LAPD's 'magic number' of 10,000 officers losing some luster

In 1989, then-Los Angeles Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky unveiled an audacious plan to boost the city police force by more than 25% to 10,000 officers.

He couldn't have imagined that city leaders would chase that goal for nearly a quarter of a century until, at the start of this year, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that he had pushed the LAPD over the long-elusive benchmark.

The two candidates vying to replace Villaraigosa in the May 21 election — City Controller Wendy Greuel and Councilman Eric Garcetti — have embraced the mayor's achievement, crediting the LAPD buildup in large measure for the city's lowest crime rates since the 1950s. Indeed, Greuel has committed to enlarging the police force an additional 20%, if the city treasury grows.

Still lagging

Number of police officers per 1,000 population as of 2011:

City	Officers
Washington, D.C.	6.7
New Orleans	6.5
Baltimore	4.7
Chicago	4.7
Philadelphia	4.7
Newark	4.4
New York	4.3
St. Louis	3.9
Boston	3.7
Cleveland	3.6
Detroit	3.5
Atlanta	3.4
Milwaukee	3.4
Cincinnati	3.2
Los Angeles	2.5
Houston	2.3
Phoenix	2.1
Albuquerque	1.9
Las Vegas	1.8
San Diego	1.5

Source: FBI

But increasingly, voices on the periphery of the mayoral campaign argue that rising police costs — up 36% to more than $2 billion over the last eight years, more than twice the rate of growth in such discretionary spending overall — raises two critical questions: Has the expansion been crucial to making Los Angeles safer? Has the relentless pursuit of more officers come at too great a cost to paramedic response times, paving streets and other basic services?

Among those raising such concerns are former police chief and current Councilman Bernard C. Parks, Councilman Paul Koretz, former first deputy mayor and businessman Austin Beutner, the police officers' union and, in a small irony, Yaroslavsky.

"If the Police Department does not lose any officers over the next few years, during this time of economic hardship, it's because the rest of city services have been eviscerated," said Yaroslavsky, now a Westside and San Fernando Valley representative on the county Board of Supervisors. "I don't think it's sensible to say that we cannot cut the Police Department by even one position."

There is little consensus among criminal-justice academics about the effect that changes in police staffing have on crime rates. Where officers are deployed and the assignments they are given appear to be as important as the number of cops on the payroll, said Jeremy M. Wilson, a Michigan State University criminologist. A recent report on police staffing levels coauthored by Wilson suggested that many departments simply guess the number of officers needed. "We determine how many officers we need," said one police official in the report, "by holding an envelope to our head."

Many criminologists who have studied big-city crime decreases credit longer prison sentences and the retreat of the crack-cocaine epidemic, among other reasons, as being most responsible for bringing down crime. They point to cities such as Seattle and Dallas that cut police staffing in the 1990s and still saw crime drop sharply.

But LAPD Chief Charlie Beck argues that there is an important correlation between officer staffing levels and lower crime rates. Cities such as San Jose, Long Beach and Oakland saw crime surge after cutting their police forces, he said.

Villaraigosa, whose legacy is tied to his record of expanding the Police Department, despite the Great Recession, also draws a direct line between more cops and less crime. The city has had fewer than 300 murders each of the last three years, he notes, down from a high of nearly 1,100 in 1992.

"The numbers speak for themselves," Villaraigosa said. "A 49% drop in violent crime and homicides, a 66% drop in gang homicides. Growing our Police Department and ... community policing is a big reason why we are safer today."

But why 10,000 cops for L.A.?

Yaroslavsky latched onto the number after crack- and gang-fueled violent crime surged. Voters demanded action. The 10,000 figure lacked any analytical underpinning but was "a nice round number," Yaroslavsky chuckled in an interview. It also "takes the force from four digits to five digits." The goal stuck, becoming a lodestar of L.A.'s mayoral politics ever since.

Police Chief Willie L. Williams, hired three years after Yaroslavsky rolled out his plan, said he wanted to reach the mark by 2000. In 1993, mayoral candidate Richard Riordan suggested pushing the force past 10,000 officers by leasing Los Angeles International Airport to a private operator and diverting the income to the LAPD. His opponent, Councilman Michael Woo, pledged to reach the 10,000-officer target by shifting money away from other departments. Riordan won the contest but never added the 3,000 officers he had promised.

In 2005, mayoral contender Villaraigosa pledged 1,000 additional officers, which would have brought the LAPD to a force of 10,200.

To finally claw past the 10,000-cop threshold, his administration employed a bureaucratic sleight of hand — shifting 60 officers to the LAPD from the General Services Department, which patrols parks, libraries and other municipal buildings. The result: no net increase in officers, but effectively 10,000 wearing LAPD blue. (Due to routine fluctuations in staffing, the figure dipped to 9,976 last week.)

