Was Police Investigation an Empty Ritual, or Will It Bring Change? : The Times asked a diverse group of people, most of them Los Angeles residents, to comment on the report of the Christopher Commission. The following commentaries are taken from the interviews. : Ease Their Tension

I think the Christopher Commission and their report were very thorough, but they missed out on a very big thing: We are a big, growing city. We don’t have enough officers to take care of a city like this. When the mayor became mayor, we had 7,500 officers. Since then, the city (population) has almost doubled, and we have only a few hundred more officers.

I think a lot of the problems with this brutality and what they say is excessive force is frustration. The officers get called constantly for bad situations. They’re human, like you and me. I see them firsthand. They come in, sit in my office and they tell me some of the problems they run into, like being spit on because they are wearing blue.

We need more police officers to take some of the tension off their shoulders.

When they say the officers are isolated from the community, that is just not true. They are at all the community functions. They are involved with the all the organizations, the chambers of commerce, the community-service groups. They’re out there.