Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the LAPD is forming a Community Safety Partnership Bureau, in an attempt to “develop better relationships with the community.”

The bureau will expand upon a 2011 program of the same name. The original Community Safety Partnership program (CSP) focused on several L.A. housing communities with a history of gang violence. The CSP program was said to be created to address quality of life issues in those communities.

“This model represents a pivot, if you will,” LAPD Chief Michel Moore said. “A strategy of moving ourselves from a containment and suppression model, to one that will increase community capacity, a sense of overall safety where you see the lower levels of crime in concert with a lower number of arrests, but increased trust.”


Since its inception, the CSP has created six new community sites, moving from public housing to neighborhoods. Now they seek to expand into more communities and create similar programs.

A committee led by Councilman Joe Buscaino, the LAPD and the Mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development oversaw a study by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. After monitoring the CSP program for a year, the research found that not only were violent crimes reduced, but so were arrests and police use of force in those communities.

“Policing stands at a critical juncture,” Chief Moore said. “We recognize that relationships in our community, particularly in the Black and brown communities, must improve.”

Urban.org conducted its own research of the program in 2019, reporting that there were some areas where communities had working relationships with the CSP officers, but in other findings, there were residents who found CSP officers to be “unhelpful, unengaged, and rarely on site.”

While conducting interviews with residents within the CSP zones, there were mixed results with people “generally” still not trusting the police, despite the program’s efforts.

LAPD captain Emada Tingirides has been selected by Moore to be deputy chief of the CSP Bureau.

Tingirides acknowledged that she hears people who say these programs should be spearheaded by the community, to which she pointed to the Watts Rams, a football program which was created by the CSP.

“There are a lot of programs right now throughout all of the districts where the community has taken over and it has been sustained within that community, with just the support and cheerleading from by the CSP officers that are assigned to those areas,” Tingirides said.

Black Lives Matter Los Angeles showed public opposition to the new bureau, tweeting, “Just because you put the word ‘community’ in front of policing doesn’t make it non-problematic.”

The organization continued by saying that creating new LAPD programs is “the opposite of defund the police,” and that appointing captain Tingirides is a “strategy of white-supremacy” called “black faces in high places.”

In an LAPD public Zoom call on Tuesday, several citizens called in opposed to the CSP Bureau, with calls to “stop using our language,” in response to the oft-used “reimagining safety,” and to “not give money to guardian cops.”

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