CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : L.A. Turns Its Back on Its People

There is something strangely disquieting about government in Los Angeles, a certain detachment, an unresponsiveness, a paternalism that says we know better than you, and that no matter what you--the grass-roots folks out there, or you with your high-minded editorials--think or say, things will proceed as they always have and business will be as usual.

Thus we continue to have a police chief who thinks it perfectly acceptable for his officers to club down striking Century City janitors like it was the West Virginia coal fields in 1916--and to do so with the absolute confidence that few in this “liberal” city will dare to as much as criticize him.

And thus we have a county sheriff whose deputies have been so violent over the last three years that more than $8.5 million in excessive force awards and settlements have had to be paid to their victims. Nonetheless, the sheriff runs for reelection virtually unopposed.

And most especially, we have a County Board of Supervisors who, upon being found guilty by a federal judge of deliberately disfranchising millions of Latinos, arrogantly go on to appeal the decision, spending millions of dollars in attorneys’ fees in the process, while presenting us at the same time with a human-services budget right out of Dickens.

It is as if public servants of Los Angeles somehow feel they are accountable to no one but themselves and the rich, powerful interests who fund them and their campaigns and a narrow, white middle-class “Leave It To Beaver” electorate who in the minds of these officials solely constitute the people . The impoverished, the gay, the homeless, the dependent child, our hordes of desperate Latino immigrants, our black kids, the working poor doing mean jobs for subsistence pay, the addict, the alcoholic, the AIDS victim, the helpless and hopeless--all seem to exist to those who rule us as an annoying inconvenience, as despised objects of failure in a society where private gain is all and public responsibility a subversive thought--or, more typically, as yet another excuse for more cops, more holding pens and more high-tech instruments of repression to keep those who make us uncomfortable out of sight and under control.

Since fiscal 1982-83, for example, the budget for the Sheriff’s Department has increased from $312 million to a proposed $704 million, while mental health, medical care and aid to the poor and indigent have been contemptuously dismissed. These programs, dealing with short-term individual suffering and long-term societal costs, have either been slashed, kept static or increased only grudgingly, and then usually by court order.

Take, for example, the county’s allocation for mental health. Over the same period that the sheriff’s budget has risen so dramatically and the county’s general fund and property tax revenues have increased by 84% and 112% respectively, money for mental health has actually gone down, from $33 million to a proposed $29 million. That’s $4 million less for those growing numbers of grime-encrusted souls outside the cappuccino shops of our local strip malls that we either pretend not to see or try not to touch as we quickly slip them a buck.

Some of those growing numbers are people who, if they’re lucky, get a total of $312 a month for food and housing from the county. They will get no increase in their allocation this year, nor did they last year. And chances are that those among them with severe mental problems will fare even worse. For under the board’s new budget proposal, two more mental health clinics are slated to be shut down, joining nine closed in three years. The closings will come as the board is simultaneously allocating $73 million for its version of low-income housing--the county’s $552-million jail construction program.

And if the board has its way, the clinics will not be all that’s shut down. For last year the board cut its share of county health-care funds by $30 million, replacing it with Proposition 99 cigarette tax money and spending it, according to the State Department of Health Services, before authorized. Money from Proposition 99, according to the initiative, can only be used to supplement, not replace, existing health-care funds. Consequently, the state says it will hold back $44 million in tobacco tax money due the county this year unless the board provides the $30 million that it is now said to owe. Meanwhile, both the state Assembly Finance Committee and the governor are threatening additional huge cuts in health care funding throughout the state. As a result, the board will hold a hearing next Tuesday to consider reducing an already underfunded county health care system by an astounding $131 million.

The board’s proposed cuts are instructive. The supervisors, for example, plan to close the only children’s hospital in the county system--the Pediatric Pavilion at County-USC Medical Center, eliminate all pediatric services from Martin Luther King Hospital, drastically reduce outpatient services throughout the county and shut down 41 public health centers.

But the low priority the board places on the welfare of poor kids goes beyond health care. Over the past year the county’s Department of Children’s Services has had to pay out more than $18 million in civil suits and settlements because of its failure to adequately supervise abused and neglected children under its protection. Allegations of outrages in local foster homes recently became so bad that the county was forced to give up its right to license the homes, and the state seized county foster-care records. Yet after hearings in Sacramento several weeks ago, replete with accounts of sexual molestation, beatings and other horrors, Robert Chaffee, the director of children’s care services, told The Times that “The impression all this would give is that something is radically wrong, but my comment would be, ‘no, nothing is radically wrong.’ ”

“I don’t know why the board isn’t asking Chaffee some hard questions and getting more involved,” Yolanda Vera, a Legal Aid attorney who has brought suit against Children’s Services, said recently. “I just don’t get it.” Neither do I.