Edward M. Davis was the chief of the Los Angeles Police
Department from 1969 through 1978. Later, he was a California State Senator from
1981 to 1993. He also made an unsuccessful bid as the Republican candidate for
the United States Senate in 1986.
Ed Davis pursued innovative approaches to crime. He balanced
his tough law-and-order rhetoric with a boots-on-the-ground policing strategy that assigned police officers to specific neighborhoods
in an effort to build personal ties with residents. His philosophy was incorporated in a program he called the "Basic Car
Plan,” which divided Los Angeles into small geographical areas and assigned officers to meet with community representatives.
Davis, who assigned almost 900 officers to the program, believed that police would be more effective if their duties were
tailored to each locality. The officers were instructed to find out which crime
problems concerned residents the most and then devise crime-fighting plans.
He also created the Neighborhood Watch program which encouraged
police officers to spend time in the homes of local city residents, listen to their concerns and then set up effective crime
fighting initiatives. Moreover, Ed Davis developed the idea of team policing wherein interdisciplinary groups of police officers
were assigned as a unit to small, specific, geographic area. These interdisciplinary
groups consisted of uniformed police officer, detectives and traffic enforcement officers working together on specific neighborhood
crime problems.
Ed Davis’ programs were highly innovative for their
time. Significantly, in the 9 years that Edward M. Davis served as police chief from, 1969 to 1978, crime rates actually dipped
slightly by 1% in Los Angeles while rising nationwide by 55%. Furthermore, while
subsequent Los Angeles Police Department police chiefs would dismantle or significantly reduce the programs, by the beginning
of the 21st Century, more than two decades after his tenure as chief, the programs would either return wholesale,
or new policing tactics would involve significant portions of Davis’ ideas.
In 1978, Senator Edward M. Davis authored Staff One: A Perspective on Effective Police Management. The term “Staff
One” is the LAPD radio call sign for the Chief of Police.
