Since I’m a known Bill Bratton fan and an LA resident, I get a steady trickle of phone calls from out of town asking some variation of “How’s he doing?” The honest answer is that I don’t know. But John Buntin’s profile in Governing suggests that the right answer might be “About as well as could be expected, under the circumstances.” LA is chronically, scandalously underpoliced, and without some additional bodies there are fairly tight limits on what even a Bratton can accomplish.
Buntin’s story accepts as fact the account of the gang problem offered by career LAPD commanders. I’m not sure that’s justified. If there are 60,000 “gang members” in LA compared to 1200 in Boston (with about a seventh the population of LA, suggesting a sixfold difference in rates) my guess is that someone has defined “gang member” too broadly, and that concentrating on a much smaller hard core might pay dividends.