Reserved gratitude

Los Angeles needs more police officers, but they’re hard to recruit because living here is so expensive. Although the pay is good, attracting officers might be easier if there were even more money to offer. Higher salaries aren’t possible, though, given the city’s huge budget shortfall.

City Hall’s solution: Get a private donor to give money to be used for one-time signing bonuses. Mercury Insurance -- a company founded and still based in Los Angeles -- gave $1 million. Now any new LAPD recruit who completes academy training and is assigned to the department will get a bonus of $5,000. Returning officers and lateral hires will get $10,000.

The city calls on businesses to be good corporate citizens, and Los Angeles owes them a debt of thanks when they pick up the tab for civic goods ranging from playground equipment to Thanksgiving turkeys. Even deeper gratitude, then, is due Mercury for a donation that could mean safer streets for all.

Yet there is something unsettling about the city accepting such a large donation to do something that is inherently a public function. There is a saying -- don’t look a gift horse in the mouth -- that means the recipient of a gift has no business inspecting the merchandise for flaws. Still, it’s tempting to tell this horse to open wide and show any evidence of hidden strings or improper motive.

None present themselves. Mercury may stand to gain from insuring residents of a safer city, but there certainly is no conflict there. We’d all gain from a safer city. The donation may help Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa make good on his pledge to expand the LAPD by 1,000 cops, but so what? Those cops are for us, and there is little the mayor could do for Mercury unless he returns to Sacramento.

The disquiet comes not from Mercury’s generosity but from the prospect of a city government becoming progressively more dependent on corporate gifts and donations. The past three decades have seen citizens gradually de-fund their government by voting to slash taxes. That means either downsizing the notion of what government should do or picking up the slack with requests for funding from private companies that may expect something in return. Such a trend would make donors, and not citizens, the constituents of elected officials.

Los Angeles may be choosing a better path. Voters’ decision this week to retain a utility tax may be evidence that citizens still expect to be in charge of, and foot the bill for, their government. The coming city budget debates will test that theory.

In the meantime, thank you, Mercury Insurance.