After Mayor Eric Garcetti feels our pain, what will permanently change at LA's City Hall?
After Mayor Eric Garcetti feels our pain, what will permanently change at LA's City Hall?
By Dick
Platkin*
Planning
Watch: Like Woodie Allen’s imaginary
character, Zelig, who
could change his physical appearance to ingratiate himself to those around him,
Eric Garcetti skillfully changes his political exterior to placate those who contest
his policies. Therefore, Angelinos
wonder what will happen when the Mayor is done feeling our pain, telling us he hopes
we can all get along, and taking a knee with Black Lives Matter demonstrators (i.e.,
a counter-insurgency technique employed by the United
States military in Iraq and Afghanistan)? Will anything permanently change in the City
of LA’s budget, ordinances and regulations, and departmental work programs?
The answer is time will tell, but clearly the Mayor is on the hot seat. On one hand, he remains accountable to his major
political and campaign backers, especially real estate interests. They would only support symbolic gestures to deflect
repeated calls to defund
the LAPD and adopt the alternative People’s
Budget. On the other hand, he faces hundreds
of thousands Angelenos who have participated or supported daily demonstrations
over the past two weeks protesting the extrajudicial execution of George Floyd
by the Minneapolis Police Department. These
demonstrators want qualitative changes to policing in Los Angeles, beginning
with a reduction of the LAPD’s 54 percent share of the City’s discretionary
budget. In the words of the LA Times,
the demonstrators “argue that
the department is too big, too militaristic and too ever-present in communities
of color.”
The Mayor’s about face, quickly supported by a City Council that previously
gave the LAPD everything it wanted, was to wriggle out of this tightening vice
with a proposed $150 million reduction in LAPD funding, about 5 percent of its
budget. According to ABC7, other likely
LAPD reforms include:
· Moratorium
on adding names to a statewide gang database.
· Independent
prosecutor to oversee police misconduct charges.
· De-escalation
and crowd control training.
· Bias
identification classes.
While cautious baby steps, these proposals are far more limited than the
detailed
police defunding proposals offered by hundreds of public testifiers at
Tuesday’s City Council Budget hearings. Similar
to the People’s Budget, this public testimony proposed that social workers and
mental health professionals, not the LAPD, become the City’s first responders
to calls about acute mental illness, family disputes, homeless encampments, and
similar emergencies.
Eric
Garcetti’s about face: Until last week Eric Garcetti walked in the
shoes of his mayoral predecessors, Richard Riordan, James Hahn, and Antonio
Villaraigosa, all of whom successfully expanded the hiring and budgets of the
LAPD. Since the 1992 Rodney King civil
disturbances this was a winning political formula, despite a Federal consent
decree over LAPD brutality and corruption, plus persistent calls to rein in
LAPD spying and surveillance.
But this ended two weeks ago with enormous, politically focused, daily,
multi-racial demonstrations throughout the entire Los Angeles region. Furthermore, the old political ploys to
contain public outrage no longer worked.
- The outside agitator claim.
This claim resurrects every time there are large public demonstrations. Donald Trump blamed Antifa, a
loosely organized movement that confronts neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and
similar white-supremacist groups when they hold threatening public events. In small cities, like Klamath Falls, Oregon, baseless
conspiracy theorists claimed that buses filled with Antifa members, funded by George
Soros, were on their way to attack white neighborhoods. In other places, like Minneapolis, Minnesota
Governor Tim Walz claimed, without evidence, that outside white supremacists
were the provocateurs. Other times,
though, local
police have been identified as the provocateurs.
- The riot/anarchy claim. The “thin
blue line,” consists of SWAT teams that began in Los Angeles after the 1965
Watts Rebellion, heavily militarized police departments resulting from
President Bill Clinton’s decision to furnish military equipment and training to
local police departments, and post-911 “anti-terrorist” Fusion Centers. They were supposed to protect the public from
violent criminals, drug gangs, and jihadists.
But repeated police murders and violence in the intervening decades
belie this rationale. In fact, the police
warrior mentality that resulted from the militarization of U.S. police
departments is partially responsible for the anti-police demonstrations
sweeping the United States and at least 40
foreign countries.
