Court’s No Place for Pettiness

Jury duty, always a chore, is sometimes a learning experience. On my most recent trip to court, what I think I learned is why Measure A -- the attempt to raise the sales tax in Los Angeles County to 8.75% to pay for more police and sheriff’s deputies -- failed in the last election.

Police Chief William J. Bratton’s “broken window” philosophy of policing has, to a significant degree, proved its merit: Crack down on petty crime like vandalism (the iconic broken window) and the like, and you create a cultural climate in which serious crime does not thrive. But all good ideas are subject to abuse. The abuse of this good idea occurs when an officer, rather than pursue a serious criminal, goes after crime so petty that it can’t even be compared to a broken window. That’s what was on display last week during jury selection.

On trial was a Latino kid whose offense was selling cigarettes on a street corner without the proper tax stamp on the packages and without a vendor’s license. We prospective jurors were given to understand that there was no plaintiff in this case other than the county. That is, no merchant had complained. No neighborhood resident had complained that quality of life was being negatively affected. The only witness against the kid, we were told, would be the police officer who had arrested him.

As a part of voir dire, every prospective juror was asked whether he or she had been a victim of the kind of crime of which the defendant was accused. One juror asked for a clarification: Did the judge mean to ask whether the juror had ever been victimized by somebody selling cigarettes to him without the proper stamp and without a vendor’s license? The juror’s innocent query made it awkwardly clear that this crime -- in effect, a case of tax evasion so minor it could be measured in pennies -- was virtually victimless.

But when voir dire resumed after a lunch break, the judge advised the prospective jurors as a group that it was not their responsibility to make the laws. He asked for a show of hands: Would any prospective juror be unable to evaluate the facts objectively even while disapproving of the law in question? Later, the prosecuting attorney again asked for a show of hands: Did any prospective juror think this trial was a waste of time and money because it was not as important as, say, a murder trial?

Not as important as a murder trial? The offense in question was not as important as a tricycle theft or as graffiti in a public lavatory. Clearly, both the judge and the prosecutor knew this. As for the jurors, wearily eager to get things over with, they mostly just gave the answers -- or delivered the hands-in-lap silence -- expected of them.

But they came away from the trial, I suspect, with a sense that if this was the “broken window” school of policing at work, then it definitely had a downside. One prospective juror, a black woman, reported being the victim of a serious crime, a home burglary, and was asked whether on that occasion she had any complaint about police conduct. “It was fine what they did,” she replied with a suppressed snort of laughter, “what little it was.”

That rather captures the glum mood in the room and goes some distance, I think, to explain why the police tax is a hard sell. The Times, in an unsigned editorial in favor of Measure A, said that, yes, it was regressive and would hurt the poor, but there was unfortunately no alternative to it. But state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sun Valley) proposes more funding for cops through a tax on the airport, port and Department of Water and Power rather than a sales tax, while the most equitable police tax of all would be a small hike in the property tax, which would fall lightly on South Central and heavily on the pricier parts of town that seem to want an increase in policing most.

So, maybe there is an alternative, after all; but even if there isn’t, proponents of the tax need to remember that law enforcement wins few votes in low-income parts of town by cracking down on poor kids trying to hustle a meager living. Whether on the street or in the courthouse, even people who want tough policing do notice how the police are spending their time; and come time for a new police tax, they remember.