detective ranks to improve crime clearance rates and streamlining the process for recruiting, hiring and training officers.
She also signaled that she wants to overhaul the department's disciplinary system in an effort to rebuild public trust.
She said her administration would work with the county to "expand the capabilities" of the Mental Evaluation Unit, which pairs officers with county social workers trained in deescalating standoffs with people thought to be mentally ill. For now, the units aren't available around the clock, in part because of a shortage of mental health practitioners, police officials said.
Bass said she wants to ensure that violence reduction efforts are concentrated in the communities most affected by serious crimes. A key concern, she said, is improving homicide clearance rates, which fell from roughly 77% in 2019 to 66% in 2021. Homicides with Black and Latino victims were solved at an even lower rate, she said.
The Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times survey findings mirror those of a poll conducted in 2022 by Loyola Marymount University, which found that the public's confidence in the LAPD had improved slightly over the prior two years, although more than half of residents believed that officers sometimes operated in racially biased ways.
That poll found that 71% of Angelenos believed police were "serving and protecting my neighborhood" — up from 63% in 2020. At the same time, a large majority of respondents said it would be better if police alone did not handle calls involving vulnerable groups such as mentally ill and homeless people.
The Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll, conducted March 9-12, interviewed 500 adult residents of the city of Los Angeles, using live telephone calls to cellphones and landlines. Quota and demographic information — including region, race and age — were determined from census and American Community Survey data. Surveys were administered in English and Spanish. The margin of sampling error for the total sample is 4.4 percentage points in either direction. Error margins increase for smaller subgroups. All surveys may be subject to other sources of error, including but not limited to coverage error and measurement error.
