Taxation to Stop Police ‘Brownouts’ : Initiative Would Give South-Central L.A. More Officers

The Los Angeles City Council is considering a proposal for a special initiative on the June ballot to increase the number of police officers in South-Central Los Angeles by levying a tax averaging about $140 for each property owner in the area. This proposal has merit, and should be given serious consideration.

South-Central residents, unlike voters in other parts of the city who rejected additional taxes for this purpose, have twice before voted in favor of higher taxes to pay for added police protection. Why shouldn’t a community be able to impose a tax on itself if it considers additional police resources to be a greater priority than do residents elsewhere in the city?

No one can argue that the South-Central area does not need additional law enforcement. Moreover, its residents have been frustrated in their repeated efforts to change the current police-deployment formula in order to receive additional officers from existing forces. This debate over perceived inequities in the Los Angeles Police Department’s deployment formula has been stalled in the City Council and the Police Commission for two years. And neither the council nor the commission has yet completed arrangements for an independent study to review the deployment formula, which has not been changed significantly in almost 40 years.

Until last year the formula placed excessive emphasis on such factors as the dollar value of stolen property, and failed entirely to weigh the serious problem of “brownouts”--periods when all of an area’s police officers are on call and unavailable for new emergencies.

The fundamental problem with the deployment formula is that it does not give enough weight to crimes against people, a pressing problem in the South-Central area, as opposed to property crimes, which are more likely to occur in the rest of the city. It also deploys the police not on the basis of the amount of crime in a specific area but according to the geographic size of the district.

South-Central residents have the highest violent-crime rate of any part of the city: homicides, assaults and gang-related incidents. Ideally, voters throughout Los Angeles, who know this to be the case, would approve a special tax so that more police could be deployed where there is the greatest need. In reality, however, voters in other parts of the city have remained indifferent to the South-Central area’s plight, refusing in 1981 and again in 1985 to share the tax burden in an effort to address the problem.

Those who are opposed to the proposed ballot initiative will no doubt argue that police protection, along with fire departments and public education, are guaranteed government services that must be shared by all. Others will argue that there is something very dangerous about providing police services on the basis of ability and willingness to pay. What is to stop wealthy neighborhoods from maintaining standing armies? Still others will argue that South-Central residents are the least able to pay an additional tax.

Yet just last week a tragedy took place that makes all these arguments meaningless. Ten-year-old Dominique Blackshear was killed in her Inglewood home by gunfire from a drive-by shooting. This type of senseless violence is typical of the peril that people in the South-Central area face daily. There are no barriers keeping armed, conscienceless hoodlums out of any area. But it is a fact that more police on the streets would deter drive-by shootings and other violent crimes. A $140-a-year tax is not too much to pay.

Perhaps all Angelenos will someday realize this and vote for a major increase in police protection for the South-Central area.

Special assessments in different parts of the city and county, and recognition of particular circumstances and needs, are not a new concept. Nor would this ballot initiative end the debate or, we hope, the eventual settlement of the issue of a more equitable police-deployment formula.

Indeed, aside from addressing the problem of getting more badly needed police officers on the streets of the South-Central area immediately, this proposed initiative may also succeed in focusing attention and energy on working out long-term solutions of problems of inadequate police resources throughout the city.

But the residents of the South-Central area--who have to live day in and day out with murder, assault, drugs and gangsterism--deserve an immediate opportunity to vote for this initiative. They have no one else to look to for help except themselves.