The department's highest-ever staffing comes with a notable asterisk. Because the city has all but eliminated funding for police overtime, cops must instead be compensated with time off, removing the equivalent of 400 or more officers from duty. That effectively reduces Villaraigosa's police buildup during his eight years in office by at least half, according to Beutner, the mayor's former first deputy.

Using the 10,000-officer figure, the LAPD now employs more than 2.5 officers per 1,000 residents. That's low compared to Chicago (4.7) and New York (4.3) but higher than other large western cities such as Houston (2.3), Phoenix (2.1) and San Diego (1.5). Criminologists warn that such ratios can be misleading because so many other factors — including geography and deployment patterns — are more important factors.

The LAPD, including the cost of benefits to retired officers, now consumes more than 55% of the $4 billion in revenue that city officials have discretion over, compared with 46% nine years ago.

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Trial for 1987 slaying of Jimmy Casino to wrap up

He was a smooth-talking swindler who operated Orange County's most notorious and lucrative strip club, the Mustang Topless Theater.

Born James Stockwell, he rebranded himself Jimmy Casino and lived the extravagant lifestyle of a character from an Elmore Leonard novel. Expensive cowboy couture. Luxury cars. Enemies who wanted him dead.

After years of staying a step ahead of the law and the people whom he owed money, Casino, 48, was ambushed at his Buena Park condo Jan. 2, 1987.

"We're getting paid to do this," one of the two gunmen allegedly said.

They raped Casino's 22-year-old girlfriend. Then they pumped three bullets into the back of his head with a silencer-equipped handgun before making off with credit cards, fur coats, jewelry and two of his cars.

For more than two decades, Casino's death remained one of Orange County's most intriguing unsolved crimes.

But investigators kept the heat on the cold case. In 2008, using DNA matching technology not available at the time of the shooting, they arrested 59-year-old Richard Morris Jr. in Hawaii, charging him with murder.

Now, a quarter of a century after Casino was gunned down, Morris' trial is set to wrap up this week in Orange County Superior Court with jurors deciding his fate. If convicted he faces life in prison without parole. A second suspect remains at large.

These days, Morris looks like an aging biker — slightly pudgy with a droopy mustache and a long ponytail. But back in the day, prosecutors say, , he was a violent criminal and cold-blooded hired hand.

"He was a street thug and a heroin addict," Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Murray said. "He was a nobody."

Casino's slaying was front-page news replete with the titillating elements of a pulp novel — mobsters, hit men, prostitution, extortion.

Morris' two-week murder trial, by contrast, has largely played out to an empty courtroom and the esoteric science of DNA matching — laboratory protocols, negative controls, electropherograms.

After one recess following a detailed cross-examination of a crime lab employee over data displayed on an overhead projector, Judge Francisco Briseno rhetorically asked jurors how they were holding up.

Morris' attorney, assistant public defender Martin Schwarz, argued to jurors that DNA collected from the rape victim was mishandled over the years and misinterpreted by the county's crime lab. Morris' DNA was obtained in Hawaii after he was picked up on suspicion of driving under the influence.

"Popular culture has shaped peoples' perception of DNA as being infallible," Schwarz said. "It's a powerful crime-fighting tool. but it's only as good as the evidence itself.... There's also a subjective component to DNA analysis."

Schwarz also placed into evidence what he described as a 2004 recorded confession by a man, now dead, who told investigators he was hired by one of Casino's business associates to kill him.

Casino's death in 1987 was the opening salvo in a battle for control of the Mustang strip club in Santa Ana, which grossed $150,000 a month and had ties to organized crime.

Over the next 15 months, a financial backer of the Mustang was shot and blinded by a Los Angeles mob underboss who was convicted of attempted murder. Mustang bouncer "Big" George Yudzevich — a 6-foot-7 slab of intimidation who also happened to be an FBI informant — was shot to death in an Irvine industrial park; no one was ever charged.

Who ordered Casino's murder may never be proven. He had served time for fraud, extortion and other crimes and made more than a few enemies. He also liked to insinuate to others that he had juice with the mob.

"There have been all kinds of theories," Murray said

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President Obama's Mexico visit comes with backdrop of uncertainty

WASHINGTON — President Obama travels to Mexico this week amid signs that the relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor's new government faces a new period of uncertainty after years of unprecedented closeness forged by the deadly war against Mexican drug cartels.

The government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is said to be wary of the level of U.S. involvement in security affairs that characterized the administration of his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. As a result, the Mexican government is expected to narrow U.S. involvement in its attorney general's office and Interior Ministry, the agencies that oversee police and intelligence, current and former U.S. and Mexican officials say.

Instead, Peña Nieto and officials from his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, want to concentrate U.S. participation in less sensitive but potentially profitable areas such as the economy.

Privately, the shifts have led to a large degree of concern in Washington about what the day-to-day working relationship will look like.

Publicly, the Obama administration has welcomed a broader agenda.

