Skepticism Greets LAPD’s Weed and Seed Proposals

The Los Angeles Police Department unveiled its plan Thursday for using $800,000 in federal Weed and Seed funds to inaugurate community-based policing, even as a coalition of liberal organizations urged Mayor Tom Bradley and the City Council to reject implementation of President Bush’s signature urban program.

Although the Justice Department contends that the program will improve law enforcement, community services and economic development, the coalition argues that Weed and Seed will lead to civil liberties violations and the imprisonment of many minorities, and will preempt the possibility of police reform.

Mark Ridley-Thomas, chairman of the City Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Recovery and Revitalization, delayed a vote on the LAPD’s plan--until public hearings are held--after representatives of the coalition sparred with law enforcement officials at a committee hearing in City Hall.

“I think there are a number of questions that need to be answered,” the councilman said later in an interview. Hearings are imperative, he said, because the program “is being designed and called ‘community-based’ policing without input from the community. . . . That in itself contradicts the very notion of community-based policing.”

Eric Mann, director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center and one of the coalition’s leaders, applauded the delay. “This is exciting,” he said. “We’ll have a full debate on police behavior and more debate on urban policy than we’re getting in the presidential campaign.”

The $1 million “weed” proposal released at the City Council meeting on Thursday has three components. The first consists of a $789,131 program from the Los Angeles Police Department to initiate foot beats and bicyle patrols, establish mobile police substations and improve community relations in the Rampart, Newton and 77th Street police divisions.

“The principal objective is to create a safe and crime-free environment by eliminating violence and crime, drug trafficking and drug-related crimes and drug use, and by revitalizing neighborhoods and improving the quality of life,” according to the proposal.

The Police Commission approved the program earlier this week, said Lt. Dan Koenig.

Another $106,739 would go to the Los Angeles County Probation Department for additional caseworkers to work with juveniles in the areas, which include Koreatown, Pico-Union and South-Central. The final chunk of money--$104,080--would go to the City Housing Authority for a program to assist residents of Avalon Gardens with crime problems.

Acting U.S. Atty. Terree A. Bowers, who is coordinating the Weed and Seed program in Los Angeles, said the delay would not cause any significant problems.

Wendy J. Greuel, the mayor’s assistant, was unconcerned about the delay. “That’s fine,” she said. “I understand everyone being cautious because it hasn’t worked in other areas.”

The central concept of Weed and Seed, as described by Atty. Gen. William P. Barr, is to “weed” out criminal elements and then “seed” an area with social services in a coordinated campaign.

Weed and Seed’s opponents say that it subordinates social service needs to policing goals. The program “will create an unethical linkage” between much-needed federal social welfare programs and federal police programs, according to Mann and Anthony Thigpen, former executive director of Jobs With Peace, who co-authored a critical report on Weed and Seed released Thursday at a news conference in South-Central.

“Weed and Seed substitutes government repression for any serious strategy for urban revitalization,” the authors said.

However, in Los Angeles, $18 million of the initial $19 million awarded will be allocated for social services, and only $1 million will go to policing.

The delay over the law enforcement program came on the same day that U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan was in Los Angeles to announce a $3-million grant to provide family support services through Head Start agencies--the first phase of the “seed” component of the program.

However, Thigpen said the $18 million is merely being reallocated from the budgets of other federal departments--including agriculture, education, health and human services, housing and urban development and labor--rather than being “new money” for Los Angeles. He said the only new money is the $1 million being used for law enforcement purposes.

Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union, Jobs With Peace, Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, the Mexican American Political Assn., the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined in decrying the program at the news conference.

“This is the M-16 approach to solving urban problems,” said Constance L. Rice, western regional counsel of the legal defense fund.

Thigpen said the critics support efforts to combat crime, but said the program would not include enough community input.

Bowers blasted the critics’ report. “It is replete with misinformation and consists primarily of very misleading rhetoric,” he said.

“The Weed and Seed effort in Los Angeles is a very unique grass-roots effort with participants from all components of the community and the local agencies and governments,” Bowers said.

He said $15 million of the $18 million that is supposed to go for social services “already has been secured” and indicated that the remaining $3 million should be obtained shortly.

Greuel said $8 million of the social service funds will be used as rent supplements for five years for 125 families in South-Central Los Angeles, Pico-Union and Koreatown.

In addition to the $3-million Head Start initiative Sullivan announced Thursday, another $4 million of the human services funds will go for community health centers, residential drug treatment programs, homeless health care, and AIDS education.

The Los Angeles Unified School District will receive $2 million for special programs in the affected areas. And the Department of Labor will provide $1 million to the city for employment and job training, Greuel said.

Greuel said that from the start, the mayor’s office has told the Justice Department that the Los Angeles program would have to be run differently than Weed and Seed has been in other cities, such as Seattle, where it has run into problems. Here, she said, the Justice Department would not have “total control.”

Despite the contention of Bowers that the program would be the “first significant effort to implement recommendations made in the Christopher Commission report” on the LAPD, its critics steadfastly maintain that Weed and Seed will hurt the affected communities.

“It is an open question,” said Ridley-Thomas, “whether this is a right-wing inspired law enforcement strategy sanitized by social services.”