Liberal Law-and-Order: The Politics of Police Reform in Los Angeles

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 1026-1049
Author(s):  
Max Felker-Kantor
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Strong Support ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Police Harassment ◽  
Police Authority ◽  
Liberal Reform ◽  
The 1960S

After his election in 1973, Los Angeles’s first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to implement reforms that would increase civilian oversight and accountability of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Ensuring procedural fairness that treated all residents equally, Bradley and other liberals believed, would lead to reductions in police harassment, abuse, and shootings. Placing their faith in the power of government to effectively manage the police allowed liberals to pledge both strong support for tough law enforcement and propose police reforms. This liberal law-and-order, however, did not result in similar police reforms, such as civilian review, pursued in other Democratic-run cities. No event demonstrated this limitation of Bradley’s liberal law-and-order approach to police reform as the Rodney King beating and the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Rather than demonstrating the failure of liberal reform, Los Angeles shows how liberal law-and-order facilitated the expansion of police authority after the 1960s.

More than Cosmetic Changes: The Challenges of Experiments with Police Demilitarization in the 1960s and 1970s

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 1002-1025 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Schrader
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Neighborhood ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

In response to civil unrest, many U.S. police forces in the 1960s and 1970s adopted more aggressive postures, including “militarized” uniforms and tactics. A few, however, directed reform efforts toward “demilitarization.” This article focuses on the Menlo Park Police Department, in California, led by the maverick reformer Victor Cizanckas. It analyzes his attempts to change relations between the police and the public in his municipality, especially by decreasing incidents of abuse in one predominantly poor, black neighborhood. He instituted, for example, new uniforms and a nonhierarchical bureaucracy in the department. The article details how Cizanckas used emerging networks of law-enforcement professionalization to disseminate his ideas. It also analyzes the failures and challenges of these reform efforts. The article concludes that even radical police reform efforts in the period could not overcome racial inequality or a right-wing backlash against progressive ideas in policing.

Paternalism and the Birth of Professional Police Organization

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Mitrani
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Daily Activity ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Police Organization ◽  
Chicago Police Department ◽  
Chicago Police

This chapter examines how the Chicago Police Department evolved into a professional police organization based on the ideology of paternalism. The election of Thomas Dyer as mayor in 1856 started a five-year period of contestation over the basic shape of the new police force. On the surface, this fight pitted law-and-order Republicans against Democratic supporters of immigrants and looser law enforcement. But party politics tells only a fraction of the story. The underlying dispute was between two conflicting visions of the police, each of which had supporters particularly within the Republican Party. Some members of both parties, most notably Dyer, a Democratic, and Republican Mayor John Wentworth, sought to fit the police into the older paternalistic method of keeping order. This chapter considers how the Chicago police came to occupy a central place in city machine politics and discusses Wentworth's organizational police policies that were consistent with his broader paternalistic vision of the institution. It also describes the police's daily activity between 1855 and 1862, including dealing with the problems arising from the Civil War.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Max Felker-Kantor
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Welfare ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Police Power ◽  
The Public ◽  
Police Authority ◽  
American Society ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
American Cities ◽  
Police Practices

Between the 1960s and 1990s, the police power in Los Angeles intensified. Police power was not incidental or supplemental, but constitutive of postwar city politics and authority. The introduction outlines the central question of the book: how and why this could happen after the Watts uprising of 1965 exposed the racism at the heart of the police power, decades of pressure from an active anti–police abuse movement, and under the twenty-year rule of a liberal administration that sought to control and regulate police behavior. Tracing the racism at the heart of the police power reveals the historical consequences of expanded police authority. Relying on the police to manage social problems of crime, violence, and drugs led to disciplinary practices of surveillance, harassment, and arrest that criminalized and excluded African American and Latino/a residents. In the process, as antipolice activists pointed out and struggled against, the police often deemed residents of color as not only potential threats to the public welfare but also unfit for full benefits of social membership in American society. Police practices thereby produced racialized definitions of criminality and enforced the city’s hierarchical racial order. As a result, the struggle over policing structured and exacerbated deep cleavages in American cities over race, citizenship, politics, and state power.

Predict and Surveil

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Brayne
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Data Analytics ◽  
Predictive Analytics ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Big Data Analytics ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Law Enforcement Agencies ◽  
Criminal Suspects

The scope of criminal justice surveillance, from policing to incarceration, has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, health, and marketing. While law enforcement’s use of big data is hotly contested, very little is known about how the police actually use it in daily operations and with what consequences. This book offers an inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world—the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations from over two years of fieldwork with the LAPD, the text examines the causes and consequences of big data and algorithmic control. It reveals how the police use predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies to deploy resources, identify criminal suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-driven practices. While big data analytics has the potential to reduce bias, increase efficiency, and improve prediction accuracy, the book argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties.

