Local Police Stations
Lose Their Harsh Image

Few people venture into their local police station voluntarily. But departments in Los Angeles and elsewhere are hoping to change that. At the soon-to-open West Valley station in Reseda, Calif., for instance, area residents will find ATMs in the light-filled lobby, kitchen-equipped meeting rooms for public use, and even an inviting outdoor courtyard with barbecue facilities.

"We want to encourage people to come to the station and tell us what's going on in the community," says Yvette Sanchez-Owens, commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department's facilities management division.

To some, the spiffed-up buildings play an even more complex social role. The new stations are "an opportunity to change the face of the L.A. Police Department and how it relates to the community through architecture," says Chet Widom, a founding principal of WWCOT Architecture of Santa Monica, Calif., which designed two stations for the LAPD. "In many respects, the older police stations were armed camps."

The new aesthetic is being driven partly by the revival of community policing -- an effort to get officers and residents to collaborate on everything from crime prevention to neighborhood cleanup. The building makeovers are also designed to lift the harsh image of some police, particularly in areas where relations between the community and law enforcement have long been strained.

The LAPD, whose well -publicized community clashes turned incendiary with the videotaped 1991 Rodney King beating, is among the biggest builders with seven new stations and a new headquarters facility under construction. The LAPD is hoping to improve its reputation after a string of other incidents, including the so-called Rampart Division scandal, which revealed in 1999 that officers had framed suspects and covered up unjustified shootings and beatings.

A model of L.A.'s West Valley police station, whose design and landscaped plaza make it more inviting than the structure it will replace.

To some degree, the new buildings don't look much like police stations at all. Gone are the small windows located high up off the ground, which were designed to deter drive-by shootings but made the buildings look l ike bunkers. The second-generation stations also typically offer more areas that are open to the public, such as cafeterias where officers and civilians can eat together, as well as bigger lobbies where people can comfortably sit. Some even have community rooms where officers can hold meetings and training sessions and that are available to local groups free of charge. Bigger windows are another common feature in the updated stations, giving the buildings a more calming, transparent appearance.

The projects , funded mainly by local taxpayer dollars, also pose some significant design challenges. For example, rather than using shatterproof glass, which is expensive and changes color over time, WWCOT's designers opted for big windows that are more than 5 feet t a ll and installed them at "standing height" to prevent someone from shooting through the glass. To create courtyard areas that feel warm and inviting, while also deterring terrorists and other vandals, Mr. Widom's team designed clever barricades for the front of the stations by plopping decorative lights atop concrete blocks.

Elsewhere, experiments with open station houses have been successful enough to warrant new ones. The public spaces at the Boston Police Department's headquarters, opened in 1997, have " broken down a lot of barriers" between the officers and their constituents, says Mark Lynch, the department's director of facilities management. The station has a community room, a public cafeteria and a child-care facility.

Such amenities have gotten the public "to interact with police officers on a social level rather than on an emergency level," says Mr. Lynch. Now the department plans to put ATMs in the three new stations that are in the works, he says, in an attempt to engage people in "a nonthreatening way."

The Chicago Police Department's 16th District station, located on the southwest side of the Chicago Loop, was designed to appear more transparent, and therefore less ominous, than the old facility.

Chicago-based architecture firm OWP/P Inc. designed a replacement police station in 1998 for the city of Chicago, which is being used as the prototype for all new stations. "The policemen wanted something very transparent, something that says, 'We don't have much to hide and we're not afraid of the bad guys,' which had to be balanced with the need to have something solid because there's always a paranoia that they're a target" for attacks, says Trung Le, an OWP/P principal.

The design included a large community room, glass walls in the front entrance and a bigger l obby to provide a place for visitors to hang out or to give "a homeless person, who doesn't have a place to stay, a spot in the front lobby during 30-degree below" weather, says Mr. Le. Since then, six police stations have been built using that model, and four more are under construction.

Herbert B. Roth, whose Denver-based firm, Roth & Sheppard Architects, has designed stations for several departments in addition to the LAPD, says community policing is also having an impact on the layout and design of area s that are limited to officers and staff. Many departments want officers to spend very little time in the station on administrative tasks, such as writing reports or booking evidence. That typically means grouping all such functions together like a row of bank tellers and in close proximity to the patrol parking lot.

Departments are also including more parking at their new facilities to accommodate both patrol cars and personal vehicles, particularly during shift changes. Inadequate parking at police stations can leave little room for residents, and gives the impression that officers, who are rarely ticketed for parking illegally, are above the law. Freeing up parking on the street "does wonders in the community," says the LAPD's Ms. Sanchez-Owens.

Yet some community leaders view the new police outposts with a measure of skepticism. "I think creating community rooms, if people use them, will help establish more trust and less fear" of the police among residents, says Monsignor David O'Connell, who i s the pastor of two Catholic churches in south Los Angeles, "but I wish they would put more money and resources into the human interaction between the police and the community."

Monsignor O'Connell is a co-chair of One L.A., a coalition of religious and community groups that has been organizing meetings between residents and police officers in peoples' homes, rather than police stations, because at the so-called house meetings, residents "become a lot more assertive and creative and take a lot more ownership of the meeting," he says. "They have the confidence that they don't have when they go to a police station."

Others say that even where the community does use the police station, young people still avoid it. But for Synergy Charter Academy in south Los Angeles, the local police station's community room, located less than a block from the school, "has been a lifesaver," says Meg Palisoc, a co-founder and co-director of Synergy.

The charter school, which opened in August, doesn't have a large meeting room and parents are happy to meet in the police station. Visiting the station, she adds, helps families feel "more comfortable" with police officers, Ms. Palisoc says.

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