Gates Asks Voters to Add 1,000 to LAPD

Police Chief Daryl F. Gates on Tuesday asked conservative Los Angeles voters for their support of a property tax increase on next Tuesday’s ballot for a boost of 1,000 officers in the 7,000-officer Los Angeles Police Department.

“To my conservative taxpaying friends, you cannot get a bigger bargain than this,” Gates said as he sat next to Mayor Tom Bradley at a news conference at the Greater Los Angeles Press Club.

It was an unusual show of harmony between the two men. Gates and Bradley have often criticized each other and Gates has considered running against Bradley in the past.

Friendly Attitude

But none of that was evident Tuesday. Instead, Gates was friendly toward the mayor, declining, in response to questions, to attack Bradley’s veto of a council move to shift general fund revenue to help finance an increase of 100 officers in the department. Gates said, “I would like more police officers. The mayor indicated (the council’s proposal for more police) was not fully funded. He’s correct.”

Gates said that even with the veto, it was the “best budget I have had for several years.”

That appeared to support Bradley’s contention that Proposition 1 is needed because there was not enough money in the budget to hire more police officers. “We have squeezed and squeezed and squeezed,” Gates said.

Bradley said that “100 officers would not provide much more security--1,000 will.”

Gates’ words to conservatives may help a difficult campaign for the tax increase, Proposition 1.

Paul Shay, executive vice president of the Los Angeles Taxpayers Assn., an opponent, said the chief’s statement is “not helpful” to the campaign to defeat the measure.

“I think he was lukewarm but now he is swinging around because it is the only show in town,” Shay said.

Tax Formula

The measure would authorize property tax increases over five years, reaching a maximum of 32 cents per 100 square feet of land area and $2.36 per 100 square feet of buildings and other improvements. Typical rate increases would vary from $32 for the owner of an 800-square-foot house on a 4,000-square-foot lot to $110 for a 3,000-square-foot house on a 12,000-square-foot lot.

It would authorize the hiring of 200 officers a year for the next five years.

Backers concede that they will have a hard time winning because the tax hike requires a two-thirds vote. But Gates could help them in a key area where he is personally popular and where the tax proposal, according to a Los Angeles Times Poll in March, is falling short of the two-thirds majority. That is the San Fernando Valley, a fairly conservative section of the city where opposition is centered around several homeowner groups.

The poll showed that 57% of those polled in the Valley approved of the way Gates was doing his job. That rating was highest in the city, closely followed by 56% in a central city area including Hollywood and mid-Wilshire.

The tax increase, however, received only a 49% to 34% approval among Valley poll respondents. It did just as poorly in other parts of the city, except in the central section where it reached 54% approval, still below the two-thirds mark.

In another Proposition 1 action Tuesday, Raymond L. Johnson Jr., president of the 15,000-member Los Angeles chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, supported the measure.

Johnson’s support was important because of reluctance of some community leaders in predominantly black South-Central Los Angeles to back Proposition 1. That reluctance comes from a feeling that police deployment must be changed--to put more officers in the South-Central area--before the force is increased.

Johnson said that an independent study of police deployment will not be completed until after election day.

“The NAACP is confident the commission will recommend more officers in South-Central,” he said, adding that if voters wait until the report comes out, Proposition 1 will have lost “and it will be too late to request more officers.”