"We don't want to define this relationship with Mexico … in the context of security or counter-narcotics trafficking," U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said April 19 in Washington, with his Mexican counterpart, Jose Antonio Meade, at his side.

"We want to define it much larger in the context of our citizens' economic needs and our capacity to do more on the economic frontier. I am convinced we're going to grow that relationship."

Under Calderon, the United States expanded its role in Mexico to a level never before seen, sending drone aircraft, intelligence agents, police trainers and other assistance worth $2 billion over a six-year period to help fight the drug war. U.S. intelligence, in particular, was instrumental in the killing or capture of 25 drug kingpins, or capos.

The number of U.S. employees at the American Embassy and elsewhere snowballed, coming from agencies as diverse as the Drug Enforcement Administration, CIA, FBI and Treasury. Many participated directly in planning and carrying out drug-war missions with the Mexicans.

Much of that is likely to change.

"The U.S. knows it's going to be different and they're actively trying to find ways to work with the Mexican government," said Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

Washington is "waiting to see how comfortable [the Mexicans] are with the kind of cooperation that has been going on," Wood added. "The [Mexican] government recognizes that reliable flows of information and intelligence are crucial, but they would rather build up their own capacity than depend on the U.S."

The PRI wants to assert much more control over how U.S. officials operate in Mexico, said a former Mexican official with close ties to the administration. "The doors [to the Americans] are closing," he said.

One of Peña Nieto's most senior staff members, Atty. Gen. Jesus Murillo Karam, is openly critical of two areas where U.S. advisors have been especially active — and where their work seems to have backfired: a series of high-profile corruption prosecutions and a botched program of police vetting.

Millions of U.S. dollars have gone to training prosecutors and police. But the corruption cases collapsed because of what Murillo now says was flimsy evidence, and the vetting has failed to rid police forces of bad cops and may also have resulted in the firing of good officers.

"In a desire of simple imitation," Murillo said, "we let ourselves be guided by the values of other latitudes, other countries."

Some in the Mexican government portray the changing relationship as more tweak than rupture.

One official said Mexico seeks continued U.S. support and advice in the drug war, but wants to reinstate a more formal relationship through "proper," high-level channels, not across-the-board contacts throughout its agencies.

"It's how the PRI does things, always centralizing the channels," said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the government's thinking.

The PRI ruled Mexico uninterrupted for seven decades until it was booted out in 2000. It returned to the presidency in December and has steadily reprised its tradition of concentrating power in a few hands.

For one thing, it is consolidating control over the drug war under the Interior Ministry, including plans to establish a 10,000-member national gendarmerie and add at least 35,000 officers to the federal police force. A powerful Public Security Ministry that existed under Calderon and received substantial U.S. attention has been dissolved; its main body, the federal police, subsumed into the Interior Ministry.

Experts say that the PRI's long-standing concern for protecting Mexican sovereignty could provide a cover for rolling back U.S. involvement. But it may not be easy.

Despite Calderon's U.S.-backed frontal assault on drug cartels, or perhaps because of it, violence skyrocketed, and experts and former officials say that Peña Nieto may have difficulty scaling back U.S. involvement because it has become so deeply entrenched in Mexico's security establishment.

Military attention to Mexico has also grown; in January, the Pentagon announced that it was creating a new headquarters for special operations forces at Colorado-based U.S. Northern Command, which covers Mexico. The number of special operations personnel could increase fivefold to about 125; they would help oversee sensitive training operations requested by Mexican security forces.

U.S. troops aren't expected to get involved in combat in Mexico because of Mexican resistance to a foreign presence, but officials say the special operations expansion has further entrenched a mission the military already has begun.

"Obviously we have a good military-to-military relationship with Mexico, and a lot of that involves special operations," said the command's spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis. "The bread and butter of what they do is build capacity and train forces.... It's no change in operation, but it provides us better accountability and better command and control."

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

wilkinson@latimes.com

Bengali reported from Washington and Wilkinson from Mexico City.

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After Dorner claim, other fired LAPD cops want cases reviewed

In the wake of Christopher Dorner's claim that his firing from the Los Angeles Police Department was a result of corruption and bias, more than three dozen other fired LAPD cops want department officials to review their cases.

The 40 requests, which were tallied by the union that represents rank-and-file officers, have come in the two months since Dorner sought revenge for his 2009 firing by targeting police officers and their families in a killing rampage that left four dead and others injured.

Dorner's allegations of a department plagued by racism and special interests left Chief Charlie Beck scrambling to stem a growing chorus of others who condemned Dorner's violence but said his complaints about the department were accurate. To assuage concerns, Beck vowed to re-examine the cases of other former officers who believed they had been wrongly expelled from the force.

Now, details of how the department plans to make good on Beck's offer are becoming clear. And, for at least some of the disgruntled ex-officers, they will be disappointing.

