While the City Abdicates Power, Commissions Set Urban Agenda : Government: In the effort to get rebuilding off the ground, the real problems that created the Los Angeles riots are being ignored or overlooked.

Over the last year, a disturbing seepage of power has occurred in City Hall. Confronted with the gravest civic crisis since the Depression, a weak, increasingly re clusive mayor and a shrewd but spineless City Council have abdicated power to a new proconsular elite of corporate lawyers, law-enforcement leaders and millionaire executives. With virtually no debate, responsibilities of democratic government have been subcontracted to the commissions or coalitions chaired by Warren Christopher, Robert E. Wycoff, William H. Webster and Peter V. Ueberroth.

They are invested with the power to develop city policy across a spectrum of vital and interrelated issues: police reform, public education and the future of South Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, these white knights have opted for narrow definitions of problems and their solutions.

Thus, the Christopher Commission abjured far-reaching institutional reforms, like a civilian review board or residency requirement, long advocated by police critics, in favor of minimal administrative changes acceptable to former police chief Ed Davis and other conservative critics of Daryl F. Gates.

The Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, chaired by Arco President Wycoff, has seized the high ground in defining the contours of educational reform. This corporate-funded coalition asserts that restructuring, rather than new tax revenue, is the key to saving Los Angeles’ collapsing schools. As teacher activists have pointed out, LEARN has undermined support for desperately needed school funding by its emphasis on organizational panaceas.

For its part, the Webster Commission, headed by the former FBI and CIA director, is restricted in focus to problems of police riot deployment and response, set apart from any critical inquiry into the events and causes of the worst civil disturbance in modern U.S. history. In sharp contrast to 1965, there has been no initiative to establish a riot commission with a comprehensive mandate. Most city leaders seem to believe we should just concentrate on upgrading police performance and not waste time on a time-consuming and possibly recriminatory inquest into the uprising itself.

In lieu of such an investigation, however, the official “theory” of the riot will inevitably be elaborated by District Atty. Ira Reiner and U.S. Atty. Lourdes G. Baird in the prosecution of innumerable looting, arson and “gang conspiracy” cases. In their relentless push for maximum indictments and penalties, they deny any significant motivation for the rebellion other than opportunist criminality--a punitive interpretation that returns our understanding of urban unrest to the pre-Kerner Commission dark ages.

Meanwhile, the imposition of Ueberroth as L.A.’s rebuilding czar virtually precludes serious debate about the relative roles of public and private sectors in addressing the current crisis. He has stated that the over-arching priority of his Rebuild L.A. committee will be the mobilization of political and economic incentives to bring private capital back to South Los Angeles.

Given this premise, the public sector’s role is reduced to leveraging the private sector through tax concessions, training subsidies, land-use variances and so on. Excluded is any serious consideration of the opposing argument, that revitalization might be more effectively achieved through public works and small-business loans financed by higher corporate and luxury taxes.

An ideological coup d’etat has taken place in Los Angeles, as elite commissions have been allowed to impose their interpretations on public policy. In every case, open debate over the fundamental parameters of analysis and action has been short-circuited or avoided. Police reform has been narrowed to a tinkering with the status quo, while redistributive solutions to the urban crisis have been excluded a priori . If there is some titular representation of selected “community leaders,” testimony or participation from the grass roots is non-existent.

But conservative reform will almost certainly run aground on reefs of its own making. Consider two examples.

The Christopher Commission’s chief antidote for widespread citizen alienation from the LAPD has been the revitalization of the “community-based” policing program that Gates previously discarded. The cornerstone is supposed to be the local police advisory council. But the Christopher Commission characteristically refrained from making these councils elected bodies or investing them with any independent power.

Thus, when the Venice Beach advisory council voted May 1 in support of the commission’s Prop. F, they were immediately disbanded by Capt. Jan Carlson, commander of the LAPD’s Pacific Division--an action upheld by Parker Center. If public advisers are fired every time they disagree with LAPD brass, the future of “community-based policing” may be less than brilliant.

At the same time, while Ueberroth’s choirs sing Rebuild L.A.’s new anthem, “Stand and Be Proud,” the city continues to be torn apart. A tidal wave of deficit-driven cutbacks mandated by city, county and state governments--will sweep away much of what remains of public education and human services in Los Angeles’ blue-collar neighborhoods. A rational “rebuilding” strategy would seek to prevent this impending loss of $2 billion-$3 billion in vital community resources and public-sector jobs--a magnitude of damage far in excess of April’s riots. But the current Ueberroth-Pete Wilson-George Bush obsession with such private-sector incentives as tax subsidies dooms practical action to shore up the public sector with new taxes.

As these examples suggest, pygmy solutions are being applied to giant-sized problems. The work of police reform, far from being concluded with the passage of Prop. F, has yet to tackle the core question of how to make the LAPD more accountable to local citizenry--elected community policing councils would be a good start. “Rebuild L.A.” will be an empty slogan without a comparably energetic and broad-based commitment to save inner-city schools and public employment.

Moreover, elite crisis management risks stifling the voices at the bottom now struggling to be heard. It is hard to imagine how any healing process can take place until aggrieved groups--whether gang youth, Central American immigrants or Korean merchants--find a forum for their views.

For all these reasons it is urgent to open the debate. We need wide-ranging public hearings--broadcast live on radio and cable television--that offer diverse communities an opportunity to testify about the underlying causes of the rebellion and what “rebuilding” should mean.

Corporate Los Angeles and the law-enforcement Establishment have been given “bully pulpits” to expound their solutions to the current urban crisis. Now it is time to make room for alternative opinions. Some will complain that such hearings delay decisive action. But have no doubt about it: Nothing is more urgent than restoring the credibility--which is to say, the inclusivity--of local democracy.