. . . but Build the Academy Elsewhere

The Los Angeles Police Department is once again trying to bully its way around Elysian Park. Proposition 2, the Police Facilities Bond Measure, is so poorly worded that most voters will probably not realize that it includes funds for a new police academy. But it does.

Although it is not spelled out, the LAPD has made it known that it has earmarked $40 million of the $176-million bond issue for a new academy, that constructing the academy is the LAPD’s top priority and that Elysian Park is the preferred site. The LAPD has claimed that it has not determined whether it will rebuild on the current police academy site in Elysian Park or elsewhere, but it has also admitted that the $40-million figure does not include money for land acquisition, should that be necessary.

As a group that has been fighting the expansion of the police academy in Elysian Park for 22 years, the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park is well aware that the academy is overcrowded and in need of repair. We do not question that new training facilities are needed. We also know that training facilities in Elysian Park are disruptive to, and incompatible with, recreational park use and that alternative and better-suited sites, especially one at Los Angeles Southwest Community College, are available. The Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club supports our position on this matter.

Our position is also supported by a 1972 study by the city’s chief administrative officer. That extensive 59-page report concluded, first, that the “Elysian Park site is now and will always be inadequate for the high quality and comprehensive training required for the Los Angeles Police Department.” It further concluded that increased public use of the parkland surrounding the academy site was inevitable and that police activity there “will result in constant irritation and is incompatible use of public land.”

Those observations remain true in 1989. The plans for the police academy call for a threefold increase in the occupant capacity, with more than 224,000 square feet of buildings. The plans also call for multi-story parking garages that would accommodate more than 1,000 cars to replace the surface parking area. Clearly, this scale of construction and the activity that goes with it do not belong in a park. This is especially true, given how little parkland Los Angeles has in relation to its population.

The police assure us that the new expanded police academy would not take more parkland, but if that is the case why is there no language to that effect in the proposal? Even if the police stay within the 21 acres that are now controlled by the Board of Public Works, their presence in such an increased capacity would have a drastic negative impact on Elysian Park.

The Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park has raised these and other issues with both the LAPD and the City Council subcommittees that reviewed the proposition before the council’s vote to put it on Tuesday’s ballot. However, both our arguments and our request to separate the police academy funding from the rest of Proposition 2 fell on deaf ears.

The construction and expansion of a police academy, whether at its current site or elsewhere, is too important an issue to be hidden in such an all-encompassing and vaguely worded bond issue. It is unfair to ask the public to vote for new facilities for their neighborhoods at the possible expense of the loss of their park. The voters should let the LAPD and the City Council know that they consider parkland a valuable asset by voting no on Proposition 2.