In letters to those wishing to have their case reviewed, department officials explain that the city's charter, which spells out the authority granted to various public officials, prevents the police chief from opening new disciplinary proceedings for an officer fired more than three years ago.

"Therefore the Department does not have the power to reinstate officers whose terminations occurred more than three years ago," wrote Gerald Chaleff, the LAPD's special assistant for constitutional policing. "You are being informed of this to forestall any misconceptions about the power of the department."

The reviews remain one of the unsettled postscripts to the Dorner saga. In February, three years after he was fired for allegedly fabricating a story about his partner inappropriately kicking a handcuffed suspect, Dorner resurfaced in violent fashion, bent on seeking revenge for his ouster.

After killing the daughter of the attorney who defended him at his disciplinary hearing and her fiance, Dorner killed two police officers and wounded three other people as he evaded capture during a massive manhunt. After more than a week on the run, Dorner was chased into a cabin in the mountains near Big Bear, where he died from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Dorner had posted online an angry manifesto of sorts in which he claimed that he had been a victim of a racist, corrupt police organization that protects its favored officers at the expense of those trying to report abuses. Those accusations tapped into deep wells of discontent and distrust that officers and minority communities have felt toward the department. Beck sought to reassure doubters that years of reforms had changed the department and buried the "ghosts" of the past. He then offered to review past discipline cases.

Fired officers who wish to have their terminations re-examined must first submit an affidavit or similar declaration within two months of receiving the letter from Chaleff, according to a copy obtained by The Times. The letter was sent in recent weeks to the former officers who have already come forward.

Using "clear and convincing language," the letter instructs ex-officers to explain "the new evidence or change in circumstances that would justify a re-examination of your termination."

LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said Chaleff will conduct a review for anyone who follows the rules laid out in the letter. "We will do whatever it takes on the cases, including redoing interviews, if necessary," he wrote in an email.

The department and the Protective League declined to release the names of former officers who have requested reviews.

Gary Ingemunson, a longtime attorney for the League, used the case reviews as an opportunity to revive the League's perennial criticism that disciplinary hearings, called Boards of Rights, are stacked against officers.

"The Board of Rights system could be fair, but for the last few years the Department has consistently outdone itself in the attempt to completely skew the system against the officer. The Department wants to win. End of story," Ingemunson wrote in a column in the current issue of the union's monthly magazine.

One of the problems, Ingemunson and other union lawyers have said, is the makeup of the three-person panels that decide an officer's fate. Two of judges are senior-level LAPD officers, while the third is a civilian.

According to the critics, that arrangement is unfair because officers are sent to boards whenever the chief wants them fired and the officers on the panel will feel pressure to do as the chief wants.

Smith rejected that idea, saying board members are completely free to decide as they see fit. He pointed to department figures showing that over the last three years, officers sent by the chief to Boards of Rights were fired in only about 60% of the cases.

Smith defended the department's disciplinary system in general, saying it has been in place for decades and stood up under repeated scrutiny by oversight bodies.

Another allowance Beck made after Dorner's rampage, Smith noted, was to launch a broad review of disciplinary procedures to identify areas that officers believe are unfair and possibly make changes to address those concerns.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

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Syria prime minister survives bomb attack

BEIRUT -- Syria's prime minister survived a bomb attack Monday that targeted his convoy in the capital of Damascus, state media reported, in the latest apparent assassination attempt against a top official in the government of President Bashar Assad.

Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi "is safe and he survived the explosion," reported the official Syrian Arab News Agency. There were unconfirmed reports that the prime minister's bodyguard and several others were killed in the blast.

Footage on state television showed several heavily damaged vehicles and debris scattered along a major street in the Mazzeh district, an upscale neighborhood in western Damascus that is home to many senior officials and diplomats.

The state media reported "casualties and material damage," but there was no official word on how many people were injured or if anyone had been killed.

The attack appeared to be a car bomb, though official accounts did not provide specifics.

Halqi, a senior figure in the governing Baath Party, was appointed prime minister last year after his predecessor, Riad Hijab, defected to the opposition and fled to Jordan.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The government blamed "terrorists," its standard term for the armed opposition.

Rebels fighting to oust Assad have regularly deployed car bombs and have been blamed for several such attacks in the capital, including a devastating explosion in February on a busy roadway in central Damascus  that killed more than 50 people.

The heavily guarded capital is largely under tight government control. But rebels based in suburbs have shown the ability to set off bombs in the city and shell the capital from positions on the outskirts. The military has thwarted several rebel attempts to storm the city from strongholds east of the capital. In recent days the government has been mounting a major counteroffensive against rebels based outside the capital.

Senior government figures have often been targeted for assassination during the two-year uprising against Assad's rule.

Last summer, four top security officials were killed by what the government called a bomb planted in a security building in the capital. A bombing attack at the Interior Ministry in December reportedly wounded Interior Minister Mohammed al-Shaar.

