Internal politics is eating away at morale inside one of the world’s most famous police forces: the Los Angeles Police Department.
In the wake of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, the department’s Robbery-Homicide Division was created. Housed out of the force’s downtown headquarters, the unit handled only the most high-profile robbery, extortion, and murder cases: celebrities, politicians, organized crime, and serial killers.
LAPD SLASHES HOMICIDE DIVISION TO JUST 10 PEOPLE DESPITE SPIKE IN MURDER RATE
However, an LAPD insider told the Washington Examiner that things have taken a turn inside the department’s most-celebrated unit in the wake of the appointment of Chief Michel Moore in 2018. Moore, the insider said, took an ax to the department’s staff in response to murder rates falling across the city.
The number of homicide detectives dropped from 25 to 10. Before Moore arrived, the entire division had more than 100 detectives who could be pulled together at a moment’s notice if anything like a Kennedy assassination happened again. Now the number is about half that.
“Within months of Moore starting, he kicked a bunch of people out of Robbery-Homicide,” the detective said. “Everybody was p***ed. They had all worked their asses off to get there, and then they’re gone. The detectives were all sent to different divisions.”
Moore, who is not elected but rather appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, toes the line of the far-left City Council, which was in favor of defunding the police following the death of George Floyd. He supports the policies of Garcetti in order to keep his job and even took a knee, like Garcetti, creating ire among the rank and file, the detective said.
“When you get someone like Garcetti in there, you do what he wants so you can keep your job,” the detective said of Moore. “The chief is just an extension of Garcetti. He doesn’t have any of his own ideas. He treats us like crap because Garcetti hates the police, and he calls us all a bunch of killers.”
Garcetti infamously said in 2020 that police will “continue being the killers that we are” unless something is done about it.
So while Los Angeles’s murder rate climbs to a 15-year high, its storied detective division is in shambles with low morale among its remaining members. No one had an answer as to why this happened other than “it’s the way the chief wants it,” the detective said.
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Meanwhile, cases are not getting solved, even those with viable clues, the detective said. There just isn’t the manpower to do it.
“If we were to have the Hillside Strangler today, we would be scrambling for [detective] bodies,” he said. “We would not have the resources to have this case. Robbery-Homicide could never handle it.”
