Unfair Tax

Los Angeles City Councilman Robert Farrell wants residents of South-Central Los Angeles to pay for more police in their neighborhoods. His goal--more protection--is admirable, but a special tax for one district is poor public policy.

Voters within a 43-square-mile area will be asked to approve the property tax on June 2. The average homeowner would pay $11.41 per month, and commercial and industrial property owners would pay more, to finance 300 additional officers over three years to serve the half-million people in the district. We urge a No vote.

All of Los Angeles needs more police, and nowhere is the need greater than in the South Central section. The 7,100-member department serves 3 million residents in diverse neighborhoods with diverse needs.

No citizen should live with the danger or the fear of violent crime--the murders, the rapes, the robberies, the drug traffic, the gang terror--at the levels that exist in South-Central Los Angeles. But crime isn’t just one community’s concern; it is everyone’s problem. And Mayor Tom Bradley and the City Council must keep searching for money to expand the force citywide.

A district tax would penalize residents of South-Central Los Angeles and strain the resources of people who apparently would be not only willing but also anxious to pay for more protection. And they would do so with no help from affluent areas in which residents could easily afford to pay to expand the force. In those affluent areas, residents could easily use a special tax to provide more police officers, more street cleaners or anything else that money could buy.

Residents of South-Central Los Angeles have campaigned for more police for years through the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, the South-Central Organizing Committee and the Merchants for Community Improvement. They have challenged the fairness of the deployment formula, the method by which officers are assigned, and that formula is finally under study. A new formula may put a few more officers in the area, but it won’t enlarge the force.

Farrell’s special tax shows just how desperate people in high-crime areas are for more police officers. He deserves credit for trying to come up with a realistic way to pay for more police, but his plan should be rejected, and city government must start an aggressive campaign to raise money for more police everywhere that they are needed.