Special correspondent Nabih Bulos in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

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LAPD's 'magic number' of 10,000 officers losing some luster

In 1989, then-Los Angeles Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky unveiled an audacious plan to boost the city police force by more than 25% to 10,000 officers.

He couldn't have imagined that city leaders would chase that goal for nearly a quarter of a century until, at the start of this year, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that he had pushed the LAPD over the long-elusive benchmark.

The two candidates vying to replace Villaraigosa in the May 21 election — City Controller Wendy Greuel and Councilman Eric Garcetti — have embraced the mayor's achievement, crediting the LAPD buildup in large measure for the city's lowest crime rates since the 1950s. Indeed, Greuel has committed to enlarging the police force an additional 20%, if the city treasury grows.

Still lagging

Number of police officers per 1,000 population as of 2011:

City	Officers
Washington, D.C.	6.7
New Orleans	6.5
Baltimore	4.7
Chicago	4.7
Philadelphia	4.7
Newark	4.4
New York	4.3
St. Louis	3.9
Boston	3.7
Cleveland	3.6
Detroit	3.5
Atlanta	3.4
Milwaukee	3.4
Cincinnati	3.2
Los Angeles	2.5
Houston	2.3
Phoenix	2.1
Albuquerque	1.9
Las Vegas	1.8
San Diego	1.5

Source: FBI

But increasingly, voices on the periphery of the mayoral campaign argue that rising police costs — up 36% to more than $2 billion over the last eight years, more than twice the rate of growth in such discretionary spending overall — raises two critical questions: Has the expansion been crucial to making Los Angeles safer? Has the relentless pursuit of more officers come at too great a cost to paramedic response times, paving streets and other basic services?

Among those raising such concerns are former police chief and current Councilman Bernard C. Parks, Councilman Paul Koretz, former first deputy mayor and businessman Austin Beutner, the police officers' union and, in a small irony, Yaroslavsky.

"If the Police Department does not lose any officers over the next few years, during this time of economic hardship, it's because the rest of city services have been eviscerated," said Yaroslavsky, now a Westside and San Fernando Valley representative on the county Board of Supervisors. "I don't think it's sensible to say that we cannot cut the Police Department by even one position."

There is little consensus among criminal-justice academics about the effect that changes in police staffing have on crime rates. Where officers are deployed and the assignments they are given appear to be as important as the number of cops on the payroll, said Jeremy M. Wilson, a Michigan State University criminologist. A recent report on police staffing levels coauthored by Wilson suggested that many departments simply guess the number of officers needed. "We determine how many officers we need," said one police official in the report, "by holding an envelope to our head."

Many criminologists who have studied big-city crime decreases credit longer prison sentences and the retreat of the crack-cocaine epidemic, among other reasons, as being most responsible for bringing down crime. They point to cities such as Seattle and Dallas that cut police staffing in the 1990s and still saw crime drop sharply.

But LAPD Chief Charlie Beck argues that there is an important correlation between officer staffing levels and lower crime rates. Cities such as San Jose, Long Beach and Oakland saw crime surge after cutting their police forces, he said.

Villaraigosa, whose legacy is tied to his record of expanding the Police Department, despite the Great Recession, also draws a direct line between more cops and less crime. The city has had fewer than 300 murders each of the last three years, he notes, down from a high of nearly 1,100 in 1992.

"The numbers speak for themselves," Villaraigosa said. "A 49% drop in violent crime and homicides, a 66% drop in gang homicides. Growing our Police Department and ... community policing is a big reason why we are safer today."

But why 10,000 cops for L.A.?

Yaroslavsky latched onto the number after crack- and gang-fueled violent crime surged. Voters demanded action. The 10,000 figure lacked any analytical underpinning but was "a nice round number," Yaroslavsky chuckled in an interview. It also "takes the force from four digits to five digits." The goal stuck, becoming a lodestar of L.A.'s mayoral politics ever since.

Police Chief Willie L. Williams, hired three years after Yaroslavsky rolled out his plan, said he wanted to reach the mark by 2000. In 1993, mayoral candidate Richard Riordan suggested pushing the force past 10,000 officers by leasing Los Angeles International Airport to a private operator and diverting the income to the LAPD. His opponent, Councilman Michael Woo, pledged to reach the 10,000-officer target by shifting money away from other departments. Riordan won the contest but never added the 3,000 officers he had promised.

In 2005, mayoral contender Villaraigosa pledged 1,000 additional officers, which would have brought the LAPD to a force of 10,200.

To finally claw past the 10,000-cop threshold, his administration employed a bureaucratic sleight of hand — shifting 60 officers to the LAPD from the General Services Department, which patrols parks, libraries and other municipal buildings. The result: no net increase in officers, but effectively 10,000 wearing LAPD blue. (Due to routine fluctuations in staffing, the figure dipped to 9,976 last week.)

