During his first major upheaval since his care of the Los Angeles police service in November, chief Jim McDonnell gave new missions to more than a dozen officials of the upper ranks.
Faced with current difficulties to won new recruits and uncertainty His plans To revise the LAPD, McDonnell gave the first indications on how he intends to reorganize himself by raising three assistant leaders – Emada Tingirides, Michael Rimkunas and Scott Harrelson – for the main positions and resuscitate a long -term office.
The moves were announced in an email across the department last week, but should not come into force later this month.
Tingirides, which Lost against McDonnell In order to become a chief last fall, becomes deputy chief in charge of the operations office, who oversees the patrol functions. She was recently announced as a finalist for the post of police chief at Fort Worth, according to local reports. His recent promotion is considered by some to be a decision to convince her to stay. She becomes the highest black woman in the history of the department.
Harrelson will now be in charge of training and recruitment efforts from the department as head of the support office, replacing deputy chief Daniel Randolph, who should retire in the coming weeks.
The filling of the interior circle of McDonnell is two other selected from the administration of former chef Michel Moore: Rimkunas and Dominic Choi, who was acting chief until McDonnell took over in November. Choi remained deputy chief but was appointed chief of staff of McDonnell – in fact n ° 2 of the ministry.
The head of the office who includes internal affairs, Rimkunas will now run the special operations office.
McDonnell also resurrected the department’s human resources office, which was closed in 2004 when he was a senior official under former chef William J. Bratton. He did not immediately say what would be the responsibilities of the new office.
It is not clear if McDonnell will have to submit parts of his reorganization plan to the municipal council, which had to sign in the past the modifications of the structure of the ministry.
When he took the job last year, McDonnell first said he wanted to spend at least three months to study the LAPD to understand how it had changed since he followed the ranks. He left in 2010 to become the best long Beach cop, then served a sheriff mandate from County. His early revision calendar was discouraged, he told journalists at a press conference last week, due to January fires and recent demonstrations against federal immigration raids.
The series of major incidents, said McDonnell, presented an unexpected opportunity to assess its senior executives to see how they performed “in crisis mode”.
The chief added that he had delayed his realignment for the “result of the budget to see where we were” and the completion of a study of several months of the department by Rand Corp., a group of reflection on global policy launched last year to carry out a top to bottom exam. The study was recently completed and McDonnell said he was examining his recommendations, as well as those made by the many internal working groups he had summoned to examine recruitment, discipline and other work problems.
Without offering details, McDonnell has suggested that another of its priorities will strengthen the ranks of detectives from the department and revise the system that manages misconduct against officers, a source of controversy and frustration.
“I have approximately I think it might look like, but I certainly want to get the comments of those dealt with on a daily basis on the best way to manage the nuances to do the work today with the number of resources we have,” he told journalists.
McDonnell suffered increasing pressure from criticism that said it was too slowly to make changes, with more emergency required while the city is about to organize events such as the World Cup the following year and the 2028 Olympic Games.
In other staff movements announced last week, McDonnell moved the deputy chief Marc Reina of the training office of the South Bureau, where he previously worked as captain, and promoted German Hurtado, immigration coordinator of the department, to the deputy chief of the central office, who was the epicenter of recent demonstrations.
Hurtado was appointed in at least two pending proceedings by LAPD officials accusing him of covering the uses of force unjustified by the police during the 2020 demonstrations. The city denied the reprehensible acts and fights in court.
“As far as I know, I am only named as a witness in these cases, and I am not free to speak of current proceedings,” said Hurtado when he was reached on Monday by the Times.
McDonnell has also downgraded the deputy chief Blake Chow to his rank as a public service commander – a trajectory similar to McDonnell, who was made to lower a row During the mandate of former chef Charlie Beck. Captain Ray Valois, who helped supervise the department’s fire response, was raised to the Valley Bureau commander.