An interview with Chief Bill Scott, Metro’s new Chief of Police and Emergency Management 

William “Bill” Scott was hired in early May as Metro’s first Chief of Police and Emergency Management. 

Chief Scott will be leading and building the agency’s new Department of Public Safety that will unify Metro’s care-based public safety work under one organizational structure. He will oversee the operations of the department, including the creation of new training standards, deployment strategies, the selection of technology systems and uniform designs, among other work. 

The Metro Department of Public Safety (DPS) will eventually replace Metro’s long-time reliance on contracting with law enforcement agencies to respond to crime and help patrol our system. The new department will be charged with improving public safety on a day-to-day basis, as well as enhancing security coordination for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, among other large events.

A decades-long resident of the Los Angeles area, Chief Scott has worked 35-plus years in law enforcement. Prior to joining Metro, Scott was Chief of Police in San Francisco between 2017 and 2025 and previously served at a variety of senior roles with the LAPD. 

We sat down with Chief Scott in mid-August to discuss how he was settling into the new job. 

From the perspective of someone who has spent a career in law enforcement, what are you seeing on our system? Is it about what you expected based on what you heard?

I was here in the Los Angeles area for almost 30 years before I left to go to San Francisco. So, it’s not like I was unfamiliar with the Metro system. I know that eight-and-a-half years is a long time to be away, but I was still visiting, and I still have family and friends here. I was seeing and hearing things about the Metro system and I was able to put that news in context. 

I did a lot of research in preparation for applying for the position that I now hold and that allowed me to dig into the recent trends and responses happening here over the past few years.

There were no surprises. I think there are some really good things happening here in terms of public safety. There are also some challenges. But no real surprises.

Was it similar at all to what you were seeing up in the Bay Area? 

The Bay Area has a very robust transit system and people probably depend on it even more up there even though the geography and the politics are a bit different. San Francisco was a major hub for the BART system — which operates in four counties — and much of that system flows into San Francisco. I also had the good fortune of being in charge of public safety for the San Francisco Muni system (Muni). 

Muni isn’t as big as Metro, but we had challenges in the center of the city with homelessness, untreated mental illness, substance abuse — not unlike the challenges in most major cities these days. So, I learned what is required to move the needle in a positive direction on those issues. 

Is it rare to have different public safety response teams under one roof? 

Usually, the police work with multiple city and/or county agencies that deal with issues such as the unhoused, drug addiction, poverty, etcetera that were not operating under a single command. In San Francisco, those departments were mostly under the city’s government. As police chief, I had to bring department heads together. 

I didn’t have the authority to tell the departments how to deploy and use their personnel. It was collaborative — I think the model worked as well as it could. 

But to put all these different responses under one department here is something very different. We’ll have the ability to collaborate the way we need to, and we’ll have more control over the resources we need.  Including how they are deployed, when they are deployed, 

One of the lessons from your career seems to be that it’s no longer about straight-up policing?

It needs to be multiple disciplines to make things truly better and thus make things safer. So many of the issues that we face here — Metro and big cities in general — intersect. You can’t work in a silo. 

Yes, there are certain things that are criminal — and there are police departments to handle that. But now there are many other things that are more medical in nature, and we need to have people with that expertise — whether it’s street medicine teams, interventionists, or clinicians who can go and meet people where they are. 

Based on what you’ve seen so far, what do you think is working well? What are some of the challenges or things maybe not working quite as well? 

The multi-layered approach that we need has already started at Metro and I think it’s working well. This includes our security and other staff. We also have 300-plus Metro Ambassadors providing everything from customer service, wayfinding, to being a friendly face, to saving lives.

The majority of our issues are quality of life issues. We call them crimes against society and they’re the misdemeanor type of crimes that have to be addressed. In many instances, we have Metro’s Transit Security Officers who are able to be proactive in dealing with those. This isn’t necessarily something you always need a police officer to do. 

There are crimes that increase in severity. But that’s a very small percentage of what we have to deal with every day. There will be sworn officers as part of our Department of Public Safety who can make felony arrests and follow up with search warrants and do special operations, monitor for illicit activity and all other types of actions when it’s necessary.

But I want to emphasize the care-based approach. We need to have people available to de-escalate situations and resolve issues before anybody with a police uniform has to be involved. This is really important. Because the uniform itself can be an escalation factor. If you can solve problems and handle incidents without a uniform, that’s ideal. 

What are some of the other challenges that you’ve seen so far? 

The size and the geography of the area Metro serves. This is a very spread-out place with issues that are intertwined and complex. I always kind of chuckle when I hear people spout out simplistic answers to solving these problems — we should just arrest everybody. That doesn’t work. These aren’t easy problems.

For example, you may have a person who needs help — who is maybe unhoused, maybe there’s untreated mental illness and in some cases there’s substance abuse or addiction. Sometimes all that gets all rolled up into one behavior. We have to deal with that and be in a position to put the right resources to the right problem. If you’re not set up to do that, these are hard issues.

Going back to the size of L.A. County and our system — you have to understand the dynamics of whatever community we’re in — what works, what doesn’t, what the public will accept. All while holding the line on the high standard of what our department is about. That means treating people with respect and dignity, even on their worst day.

How similar or different will our transit safety department be compared to a traditional police department? 

It will be very different because we are taking a holistic care-based approach to creating our safety ecosystem. I don’t know of many other cities who have put all the public safety work under one roof. Some departments may have one or two components. Bellevue in Washington (State) has a similar model. 

I think this model will show that this is the way to go. You need all these components to address these complex issues. It is what drew me here — the ability to put this all together is exciting. I’ve been around this profession for many years and in my career and I’ve never seen anything like it.