The department's highest-ever staffing comes with a notable asterisk. Because the city has all but eliminated funding for police overtime, cops must instead be compensated with time off, removing the equivalent of 400 or more officers from duty. That effectively reduces Villaraigosa's police buildup during his eight years in office by at least half, according to Beutner, the mayor's former first deputy.

Using the 10,000-officer figure, the LAPD now employs more than 2.5 officers per 1,000 residents. That's low compared to Chicago (4.7) and New York (4.3) but higher than other large western cities such as Houston (2.3), Phoenix (2.1) and San Diego (1.5). Criminologists warn that such ratios can be misleading because so many other factors — including geography and deployment patterns — are more important factors.

The LAPD, including the cost of benefits to retired officers, now consumes more than 55% of the $4 billion in revenue that city officials have discretion over, compared with 46% nine years ago.

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Trial for 1987 slaying of Jimmy Casino to wrap up

He was a smooth-talking swindler who operated Orange County's most notorious and lucrative strip club, the Mustang Topless Theater.

Born James Stockwell, he rebranded himself Jimmy Casino and lived the extravagant lifestyle of a character from an Elmore Leonard novel. Expensive cowboy couture. Luxury cars. Enemies who wanted him dead.

After years of staying a step ahead of the law and the people whom he owed money, Casino, 48, was ambushed at his Buena Park condo Jan. 2, 1987.

"We're getting paid to do this," one of the two gunmen allegedly said.

They raped Casino's 22-year-old girlfriend. Then they pumped three bullets into the back of his head with a silencer-equipped handgun before making off with credit cards, fur coats, jewelry and two of his cars.

For more than two decades, Casino's death remained one of Orange County's most intriguing unsolved crimes.

But investigators kept the heat on the cold case. In 2008, using DNA matching technology not available at the time of the shooting, they arrested 59-year-old Richard Morris Jr. in Hawaii, charging him with murder.

Now, a quarter of a century after Casino was gunned down, Morris' trial is set to wrap up this week in Orange County Superior Court with jurors deciding his fate. If convicted he faces life in prison without parole. A second suspect remains at large.

These days, Morris looks like an aging biker — slightly pudgy with a droopy mustache and a long ponytail. But back in the day, prosecutors say, , he was a violent criminal and cold-blooded hired hand.

"He was a street thug and a heroin addict," Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Murray said. "He was a nobody."

Casino's slaying was front-page news replete with the titillating elements of a pulp novel — mobsters, hit men, prostitution, extortion.

Morris' two-week murder trial, by contrast, has largely played out to an empty courtroom and the esoteric science of DNA matching — laboratory protocols, negative controls, electropherograms.

After one recess following a detailed cross-examination of a crime lab employee over data displayed on an overhead projector, Judge Francisco Briseno rhetorically asked jurors how they were holding up.

Morris' attorney, assistant public defender Martin Schwarz, argued to jurors that DNA collected from the rape victim was mishandled over the years and misinterpreted by the county's crime lab. Morris' DNA was obtained in Hawaii after he was picked up on suspicion of driving under the influence.

"Popular culture has shaped peoples' perception of DNA as being infallible," Schwarz said. "It's a powerful crime-fighting tool. but it's only as good as the evidence itself.... There's also a subjective component to DNA analysis."

Schwarz also placed into evidence what he described as a 2004 recorded confession by a man, now dead, who told investigators he was hired by one of Casino's business associates to kill him.

Casino's death in 1987 was the opening salvo in a battle for control of the Mustang strip club in Santa Ana, which grossed $150,000 a month and had ties to organized crime.

Over the next 15 months, a financial backer of the Mustang was shot and blinded by a Los Angeles mob underboss who was convicted of attempted murder. Mustang bouncer "Big" George Yudzevich — a 6-foot-7 slab of intimidation who also happened to be an FBI informant — was shot to death in an Irvine industrial park; no one was ever charged.

Who ordered Casino's murder may never be proven. He had served time for fraud, extortion and other crimes and made more than a few enemies. He also liked to insinuate to others that he had juice with the mob.

"There have been all kinds of theories," Murray said

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President Obama's Mexico visit comes with backdrop of uncertainty

WASHINGTON — President Obama travels to Mexico this week amid signs that the relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor's new government faces a new period of uncertainty after years of unprecedented closeness forged by the deadly war against Mexican drug cartels.

The government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is said to be wary of the level of U.S. involvement in security affairs that characterized the administration of his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. As a result, the Mexican government is expected to narrow U.S. involvement in its attorney general's office and Interior Ministry, the agencies that oversee police and intelligence, current and former U.S. and Mexican officials say.

Instead, Peña Nieto and officials from his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, want to concentrate U.S. participation in less sensitive but potentially profitable areas such as the economy.

Privately, the shifts have led to a large degree of concern in Washington about what the day-to-day working relationship will look like.

Publicly, the Obama administration has welcomed a broader agenda.

