CommentsPLANNING 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, Angelenos 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 training.
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 from 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 lines up with these 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.
Woodie Allen in his film, Zelig.
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 up-zoning 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 dramatic changes in local and nationwide policing, City Hall is fully culpable for LA’s growing gaps in wealth and income. The 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 hundreds to 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 and evict 300 hard-core Occupiers from City Hall’s grounds. It is doubtful that a similar show of LAPD force would work in 2020.
Since many mass movements 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 many mass movements emerging in the United States grow in numbers, organizing skills, and their 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 CityWatch. 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 [email protected] or via Twitter to @DickPlatkin.)Prepped for CutyWatch by Linda Abrams
