The New Power Brokers? : The city’s need for more cops and its inability to pay have led to solutions that risk takinng us back to the time when the Committee of Twenty-Five held sway.

The public’s demand for greater security in the streets and in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and the city’s lack of money to pay for it, have combined to create a power vacuum that threatens to shift local control of police power either to private hands, to the federal government or, worse, to both.

This is especially disturbing, because of all powers granted government by the Constitution, police power is the most awesome. With the exception of state highway patrols, it has historically remained highly localized. This is proper. To remain democratic, police power must be under the control of the local citizenry. This can best happen when local constituencies can--and are willing to--pay their own law-enforcement bills.

Los Angeles is struggling to pay those bills after years of recession. The Los Angeles Police Department’s computer system is from the Stone Age. In fact, it practically doesn’t exist. Police Chief Willie L. Williams works on a borrowed computer, and his officers currently spend an estimated 40% of their time filling out forms--equivalent to more than 640,000 hours annually or 368 officers on the street.

City Council member Laura Chick, among others, estimates that it would cost $100 million to computerize the LAPD. Having been forced to dip into cash reserves to reach an agreement with the Police Protective League, neither Mayor Richard Riordan nor the City Council is in a position to find even one-tenth of that $100 million, though it would mean putting the patrol equivalent of hundreds of police officers back on city streets.

So what does Riordan do? He turns to the private sector from whence he came. An alliance of 20 corporate leaders, headed by Bruce Karatz, chairman of Kaufman & Broad Home Corp., will seek to raise $15 million from private citizens to begin the long overdue computerization of the LAPD. The money will be used to install 1,700 computer workstations and related technology at key police stations.

Enlightened self-interest motivates the donations. Corporate contributors know that their businesses will suffer if the citizens of Los Angeles are afraid to be on the street. This, then, is the good news: A mayor who loves to solve problems employs the private sector in an effort to provide for a public good--computerizing the LAPD so that more of its resources can be devoted to crime fighting.

Now, the bad news: Throughout its history, Los Angeles has shown a too-eager tendency to govern itself through private committees. One committee promoted the Port, another the Aqueduct, still another the Coliseum. The 1932 Olympics and the Hoover Dam were also products of private commissions. A reform committee led by cafeteria magnate Clifford E. Clinton engineered the recall of Mayor Frank Shaw in the 1930s and the election of Judge Fletcher Bowron.

Perhaps the most famous committee was the Committee of Twenty-Five, which held sway through the 1950s and early 1960s. It included representatives from the city’s two major universities, Dr. Norman Topping of USC and Dr. Franklin D. Murphy of UCLA, together with such business leaders as Dan Bryant of Beacon Industries, Norman Chandler of The Times, Justin W. Dart and Asa V. Call, an insurance executive and state Republican leader.

The Committee of Twenty-Five exercised its influence in a city where Anglos ran the show. As the centurion in the gospel, it said to one man, “Come,” and he cameth, and to another “Go,” and he goeth. Its power began to wane after the Watts Riots, in 1965, and the rapid multiculturalization of the city that has yet to abate. The Committee of Twenty-Five exercised authority because the majority of the people of the city, the Anglo majority, wanted it that way, if only by passive assent.

The Riordan plan for corporate-sponsored computerization of the LAPD obviously does not recreate a Committee of Twenty-Five to exercise influence over the use of police power. But should the fund-raising effort be successful, and everything indicates that it will, the foundation formed to collect and administer the contributions may soon be as influential as the Police Commission. Yet, it would remain an essentially independent foundation, unless structured otherwise, outside the control of, and unaccountable to, the citizenry.

Shall the private corporate sector be given such influence over the LAPD outside the restrictions of the City Charter and the political process? Is the gift of an updated computer system a Trojan horse, ostensibly beneficial, yet ultimately destructive of the publicly held polis, the shared common ground, of Los Angeles as established by charter, supported by taxpayers and controlled by every voting citizen, equal to one another in the ballot box?

Should comparable initiatives from the private sector, along the lines of the LAPD model, be encouraged to supplement the responsibilities of the taxpayer in the fire department, the public library, the school district? And if so, would not these corporate initiatives, these non-profit foundations, ultimately constitute the true authority of Los Angeles itself, beyond the reach of the voter and, in the case of the LAPD foundation, beyond the control of those groups, almost always the least empowered, most intimately in dialogue on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour, basis with the police department?

Any desire to avoid the shadow governments of Los Angeles’ past should not drive us to look to Washington for answers, as tempting as that may be. The recently enacted crime bill could help Los Angeles add as many as 1,500 police officers with the more than $100 million the city might receive for law-enforcement salaries. The problem is that such goodies accelerate the federalization of police power.

The federal government, to be sure, has played a major--and beneficial--role in the development of Los Angeles. In 1899, it recreated inland Los Angeles as a deep-water port. Without the direct intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt, there would have been no Owens Valley project, completed in 1913. Without the intervention of President Herbert Hoover, there would have been no Hoover Dam. And without the Owens Valley Aqueduct and the Hoover Dam, there would be no Los Angeles.

Yet, these and other initiatives did not entail control of local police power in the modern sense of the term, with the exception of the Military Police and Shore Patrol, which kept order among the servicemen on leave. The federal government entered the business of local police in 1967, and since that year, we have had one crime bill after another from the federal government with little result.

But the taxpayers of Los Angeles are unwilling to come up with the $100 million necessary to computerize the LAPD, compelling Riordan to look to the private sector to pick up some of the slack. And the federal government launches a Great Society-style war on crime that replaces defense spending with crime busting as a national priority.

In each instance, sadly--the loss of local resources leaving Riordan little choice but the private sector, the federal behemoth dangling before the mayor the possibilities of tax revenues taken from Los Angeles in the first place--an element of local control in the all-important matter of public safety is being lost.