When we wrote a letter of concern and suggestions to Charlie Beck, Chief of the Los
Angeles Police Department, we were expecting a response but we never got one. We felt
that our letter warranted a response, but we concluded as a group why we didn’t get one.
According to the LAPD website, there are over 9,800 active police officers in the LAPD
and about 4 million people in Los Angeles. There are many people living here and it could
have been a case of our letter simply not reaching Charlie Beck’s email due to the
possibility of other people trying to do the same (www.lapdonline.org). The city of Los
Angeles is large and the LAPD has to account for it, making it easy to assume that the
LAPD is a rather mechanistic organization with many officers with emails and letters not
being a big priority or Charlie Beck and the LAPD get so many e-mails that it simply
doesn’t arrive or they have other important things to worry about and cannot spend hours
upon hours responding to each and every e-mail. Our letter wasn’t officially a letter of
complaint per se, so we feel like that played a big factor in the absence of a response.
According to Gaines and Worrall, “The organizational design of police internal affairs
units becomes more complex as the size of the police agency increases (Gaines and
Worrall, 2012, pg.435).” The LAPD is one of the biggest police departments in the country
with jurisdiction in a city of about 4 million and it is important that they have enough