- The bad apple claim. Repeated
racist police practices supposedly result from a handful of prejudiced cops – the
few bad apples. They violently target
local Black residents, smearing the reputation of the overwhelming number of
good cops. Missing from this bad apple explanation
is the lattice of racist laws, arrests, prosecutions, convictions, sentencing, imprisonment,
and parole and probation. As carefully
documented in Michelle
Alexander’s best selling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness, systemic racism permeates the entire criminal justice
system.
As the Mayor wriggles his way through this maze, it will take
considerably more pressure to get him to move from cosmetic changes to the LAPD
to the People’s Budget, and eventually to oppose many other municipal ordinances
that fuel the current protests. He could
try a political head fake by resurrecting the forgotten recommendations of President
Obama’s Task
Force on 21st Century Policing. Or he might call for local implementation of
the House of Representatives Justice
in Policing Act of 2020, even if the Senate adopts the weaker Republican
alternative.
But, even if Mayor Garcetti supports other police reform proposals that
dodge defunding and restructuring, he should fully expect that Blacks Lives
Matter, their growing list of allies and supporters, and the multi-racial
crowds on LA’s streets, will not be easily hoodwinked. If his reforms keep the existing structure of
policing intact, the Mayor should gird himself for much more political heat.
Like Minneapolis, many
groups will call for replacing the LAPD with a Public Health and Safety
Department. Others will call for the
elimination of LAPD domestic surveillance and the return of military equipment
to the Pentagon. After that, proposals to shut down SWAT teams,
end police immunity from prosecution, and defy the Police Protective League
will absolutely put LA’s homegrown Zelig on the spot. He might even overhear such outrageous demands
that the LAPD be subject to the laws it enforces and that it join the FBI in
securing indictments
for widely reported City Hall graft and corruption.
While the Mayor wrestles with these non-cosmetic proposals to upend the LAPD,
others will press him to dismantle City Hall’s well-oiled inequality machine.
It operates through zoning waivers and land use ordinances. It is also buttressed by California-wide
zoning laws, including developer-sponsored upzoning
bills worming their way through the State legislature in Sacramento.
While LA’s extraordinary economic
inequality is only one factor responsible for the demonstrations
supporting fundamental changes in local and nationwide policing, City Hall is fully
culpable for LA’s growing gaps in wealth and income. Its gentrification process replaces older, lower-priced
housing and their residents with new, overpriced housing that only a small
percentage of the population can afford. It proceeds on many fronts, most of which are
based on up-zoning, a program that instantly increases the value of private
parcels and becomes an immediate windfall for flippers. At the same time, the displaced – disproportionately
minorities -- are forced to live in cars, overcrowded apartments, and sidewalks.
This is what the Mayor ought to stop championing and finally oppose:
· Complex
ordinances attached to Community Plan Updates that simultaneously up-zone and
up-plan thousands of privately owned parcels.
· Two
density bonus ordinances, SB 1818 and TOC Guidelines, that allow the size,
height, and density of private parcels to increase if developers make never-verified
pledges to include low income housing in new buildings.
· Transit
Neighborhood Plans that use the construction of mass transit as a pretext to
up-zone commercial and multi-residential parcels, often without any low-income
housing.
· Discretionary
actions, like zone changes and zone variances, that the City approves 90
percent of the time.
Can a
skillful politician thread this needle?
Can he or she simultaneously keep in the good graces of campaign donors,
the Democratic Party machine, the Police Protective League, and a politically
aroused public? In LA, Eric Garcetti’s predecessor,
Antonio Villaraigosa, fumbled this juggling act. On November 30, 2011, he ordered the LAPD to
violently arrest 300 hard-core Occupiers camped out on City Hall’s grounds. It is doubtful that a similar show of LAPD force
would work in 2020.
Since many mass movements often run out of steam or are co-opted by feel
good concessions, like police bias training, the fates may yet save Eric
Garcetti. If this happens in LA and
elsewhere, the Mayor could politically survive.
But, if the mass movement emerging in the United States grows in numbers,
organizing skills, and its critique, the municipal Zelig’s will be elbowed out
of the picture, leaving a political mess for their successors to clean up
through real, not symbolic, change.
*Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles city planner who
reports on local planning issues for CityWatchLA. He serves on the board of
United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA) and is co-chair of the new
Greater Fairfax Residents Association. Please email comments and corrections
to rhplatkin@gmail.com or via Twitter to @DickPlatkin.
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