Bureaucrats Lost Touch With People

The real question to consider in examining Charter Amendment F is this: How much politics and how much professional administration make for good government?

At the beginning of the Progressive era in the late 19th Century, reformers advanced an answer that involved removing politics entirely from the process of administering government. Reacting against the rampant machine politics of their era, Progressives sought to achieve a scientifically professional approach to public administration. Professionalism, bureaucratic control, technical knowledge, standardization of procedures, merit-based selection and promotion and civil-service protections became the salient features of administrative work wherever the Progressives left their imprint, including here in California.

Now we see the problems inherent in the Progressive legacy. If public administrators such as police chiefs are viewed as professionals who demonstrate merit through the perfection of technical expertise and are largely insulated from control by politicians, the citizenry has no way to influence that part of the machinery of government that affects their lives most--the public bureaucracy.

Of course, the problem is more general. Our difficulty in calling the police chief to account and requiring him to demonstrate greater sensitivity to the diverse cultures and lifestyles of Los Angeles is but one highly charged example of the more general problem of a public administration trained to see itself as the custodian of technical expertise beyond the comprehension or rightful purview either of the citizenry or their elected representatives. Departments of transportation that attempt to build freeways heedlessly through communities and public school systems that view concerned parents as problems are instances of this more pervasive tendency.

Efficiency is a core value of modern society, and it must not be sacrificed totally to the push and pull of political interests. However, it also seems clear by now that neither should we allow public bureaucracies, which are established and maintained by and for the people, to operate as professional fiefdoms divorced from democratic control.