LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Sharon Papa : Fighting to Get More Respect for the Transit Police

It’s the fastest-growing police force in Southern California, quadrupling its ranks in just five years. Its jurisdiction is huge, covering 2,200 square miles across five counties. And its chief is one of the few women in America to head a law-enforcement agency. Still, to that vast majority of Angelenos who never ride a bus or step on a trolley, the Metropolitan Transit Police is all but invisible.

But to the million-plus daily bus riders, the MTA transit police provide a ray of order in the chaos that characterizes many bus lines. Much of their work involves nabbing the bullies, drunks and petty thieves who make life miserable for riders, and busting taggers who find buses a perfect showcase. But the transit police also encounter serious crimes--shootings, stabbings and even an occasional bus hijacking. Yet, they remain the Rodney Dangerfields of police forces--with a troubled history that adds to the lack of respect.

Chief Sharon K. Papa is doing her best to change that. She’s fired a number of “problem” officers and, by most accounts, raised the level of professionalism. She’s also taken on both the sheriff and the Los Angeles Police Department in turf battles, and come out the winner.

Two years ago, Papa’s transit police won a bidding war with the LAPD for the right to police the new Red Line subway. Then last summer, she warded off an attempt by Sheriff Sherman Block to take over her agency and fold it into his department. This summer, she again foiled Block, by winning jurisdiction over the Blue Line; the trolley service between Long Beach and Downtown had been patrolled by sheriff’s officers since it opened in 1990.

Papa won those battles by persuading the transit board that her force was better equipped for the special task of transit policing. Only 36, married and with no children, she came up through the ranks, with nine years on the transit force before being named chief. Even Papa’s critics concede she has been successful in defining her own style of community policing for the transit system, and in deploying her resources in innovative and effective ways. A native of upstate New York, she plays down the issue of her gender when it comes to leading a police force, but worries that, for a variety of reasons, too few women are considering wearing a badge as a career.

Question: What’s different about transit policing? Why do we need a separate agency?

Answer: Transit policing is based on a different philosophy. Most local law-enforcement agencies are response-oriented. They don’t have a lot of prevention programs. In transit policing, we have to be pro-active. We have to take care of the quality-of-life issues--the eating, drinking and smoking. We need to keep order, because how the public feels when they get on a bus or train impacts their perception of how safe things are there. Our officers are not just catching people breaking the law; they need to prevent laws from being broken.

Q: How is the training for a transit officer different from what one might get at a normal police academy?

A: These officers attend a police academy just like any other peace officer in the state. They need to know the same things--laws concerning arrest, search and seizure, penal code and vehicle code. But when our officers graduate the academy, they go through three more weeks of in-house training to get them focused on which penal-code sections are specific to transit.

For instance, if a bus or train operator gets assaulted, there’s a specific penal-code section for that. It’s different from an assault on an individual, because it endangers everybody on the train or the bus. So it’s important that our officers know the law, because the penalty can be enhanced. They need to learn how our alarm system works--we have a silent alarm system similar to a bank’s on board our buses and trains. They need to understand how to make a traffic stop on a bus, because that’s very different from making a traffic stop with a car.

The subways are a specialized environment as well. Our officers there are not just police. They’re responsible if a fire breaks out; they monitor gas meters; they really operate as public-safety officers down in that subway.

Q: You have your own concept of community-based policing for the transit system. How does that work?

A: Our community is the people who use public transit and the people who work on the trains and buses. Probably our most high-profile community-police effort is our foot-beat team Downtown, between 2nd and 9th on Broadway. They’re not there to handle the shoplifters or problems inside the stores. They’re making sure panhandlers aren’t hassling passengers at the bus stops or that illegal vendors aren’t blocking buses from getting in and out of stops. Merchants in the area did a survey and found about 75% of their customers were getting to Broadway via buses, and many reported being uncomfortable waiting for buses--there were drugs being sold at the bus stops and counterfeit bus passes for sale. We started a pilot program on Broadway, and it’s been so successful we’re going into our third year.

So community policing for us means identifying the problems within our community--in and around the buses and trains--and creating solutions.

Q: Haven’t you been shifting more officers from plainclothes to uniformed positions?

A: Yes, we did a real shift. We used to use a lot of undercover teams, riding the buses, looking for the pickpocket, looking for taggers. And although they were effective--their arrest statistics were very high--the public wasn’t aware of them. Even though we have signs on the buses that say, “Undercover officers may be riding this bus,” people would always say, “Well, I never see them.”