We have some riders who say they want more, visible law enforcement. We have other riders who say the opposite. How do you balance that?

You have to listen to the people you serve. Then there is the process of finding common ground. 

What you cannot do: is police in an improper way that causes a public backlash. Because then you end up spending a lot of time and energy dealing with those issues. 

Most of the time you can find common ground. I think most people really do want a safe environment in their community and transit system. And that sometimes means a uniformed police presence. 

Sometimes we can also solve a problem without a uniformed presence. That’s why I always say, let’s work our way up to needing a uniformed presence.

In the aftermath of George Floyd, there was a lot of distrust and anger toward policing. As police we needed to sit down, let people voice their frustrations and make sure that people knew we were actually listening. That has been a pretty successful formula for me during my career. You can’t solve everything that way, but it goes a long way. 

You also have to be honest with people about what you can and cannot deliver. 

As part of the new department, Metro will need to hire a lot of staff with different skills, including several hundred sworn officers. Many police departments around the country are also hiring and having challenges. How does Metro get past that?

It’s a challenge. But here’s what encourages me. I just left San Francisco where we in the last year had success recruiting. 

This was after everything that happened in 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. Recruitment was tough after that. People were just walking away from the profession. Some retired early. 

The San Francisco Police Academy had room for a maximum class of 55. About two years ago, we were graduating classes of nine or 10. But in the last three classes we had in 2024, we were at 55. 

A couple of things happened. The city and the Police Officer Association agreed on a new and significant financial package that made San Francisco one of the higher paid departments in the state. They put in retention incentives and things of that nature to keep the officers who were already there. 

We couldn’t pay the kind of signing bonuses that were available in Alameda County [across San Francisco Bay] and elsewhere. But we worked hard on a kind of rebranding the department to make sure that people understood the job, what they were getting themselves into and that there was an environment that actually was supportive. We got better equipment. Those were things we were able to go out and market to make it appealing to work in San Francisco.

Now, starting a new department at Metro — we probably won’t be the highest in terms of pay. We definitely will not be the lowest. We’ll be competitive. This is a really good organization to work for — we need to take advantage of that and let recruits know that we’re a new department where a positive culture will be set and maintained. All that will work in our favor.

We have an aggressive timeline. We want to have 400-plus sworn officers by 2028. That means 150 recruits per year on average. We’ll need to work to get recruits through training — and to make sure we don’t lose them once they start. 

In terms of training, are you planning on implementing something new? 

I don’t know if I’ll call it new. But I do think it’s a break from the traditional training of most police departments. 

We’ll have a block of training for our new officers that is very specific to policing our system, which is really important. We want officers to know the system and what is expected of them. 

Most police departments — you do your basic academy, you go to your field training, and then you’re out there learning how to be an officer. The academies don’t necessarily have training modules specifically focused on transit policing — skills such as policing on buses and trains, policing in subways platforms and transit platforms, and doing everything possible to minimize transit service disruptions when conducting police activity on the transit system. 

We also will train officers from the very beginning of their transit policing careers to work with empathy with the diverse populations we serve on our transit system and work collaboratively with care-based providers working within the DPS public safety ecosystem.  That is something we’ll do post academy and prior to our recruits getting out on the system, but the training will be ongoing throughout their careers. 

There are plenty of public sector jobs in law enforcement and private sector jobs in the security fields. Why did you decide to stay in the public sector?

On a personal note, it got me back home. I enjoyed my time in the Bay Area, but L.A is my home. I have family here. 

It’s also the opportunity of a lifetime. 

I don’t say this to be arrogant, but I think I was successful in San Francisco. Things were not in a good place when I got there. There was a series of officer involved shootings that did not meet the public’s approval. I was brought there to implement a very aggressive reform initiative. 

The chief who preceded me had started down the reform path. It took us eight years to accomplish all the reforms needed. But we did it. 

A recruiter reached out to me and told me about this opportunity at Metro. The more I learned about it, the more exciting it was. In this profession, you don’t get many — or any — opportunities to literally start a new police department, particularly of this size. 

This is not an ego driven thing. It’s definitely going to be a challenge, but I think I can do some good and apply lessons I’ve learned throughout my career. 

Has there been any particular moment in your career that you return to — something that keeps you anchored or motivated? 

One thing that I always go back to happened in my days here in L.A.  I was a homicide detective working in the Wilshire Division. One Saturday morning, about 10 a.m., a 15-year-old young man lost his life. He was at a bus stop to go bowling with his high school classmates. A car full of gang members mistook him for a gang member and just gunned him down. Senseless. 

This was the mid-90s. It was a busy time. L.A. had 800 homicides the previous year [in 2024, the city of L.A. had 268 homicides]. I just had another homicide on the same corner about a week prior. 

After that first homicide, part of the job was to knock on doors and look for witnesses. Canvassing. I knock on this one door, this woman answers and she’s angry at the sight of a police officer. I said “M’am somebody just lost their life down the block and I’m just seeing if you heard or saw anything.” She didn’t have anything nice to say. Slammed the door in my face. 

One week later. The second homicide happens. We figured out who the victim was, where he lived and went to his house. And it was the same house where this woman lived. So, I had to make the notification that her son had been killed. 

I told her, “Despite what you think of the police department, or me, I’m going to do everything I can to catch who killed your son.” 

It was a difficult case. But my partner and I solved it. We eventually arrested two of the people who were in the car. They were both convicted and are serving life in prison without parole. After all was said and done, the woman and her husband wrote a letter to the LAPD chief saying how we had restored their faith in the police. I still get choked up thinking about that. 

It showed me that sometimes things can be hard. Maybe they’re not going well. But if you stick with it, you can get the job done and make a difference.