Erroll G. Southers sees a lot of familiar faces as president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the oversight board for one of the nation’s largest police agencies.
In meetings with top brass and other department leaders, Southers finds himself surrounded by his former students at the USC Price School of Public Policy.
“You see this big smile on my face because I’m like a proud dad,” said Southers, Professor of the Practice in National and Homeland Security. “I see my former students here, and they don’t know whether they should call me commissioner or professor.”
To Southers, the alumni at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) are walking examples of how well the USC Price School prepares public safety professionals, who have been promoted to leadership positions at LAPD and other agencies across the country. Their roles at LAPD also reflect the diverse career opportunities for public safety that go well beyond patrolling neighborhoods and responding to emergency calls.
“Maybe 90% of police work is discretionary decision making,” Southers said. “If we have people that understand policy and understand how to do research – understand the importance of quantitative information and evidence-based information – they become better managers and leaders in our departments.”
The USC Price School alums are leading LAPD through a challenging moment as police grapple with issues ranging from violent extremism to officer shortages to a lack of trust between police and communities. Public safety leaders are also rethinking how police work is done given the rising need for social services and mental healthcare.
“We’re on the cusp of modern policing so I think right now is a challenging time, but it’s also a very exciting time,” said Captain Kelly Muniz, a USC Price School alum. “We’re laying the groundwork for what the next 10 and 15 years of policing is going to look like.”
New Challenges
Muniz, a 25-year veteran of LAPD, is now the agency’s head of communications. She manages a team of 27 people who mimic a newsroom, with staffers in charge of video editing, news media requests and social media updates. Last year, her department issued around 400 press releases, organized roughly two dozen news conferences and fielded countless calls and emails from reporters covering crime in the nation’s second-largest city.
Muniz, who studied in the USC Price School’s Executive Master of Leadership program, graduating in 2019, is tasked with adapting to a rapidly changing media landscape. Her team must stay on top of an increasing volume of information that spreads quickly across the internet, especially on social media. There is also a higher demand for disseminating video of police encounters with the public, which requires blurring, editing, and transcribing.
“Social media is all the time,” Muniz said. “That’s a change in media, even in the last few years, where information is getting pushed out on the social media channels, even by your major outlets, more so than on television.”
When managing her team of press release writers, video editors and website managers, she often thinks of what she learned at the USC Price School. Her favorite lesson likened collaborative leadership to a jazz band composed of trumpet players, pianists and other musicians with diverse but equally important talents.
“We talked about leadership with the jazz band and how everybody gets a place to shine, that everybody’s a leader,” Muniz said. “They take their turn, they boldly take the stage and show what they are capable of and their talent, but no one instrument necessarily outshines the other. They are respectful of each other.”
Replenishing the Ranks
Another new challenge in law enforcement is police recruitment. Agencies like LAPD have had their ranks depleted since 2020. LAPD’s office count fell from roughly 10,000 in 2020 to about 8,800 today.
It’s Captain Robin Petillo’s job to replenish the ranks.
“We’re on the cusp of modern policing so I think right now is a challenging time, but it’s also a very exciting time.”
Captain Kelly Muniz, a USC Price School alum.
“Citizens absolutely deserve the very best from police, but when you have a workforce that’s overburdened and under deployed, you’re just not going to always have the very best,” the 2019 USC Price School grad said, noting that staff constraints can make officers more fatigued or reduce resources for some investigative units.
To boost recruitment, Petillo has focused on digital marketing, believing it is a more cost-effective way to reach a new generation of prospective officers.
“People are not getting their information from physical newspapers or a magazine or maybe even a billboard. What matters is what we’ll see on this,” Petillo said, pointing to her smartphone. “And the appetite has changed. You have to give people short bits of information.”
Petillo, a 26-year veteran who earned an Executive Master of Leadership, has researched new ways to recruit officers and sold those ideas to upper management – skills she gained at the USC Price School.
“Through my professors and just the different experiences I had, Price prepared me for what was to come. I had no idea that we would see such a leadership challenge like in 2020,” Petillo said. “I made captain in 2021 and I really credit USC for that because the whole program gave me the confidence to be able to put myself out there.”
