Votes Against Placing Measure on Ballot : Bernson Says Valley Opposes Police Tax

West Valley Councilman Hal Bernson, who Tuesday cast one of three votes against placing a proposed police tax on the city ballot, predicts the majority of San Fernando Valley voters will oppose the measure unless assurances are made to guarantee the area its share of additional officers.

“This is a joke,” Bernson said. “The whole thing is a fraud on the people of Los Angeles. You know it won’t pass. The people in the Valley won’t vote for it unless they’re assured they’ll get officers in their communities.”

Valley residents have been among the most vocal opponents of recent moves to take small numbers of officers from all Los Angeles Police Department divisions to form a task force in South Los Angeles.

Bernson joined Mid-Valley Councilman Ernani Bernardi and Wilshire District Councilman and mayoral candidate John Ferraro in casting the only votes on the 15-member council against putting the measure on the June ballot.

The measure would impose a $5-a-month tax on the average home to pay for 1,000 additional officers over a five-year period. It will require approval by two-thirds of the voters.

East Valley Councilman Howard Finn, who voted to place the measure on the ballot, also expressed doubts about its chances in his district, which contains some of the Valley’s highest crime areas. He noted that an unsuccessful 1981 city police tax proposal did worse in the Valley than in the city as a whole because Valley voters “didn’t want to pay for police going somewhere else.”

Deployment Fairness Study

Assistant Police Chief Barry Wade said that every police station in the city would receive at least 39 additional officers under the plan. But he added that some areas could receive more than others depending on the outcome of a department study examining the fairness of current deployment methods.

Bernson, a strong Police Department supporter who is often asked by the department to push its programs and viewpoints through the council, contended his colleagues were being unrealistic by supporting a tax that is doomed to defeat.

“If we really want to be sincere, we could freeze the budget for a couple of years and take the increase in revenue and put that into officers . . . but the truth of the matter is we’re not willing to take the heat from the employee unions” that would receive no pay raises, he said.

Bernardi also contended the council could find enough waste in the nearly $2-billion budget to come up with the $28 million necessary to hire 1,000 police.

Introducing an entirely different argument against the police tax, Bernardi questioned whether hiring additional officers would have an impact on crime.

“What happens if, after we add LAPD officers and they increase arrests, the criminals still are put back out on the street,” he asked, by what Bernardi and other critics consider an underfunded and lax criminal justice system.