Los Angeles Police Department

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is the police department of the City of Los Angeles, California. It is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States, with over 9,000 officers and 3,000 civilian staff, covering an area of 467 square miles (1209 km²) with a population of nearly 4 million people. The LAPD has had a rich and controversial history, including incidents of brutality and corruption. The agency's exploits have been heavily fictionalized in numerous movies and television shows.

Force composition

During the Parker-Davis-Gates period, the LAPD was virtually 100% white, and much of it lived outside of the city. Simi Valley, the Ventura County suburb that later became infamous as the site of the state trial that immediately preceded the 1992 Los Angeles riots, has long been home to a particularly large concentration of LAPD officers, almost all of them white. Hiring quotas began to change this during the 1980s, but it was not the Christopher Commission reforms that substantial numbers of qualified black, Hispanic, and Asian officers began to join the force. While whites are still overrepresented in LAPD relative to their portion of the city's population, minority officers can be found in both rank-and-file and leadership positions in virtually all precincts.

Related Topics:
White - Simi Valley - Ventura County - 1992 Los Angeles riots - Christopher Commission

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