. . . So, faced with that, we decided to put teams of uniformed officers onto the buses and see what kinds of response we got. And although the arrests weren’t as high--you have to be pretty stupid to snatch a purse when an officer is on the bus--the public response has been very favorable. So we are using a combination now--we didn’t eliminate the undercover teams, but we supplemented them with uniformed officers boarding the buses and trains.

Q: How much of your time, effort and money is being spent on graffiti?

A: We have 20 officers assigned full time to what we call our Graffiti Habitual Offenders Suppression Team, or GHOST. The team was put together in 1989, when the graffiti problem was starting to take off in Los Angeles. The taggers focused on RTD buses because they viewed them as rolling billboards, going from one end of town to another. At that point, everybody figured it was just gang writing. No one knew it was a whole different phenomenon. Once our officers got out there and started identifying these taggers, we realized it was a whole second sub- culture. And, quite frankly, we were laughed at by the LAPD and the sheriff’s department. They asked, “You’ve got a task force working a misdemeanor crime?” In their world, everything is based on major felonies, drive-by shootings, that sort of thing. We were concerned with the vandalism. It was escalating.

We were the pioneers in combatting taggers, so much so that we ended up training other law-enforcement agencies once the activity began to spread to freeway signs and shopping malls. We were the only ones with a database, the only ones who knew how to identify the taggers, the only ones who knew how they were different from gang-bangers.

We don’t just focus on apprehending the vandals. We’ve developed a curriculum for the schools called NO TAG, which teaches kids respect for public and private property. We target kindergarten through sixth grade, and we teach kids why it’s wrong to vandalize and what the consequences are.

Q: The amount spent on security for buses is dwarfed by the budget for rail--one breakdown shows the transit police spending $1.25 for every rail passenger and only 3 cents for every bus passenger. Why is that, since the bus system serves vast amounts of people and the rail system serves a relative few?

A: I’ve been here a long time and the bus system is near and dear to my heart. But we’ve designed a rail system that’s state-of-the-art. Unlike the bus line, security systems are part of its design. We’ve got a system of security cameras; we’ve designed the stations so there are no hiding places. We don’t have that luxury with the bus system. We’ve got bus stops in horrible areas, and just the sheer volume--there are maybe 15,000 to 20,000 bus stops out there. They’re two different animals. I think it’s good that the focus is on the new system and on doing it right. But there is a recognition that we have to do more on the bus side, and at least half of the new officers we are going to get will be assigned to buses. But there are only so many dollars.

Q: Do you consider the buses to be safe?

A: Yes. The unfortunate thing about the bus system is if one high-profile crime occurs on a bus, it gets a lot of media attention and scares people everywhere. One isolated incident creates fear up and down the line. But the actual crime rate is less than one crime per 100,000 passengers. That’s considering that somewhere between 1.2 million and 1.4 million people are riding our buses everyday.

We’re taking a hard look at how we deploy our resources. We obviously cannot have an officer on every bus, all the time. But if officers are deployed smart--if geographically you put them where the most buses are--you can do a good job with fewer officers. We’re very versatile; we change as things change. In most city police departments, the beats may not have changed in 50 years--but we modify ours a lot, based on crime trends.

Q: Do you think your gender affects your management style?

A: My age may affect it more than my gender. Not too long ago, I was working in the field. A lot of the police chiefs in this area are 20 years older than I am, and we’ve had very different life experiences. But, yes, there are differences because of my gender. For instance, I understand about female officers, sexual harassment and how the work environment should be. I’m probably a lot more sensitive about that than some male chiefs, because I’ve been there and I’ve seen it firsthand.

Q: How are women doing in law enforcement? Do you think they are being afforded equal opportunity in most police forces, or is it still very difficult for a woman to make it as a police officer?

A: I can’t say that women are given equal opportunities at every department I’ve seen. Things are better now than they were 10 years ago, but we still have a long way to go. I think it will take more women serving in high-ranking positions to show the guys that we can do this job and can be held accountable just like they are. Right now, it’s still too unique. I’m sure there were people who thought the sheriff’s department should police the transit system, because the chief of the transit police is a woman. And as I look around various departments and I see women moving up in the ranks, it’s very encouraging, but there is much, much more to do before I could say we are treated equally.

I’m very interested in increasing the number of women in our department, as well as minorities. I want the department to be reflective of the community, and I’m proud that more than 50% of our department is minority officers. But the female ranks here are average for a police department. I want to see that improve.