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How will the City of Los Angeles cope with the statewide release of inmates under a new plan to lessen overcrowding in prisons? Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck says 150 officers will be taken away from regular duties in order to "deal with" the plan, according to L.A. Now. Doing so, cautions Beck, will affect how the LAPD deal with crime and emergency responses."911 calls will take longer to answer, reports will take longer to write, and our system will suffer because of an unfunded mandate placed on us by the state," said Beck.
In addition to affecting emergency response times, Beck, along with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, fear that the crime rates in L.A. will no longer be on the decline.
Officers re-assigned to be part of the released prisoner program will be spending time keeping track of those prisoners who otherwise would have been supervised by employees of the state parole department; the plan, which went into effect this weekend moves the responsibility for thousands of inmates and parolees from the state to local authorities.
According to Villaraigosa, there will be over 4,200 released offenders transferred into the supervision of Los Angeles. Villaraigosa and Beck have been critical of Governor Jerry Brown for implementing this plan without providing the city any funds to deal with the added burden. "This is not alignment," remarked Villaraigosa at a press conference, "this is a recipe for making the problem much worse."