"We don't want to define this relationship with Mexico … in the context of security or counter-narcotics trafficking," U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said April 19 in Washington, with his Mexican counterpart, Jose Antonio Meade, at his side.

"We want to define it much larger in the context of our citizens' economic needs and our capacity to do more on the economic frontier. I am convinced we're going to grow that relationship."

Under Calderon, the United States expanded its role in Mexico to a level never before seen, sending drone aircraft, intelligence agents, police trainers and other assistance worth $2 billion over a six-year period to help fight the drug war. U.S. intelligence, in particular, was instrumental in the killing or capture of 25 drug kingpins, or capos.

The number of U.S. employees at the American Embassy and elsewhere snowballed, coming from agencies as diverse as the Drug Enforcement Administration, CIA, FBI and Treasury. Many participated directly in planning and carrying out drug-war missions with the Mexicans.

Much of that is likely to change.

"The U.S. knows it's going to be different and they're actively trying to find ways to work with the Mexican government," said Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

Washington is "waiting to see how comfortable [the Mexicans] are with the kind of cooperation that has been going on," Wood added. "The [Mexican] government recognizes that reliable flows of information and intelligence are crucial, but they would rather build up their own capacity than depend on the U.S."

The PRI wants to assert much more control over how U.S. officials operate in Mexico, said a former Mexican official with close ties to the administration. "The doors [to the Americans] are closing," he said.

One of Peña Nieto's most senior staff members, Atty. Gen. Jesus Murillo Karam, is openly critical of two areas where U.S. advisors have been especially active — and where their work seems to have backfired: a series of high-profile corruption prosecutions and a botched program of police vetting.

Millions of U.S. dollars have gone to training prosecutors and police. But the corruption cases collapsed because of what Murillo now says was flimsy evidence, and the vetting has failed to rid police forces of bad cops and may also have resulted in the firing of good officers.

"In a desire of simple imitation," Murillo said, "we let ourselves be guided by the values of other latitudes, other countries."

Some in the Mexican government portray the changing relationship as more tweak than rupture.

One official said Mexico seeks continued U.S. support and advice in the drug war, but wants to reinstate a more formal relationship through "proper," high-level channels, not across-the-board contacts throughout its agencies.

"It's how the PRI does things, always centralizing the channels," said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the government's thinking.

The PRI ruled Mexico uninterrupted for seven decades until it was booted out in 2000. It returned to the presidency in December and has steadily reprised its tradition of concentrating power in a few hands.

For one thing, it is consolidating control over the drug war under the Interior Ministry, including plans to establish a 10,000-member national gendarmerie and add at least 35,000 officers to the federal police force. A powerful Public Security Ministry that existed under Calderon and received substantial U.S. attention has been dissolved; its main body, the federal police, subsumed into the Interior Ministry.

Experts say that the PRI's long-standing concern for protecting Mexican sovereignty could provide a cover for rolling back U.S. involvement. But it may not be easy.

Despite Calderon's U.S.-backed frontal assault on drug cartels, or perhaps because of it, violence skyrocketed, and experts and former officials say that Peña Nieto may have difficulty scaling back U.S. involvement because it has become so deeply entrenched in Mexico's security establishment.

Military attention to Mexico has also grown; in January, the Pentagon announced that it was creating a new headquarters for special operations forces at Colorado-based U.S. Northern Command, which covers Mexico. The number of special operations personnel could increase fivefold to about 125; they would help oversee sensitive training operations requested by Mexican security forces.

U.S. troops aren't expected to get involved in combat in Mexico because of Mexican resistance to a foreign presence, but officials say the special operations expansion has further entrenched a mission the military already has begun.

"Obviously we have a good military-to-military relationship with Mexico, and a lot of that involves special operations," said the command's spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis. "The bread and butter of what they do is build capacity and train forces.... It's no change in operation, but it provides us better accountability and better command and control."

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

wilkinson@latimes.com

Bengali reported from Washington and Wilkinson from Mexico City.

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After Dorner claim, other fired LAPD cops want cases reviewed

In the wake of Christopher Dorner's claim that his firing from the Los Angeles Police Department was a result of corruption and bias, more than three dozen other fired LAPD cops want department officials to review their cases.

The 40 requests, which were tallied by the union that represents rank-and-file officers, have come in the two months since Dorner sought revenge for his 2009 firing by targeting police officers and their families in a killing rampage that left four dead and others injured.

Dorner's allegations of a department plagued by racism and special interests left Chief Charlie Beck scrambling to stem a growing chorus of others who condemned Dorner's violence but said his complaints about the department were accurate. To assuage concerns, Beck vowed to re-examine the cases of other former officers who believed they had been wrongly expelled from the force.

Now, details of how the department plans to make good on Beck's offer are becoming clear. And, for at least some of the disgruntled ex-officers, they will be disappointing.

In letters to those wishing to have their case reviewed, department officials explain that the city's charter, which spells out the authority granted to various public officials, prevents the police chief from opening new disciplinary proceedings for an officer fired more than three years ago.

