Lawmen Vow to Press for Funding

Although voters rejected their plan for a sales tax increase, Los Angeles County’s top law enforcement officials vowed Wednesday to find another way to raise the money to put more police officers and sheriff’s deputies on the streets.

“We’ll come back with another initiative, if that’s necessary, because we cannot ignore the needs of public safety,” Sheriff Lee Baca said the morning after Measure A went down to defeat.

“We desperately need these resources, and we’ll keep at it until we finally succeed,” Police Chief William J. Bratton said.

With all of the county’s precincts reporting and an unknown number of absentee and provisional ballots still to be counted, Measure A won support from 59.6% of the voters, but it needed 66.7% to pass.

Outside the Los Angeles Police Department’s headquarters at Parker Center, Baca and Bratton said supporters of the measure would examine a number of options, including putting a tax increase on the city ballot, perhaps as early as March.

But first, they said, they need to figure out why enough county voters did not agree that boosting the sales tax from 8.25% to 8.75% was the best way to pay for more police.

Even as the votes were being counted Tuesday night, Bratton cited one possibility. “People in this state have a phenomenal mistrust of their political leaders,” he said. “It’s based on past experiences, where they voted for money to go to one purpose and it went to other purposes.”

Before a battery of television cameras, Bratton said Wednesday that city and county leaders must find a way to overcome that distrust.

“We know people want more police. We desperately want more police. We know what to do with those police,” Bratton said. “But we need to be able to address the concern: Is the money going to be used appropriately?”

Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla and council members Wendy Greuel and Tom LaBonge joined Baca and Bratton at the news conference to back his effort to get more officers.

The nation’s second-largest city has fewer than 9,100 police officers for 3.8 million residents. For decades, Los Angeles has been one of the most under-policed major cities, with a lower ratio of police to residents than New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Padilla said city officials would get a report today detailing how Measure A fared in Los Angeles and would then begin to discuss their options. The deadline for asking the city attorney to write language for placing the measure on the March ballot is Nov. 17.

In an interview, Mayor James K. Hahn said he was waiting to examine the election results before making any decisions.

“Timing is everything in life,” he said, but he noted that a majority of voters supported the measure. “Clearly a lot of people are not averse to the idea of paying more to get more public safety.”

At the county Hall of Administration, the Board of Supervisors took an initial step to confront a public safety issue that the sheriff highlighted repeatedly during the Measure A campaign.

Two years after Baca began releasing County Jail inmates early to save money, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky introduced a motion Wednesday directing the county’s chief administrative officer and the sheriff to determine how much money would be needed to end the early releases.

Since the program began, Baca has released more than 66,600 County Jail inmates, many of whom have served as little as 10% of their sentences.

“It’s a scourge on this community. It undermines the integrity of the judicial system,” Yaroslavsky said. “You get sentenced to six months and you’re out in 15 days.”

Supervisors Gloria Molina, Mike Antonovich and Don Knabe supported Yaroslavsky’s motion.

Antonovich, who opposed Measure A, said a $560-million annual increase in the sales tax was not needed to reopen two jails that Baca closed because of budget problems.

“We are responsible for those failures in not funding the Sheriff’s Department to meet his needs. But the sheriff also needs to do a better job in managing his resources,” Antonovich said. “The sheriff was wrong in releasing 60,000 people out on the streets.... What he did was use that as an excuse to push for a tax increase, an unneeded tax increase.”

Instead of seeking higher taxes, Antonovich said, the county should allocate some of its unanticipated $309-million budget surplus to public safety programs.

Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said the Measure A campaign should have been more of a grass-roots effort.

“There were an awful lot of taxes and fees on the ballot,” he said, speculating that voters thought they already paid too much in taxes. Cooley, an elected official, said he believed the results to be a vote not against law enforcement but against politicians.

A Los Angeles Times analysis of the election results in 84 cities across the county found a strong relationship between support for Measure A and the rate of violent crime in those communities.

The top 20% of cities in terms of violent crime for 2003 voted almost 64% in favor of the sales tax. Indeed, in the city of Los Angeles, Measure A received 64% of the vote, short of the two-thirds margin, but within striking distance.

The measure received more than 70% support in small cities with the highest rates of violent crime. They include Commerce, Huntington Park, Lynwood, Hawaiian Gardens and Paramount.

The lowest support for the tax increase -- below 50% -- was in affluent suburban communities on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and in Torrance, La Canada Flintridge, San Marino, Arcadia, Sierra Madre, Glendora, La Habra Heights and Santa Clarita.

Measure A did well in West Hollywood, which has a high crime rate, winning almost 72% of the vote.

And in Beverly Hills, 68% of the voters were also willing to pay for more police protection.

Times staff writers Sue Fox, Jessica Garrison, Doug Smith, Richard Winton and data analyst Sandra Poindexter contributed to this report.

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Measure A vote

Support for a sales tax increase to fund law enforcement was highest in cities with the highest violent crime rates. The chart shows the combined vote in five groups of 84 cities ranked by their 2003 violent crime rates.

*--* Rank Violent crimes Percent per 1,000 Yes vote 1 1.1 - 1.8 51.0 2 1.9 - 3.4 51.7 3 3.6 - 5.7 57.3 4 5.8 - 7.5 62.1 5 7.5 -- 173 63.7

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Sources: Los Angeles County Registrar/Recorder and FBI