Comic Legend Richard Pryor Dies at 65
Our
Town
The
Pied Piper of Watts
Robinson to Step Down From College Board
Compton Challenges LAFCO Over Service Report
Breakfast With Santa a Hit With Local Kids
Community Remains Optimistic About Public Safety
Compton’s Commercial Revolving Loan Fund Left With Surplus
CDC Reports Deadly Bacterial Illness Appears to Be Growing More Common
Sheriff’s Captain Highlights Agency’s Highs and Lows of 2005
By
Gary
Walker
Bulletin
Staff Writer
Perhaps
the opening line in Charles Dickens’s classic “A Tale
of two Cities” may best describe 2005 in Compton from a law
enforcement standpoint: “It was the best of times; it was the
worst of times.”
A rising crime rate, coupled with a series of noteworthy arrests
marked the fifth year that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department
has been contracted to provide police services in Compton. Capt. Eric Hamilton
heads the Compton station, and as the year draws to a close, the Bulletin
had the opportunity to speak with him about a variety of topics.
In an interview in his second floor office at the Compton Sheriff’s
station last week the captain, dressed in his department’s olive green
uniform, fielded questions regarding his agency’s role beyond law
enforcement in Compton, the unusually high number of homicides this year,
the responsibility of
the citizenry in making the city safer and gang injunctions, among
other topics.
Regarding a decision earlier this year by the Los Angeles County
Board of Supervisors to ask cities like Compton that contract with the
county for police services to contribute more of their own funding, the
captain stated that regardless of what happens, the manner in which his
department polices the city will not be altered.
“If that occurs, obviously the city will have to provide a certain
mount of dollars,” Hamilton acknowledged. He pointed out that the
amount of personnel will not increase, “Just the size of the contract,
in a sense.
“We have heard estimates of 3-4% for the upcoming fiscal year, but
have not received any hard numbers or formal notification from the
County,” City
Manager Barbara Kilroy told the Bulletin. “The City Council is aware
that we may be looking at an increase and the Contract Cities Association
is monitoring the situation for its member municipalities.”
“One of the things that I have always said throughout my tenure here
is that we have basically have had the same number of staff since
we started here, and we’ve been very successful,” Hamilton
continued. “I
think that we’re okay; because of budgetary issues in the city we
lost six deputies and a sergeant, so today we have a little less
than we did five years ago.”
In July the department added two additional deputies, bringing the
number of sworn personnel to 78. “The city is talking about adding
some more next year,” Hamilton reported. “I’m pretty
optimistic that we’ll get more people, which is a good thing,” he
added.
The captain, never one to shy away from tough questions, addressed
one of the most discussed topics in and out of Compton this year: the unusually
high rate of murders, which at this writing is climbing toward 70, the
highest that it has been since the sheriff’s department took over
the law enforcement duties in Compton in 2000. “Unfortunately, (the
crime rate) did go up this year,” he admitted. “And one of
the good things about this organization is that we didn’t panic;
we’ve just dealt with it,” Hamilton stated. “We’ve
made sure that we’ve tried to put the resources out there to slow
the tide down.”
“We realize that in our profession that we’re going to have
those years where you have those spikes in crime and the years where there
will
be a reduction in crime, and so we don’t get excited about it, although
it obviously concerns us,” he noted.
Hamilton mentioned some of the strategies that his agency and the
municipal government were working on in order to tackle the escalating
homicide rate, which has caused a great deal of anxiety among the citizens
and the elected officials. Two of the tools that the department is actively
pursuing are abatement and gang injunctions, tactics that other law enforcement
agencies have implemented in the past with varying degrees of success.
The City Attorney’s office is currently working on developing a gang
injunction order, but has not released many details on how they propose
to implement it. The Lynwood City Council has begun to move forward with
its plan to instigate a similar order.
The captain also talked about his department’s networking with the
Compton Unified School police regarding issues such as curfew sweeps and
truancy, and with the parole and probation agencies with compliance sweeps. “We
know that some of the people out here committing crimes are parolees,” Hamilton
asserted. “Not everyone on parole is involved in criminal activity,
but some of them are.”
Hamilton believes that his agency’s arrest record rates with other
departments and despite the surge in crime and homicides this year he feels
that they have made significant progress on a number of other law enforcement
related fronts. “We have one unit that alone that has taken 147 guns
off the street,” he reported. “And that’s not including
our patrol units, our special assignment teams and other teams that we
have on the street,” Hamilton noted.
Community involvement is one thing that the captain has stressed
in town hall meetings and other public forums. Many citizens have inquired
why Compton cannot be a safe as other far- flung cities such as Beverly
Hills or Santa Monica. Hamilton, who worked in the affluent coastal enclave
of Marina Del Rey prior to coming to Compton suggested that the residents
of those cities are more active in demanding better police services and
take a larger role in participating in community-based policing activities.
“The reason those communities are successful is because they are
all on the same page,” he explained. “You’re not going
to have a shooting in Cerritos, for example, without people saying, ‘Unacceptable.’ They
are going to be on the phone, calling the police and telling them
what happened. You don’t experience the apathy that we may experience
in this city.”
“The citizens have to call us, they have to get involved,” he
insisted. “Even
if they don’t want to leave their phone numbers, names and addresses,
they have to call us to give us the information that we need to be
successful.”
“We took a guy of the street who was responsible for multiple murders,
five or six shootings, a bunch of random killings,” he reported. “Now
this all began in 1999, before we came on board, but folks have been
afraid to call us, including his own family. And we allowed this guy to
walk the
streets for at least six years before we picked him up.”
“Can you imagine,” the captain asked, “What this community
would look like if we had been able to take this guy off the streets back
in
1999?”
The arrests of the alleged shooters in two of the more high profile
cases investigated by the department this year, the murder of Osiel Hippolitto,
a member of the U.S. Navy and a former Compton Explorer, and the shootings
of two teens at a birthday party were solved due to witnesses who identified
the shooters. “I always believe in being optimistic,” Hamilton
responded when asked if he was encouraged by those incidents.
“We just need to keep sending the same message over and over that
we’re all in this together, we’re committed as the sheriff’s
department and hopefully as a community, we’re going to fight the
fight, we’re never going to give up as an organization,” he
said. “But again, the message that I’ve asked my staff to convey
to the community is that the citizens need to get on board, and we
have to be passionate about it.”
“It’s our responsibility as a law enforcement agency to provide
a safe community and I’m committed to doing that, and as a minority,
I think that it’s important that we fight in this community and make
sure that we do the best that we can to let them know that they pay
a critical role in the reduction of crime,” Hamilton added.
“Ultimately, the safety of our community is the responsibility of
all of us,” the captain reiterated.
Next week: The captain’s views on a public safety commission,
community based policing and his plans for fighting crime in 2006.
ADVERTISE | CLASSIFIEDS | ABOUT US | CONTACT US | SUBSCRIBE | HOME
This site and its contents ©2005 thecomptonbulletin.com