"Therefore the Department does not have the power to reinstate officers whose terminations occurred more than three years ago," wrote Gerald Chaleff, the LAPD's special assistant for constitutional policing. "You are being informed of this to forestall any misconceptions about the power of the department."

The reviews remain one of the unsettled postscripts to the Dorner saga. In February, three years after he was fired for allegedly fabricating a story about his partner inappropriately kicking a handcuffed suspect, Dorner resurfaced in violent fashion, bent on seeking revenge for his ouster.

After killing the daughter of the attorney who defended him at his disciplinary hearing and her fiance, Dorner killed two police officers and wounded three other people as he evaded capture during a massive manhunt. After more than a week on the run, Dorner was chased into a cabin in the mountains near Big Bear, where he died from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Dorner had posted online an angry manifesto of sorts in which he claimed that he had been a victim of a racist, corrupt police organization that protects its favored officers at the expense of those trying to report abuses. Those accusations tapped into deep wells of discontent and distrust that officers and minority communities have felt toward the department. Beck sought to reassure doubters that years of reforms had changed the department and buried the "ghosts" of the past. He then offered to review past discipline cases.

Fired officers who wish to have their terminations re-examined must first submit an affidavit or similar declaration within two months of receiving the letter from Chaleff, according to a copy obtained by The Times. The letter was sent in recent weeks to the former officers who have already come forward.

Using "clear and convincing language," the letter instructs ex-officers to explain "the new evidence or change in circumstances that would justify a re-examination of your termination."

LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said Chaleff will conduct a review for anyone who follows the rules laid out in the letter. "We will do whatever it takes on the cases, including redoing interviews, if necessary," he wrote in an email.

The department and the Protective League declined to release the names of former officers who have requested reviews.

Gary Ingemunson, a longtime attorney for the League, used the case reviews as an opportunity to revive the League's perennial criticism that disciplinary hearings, called Boards of Rights, are stacked against officers.

"The Board of Rights system could be fair, but for the last few years the Department has consistently outdone itself in the attempt to completely skew the system against the officer. The Department wants to win. End of story," Ingemunson wrote in a column in the current issue of the union's monthly magazine.

One of the problems, Ingemunson and other union lawyers have said, is the makeup of the three-person panels that decide an officer's fate. Two of judges are senior-level LAPD officers, while the third is a civilian.

According to the critics, that arrangement is unfair because officers are sent to boards whenever the chief wants them fired and the officers on the panel will feel pressure to do as the chief wants.

Smith rejected that idea, saying board members are completely free to decide as they see fit. He pointed to department figures showing that over the last three years, officers sent by the chief to Boards of Rights were fired in only about 60% of the cases.

Smith defended the department's disciplinary system in general, saying it has been in place for decades and stood up under repeated scrutiny by oversight bodies.

Another allowance Beck made after Dorner's rampage, Smith noted, was to launch a broad review of disciplinary procedures to identify areas that officers believe are unfair and possibly make changes to address those concerns.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

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Syria prime minister survives bomb attack

BEIRUT -- Syria's prime minister survived a bomb attack Monday that targeted his convoy in the capital of Damascus, state media reported, in the latest apparent assassination attempt against a top official in the government of President Bashar Assad.

Prime Minister Wael al-Halqi "is safe and he survived the explosion," reported the official Syrian Arab News Agency. There were unconfirmed reports that the prime minister's bodyguard and several others were killed in the blast.

Footage on state television showed several heavily damaged vehicles and debris scattered along a major street in the Mazzeh district, an upscale neighborhood in western Damascus that is home to many senior officials and diplomats.

The state media reported "casualties and material damage," but there was no official word on how many people were injured or if anyone had been killed.

The attack appeared to be a car bomb, though official accounts did not provide specifics.

Halqi, a senior figure in the governing Baath Party, was appointed prime minister last year after his predecessor, Riad Hijab, defected to the opposition and fled to Jordan.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. The government blamed "terrorists," its standard term for the armed opposition.

Rebels fighting to oust Assad have regularly deployed car bombs and have been blamed for several such attacks in the capital, including a devastating explosion in February on a busy roadway in central Damascus  that killed more than 50 people.

The heavily guarded capital is largely under tight government control. But rebels based in suburbs have shown the ability to set off bombs in the city and shell the capital from positions on the outskirts. The military has thwarted several rebel attempts to storm the city from strongholds east of the capital. In recent days the government has been mounting a major counteroffensive against rebels based outside the capital.

Senior government figures have often been targeted for assassination during the two-year uprising against Assad's rule.

Last summer, four top security officials were killed by what the government called a bomb planted in a security building in the capital. A bombing attack at the Interior Ministry in December reportedly wounded Interior Minister Mohammed al-Shaar.

Special correspondent Nabih Bulos in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

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