Must-read of the day, on how political correctness has corrupted the Los Angeles Police Department is in The American Enterprise online. An excerpt:

Los Angeles County averages 1,000 murders every year, two thirds of them carried out by gangs. Most of the victims never make the papers (though every charge of “racial profiling” by an ACLU attorney gets headlines). After the Rampart scandal, L.A.’s anti-gang units were disbanded, leaving the gang-directed narcotics trade virtually unpoliced. During the year that followed, crime increased 10 percent, and the murder rate rose 25 percent, while arrests dropped 25 percent. The best cops fled to jobs at more supportive departments and communities.

By 2001, the LAPD was 884 officers short of full strength. Half the cops on the street suddenly had less than five years experience. The remaining veterans continued to leave in droves; at some divisions, 40 percent of the officers were applying for jobs at other departments. The attrition rate was double the hiring rate. Special units were disbanded or cannibalized just to keep officers on the street.

“We have money to hire officers but we can’t get them,” explained Dennis Zine of the Los Angeles Police Protective League in 2001. Good candidates “won’t go to a police department in turmoil. And the message in the recent verdicts is that Los Angelenos are going to believe the gangbangers. There’s a ‘hang the cops at the airport’ mentality.” Zine was so appalled by the city’s failed leadership that he ran for city council, and won. “The city leaders were culpable for allowing the LAPD to get into a situation where officers were afraid to do their jobs. And they cost the taxpayers millions. They settled every lawsuit. They rolled over and accepted a consent decree. They wouldn’t fight for the department.”

Local newspapers suggested officers were leaving because they had suddenly found more convenient schedules, fatter benefits, or better retirement packages at other departments. But the real issues driving cops away, wholly ignored by the media, were racial suspicions, absurd constraints, and the hostile complaint system imposed upon the LAPD by politically correct “reformers.”

Read the whole thing. I’m glad I don’t live in L.A. anymore, but the P.C. virus is in every police department. There’s no escape.

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