Directed Surveillance

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-73
Author(s):  
Sarah Brayne
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
Predictive Policing ◽  
Crime Patterns ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Using Data

This chapter focuses on directed surveillance, or the surveillance of people and places deemed suspicious. Big data is associated with a shift from reactive to predictive policing. Predictive policing refers to analytic techniques used by law enforcement to forecast potential criminal activity. It involves using data to determine current crime patterns and direct patrol resources, such as where officers should go and who they should stop. In general terms, the stages of predictive policing are collection, analysis, intervention, and response. The chapter analyzes how the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) conducts person- and place-based predictive policing; why it adopted different forms of predictive policing; how it uses algorithms to quantify criminal risk; how the police do—and do not—incorporate insights from the algorithms into their work in the field; and how predictive policing serves as a foundation for ongoing intelligence gathering.

Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism: The Los Angeles Police Department, Mexican Americans, and Police Reform in the 1950s

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward J. Escobar
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican Americans ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Police Department ◽  
City Government ◽  
Civilian Control ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Los Angeles Police Department ◽  
The Rule Of Law

On December 25, 1951, approximately fifty Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers brutally beat seven young men in their custody, including five Mexican Americans. The ensuing controversy became known as Bloody Christmas. Mexican American activists demanded investigations into allegations of police brutality and LAPD accountability to civilian control. The LAPD's new chief, William Parker, however, had just launched a reform campaign based on the police professionalism model, which stressed police autonomy, particularly about internal discipline. Parker and his allies in city government stifled external investigations into department matters, vilified LAPD critics, and even ignored perjury by officers. They thus helped create an organizational culture that valued LAPD independence above the rule of law and led to the LAPD's estrangement from Mexican American and other minority communities.

When the Perpetrator Is a Partner

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 707-729 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eryn Nicole O’Neal ◽  
Cassia Spohn
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Focal Concerns ◽  
Law Enforcement Officials ◽  
Organizational Consequences ◽  
Community Protection ◽  
Focal Concerns Perspective ◽  
Practical Constraints

Law enforcement officials and prosecutors have been called “gatekeepers” of the criminal justice system, as their discretionary decisions determine case outcomes. Using the focal concerns perspective as our theoretical foundation, we explore the factors that influence arrest and charging decisions in intimate partner sexual assaults (IPSA) reported to Los Angeles law enforcement in 2008. Quantitative findings are supplemented with qualitative examples from Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detectives interviewed in 2010 and charge evaluation sheets from complaints referred to Los Angeles prosecution in 2008. Attempting to expand its theoretical relevance, we develop an alternative conceptualization and operationalization of the focal concerns perspective that is more appropriate to IPSA cases. Findings suggest that arrest decisions are motivated by suspect blameworthiness, community protection, and practical constraints and organizational consequences. In addition, charging decisions are influenced by community protection and practical constraints. Extralegal factors did not influence decision making. Directions for future research are discussed.

An Interview With Chief Årestad-Radner of the Swedish Police Authority

2021 ◽  
pp. 198-206
Author(s):  
Sneha Shankar
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Police Agency ◽  
Mental Health Integration ◽  
Police Authority

In this interview, Chief Årestad-Radner, National Coordinator of Recruitment for the Swedish Police Authority, provides her unique insights into law enforcement in Sweden. She discusses her experiences within the police agency and the changes in which she has been involved throughout her career. She describes the current training procedures, the strengths of these, and areas of growth. She reflects on the unique challenges of policing in Sweden, identifying possible solutions to overcome these challenges. Chief Årestad-Radner discusses the need for a police force that is representative of the community as well as the need for a standardized system for recruiting for higher-level positions. In addition, she describes the need for mental health integration within the police department and discusses the benefit of doing so. Lastly, she identifies the need for further research within law enforcement.

From Sanctuary to Safe Space

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (135) ◽  
pp. 95-118
Author(s):  
Treva Ellison
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Gay And Lesbian ◽  
Safe Space ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Police Reform ◽  
Urban Identity ◽  
Lesbian Identity ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
Neighborhood Politics

Abstract This article focuses on how the trajectories of gay and lesbian police-reform efforts in Los Angeles model a transition from a politics of sanctuary to the production of safe space. The production of safe space is conditioned by the multiplication of discourses of race, gender, and sexuality emblematized by the rise of identity-based neighborhood politics throughout the postwar period, and how these politics interface with the reterritorialization of the welfare state and the advent of community policing. The article historicizes several Stonewall-era gay organizations, showing how activists enacted a politics of sanctuary that helped to decriminalize gay and lesbian identity, and then arguing that this politics of sanctuary was drawn into the production of safe space. This writing invites possibilities for abolitionist organizing by demonstrating the life cycle of law and order that circumscribes urban, identity-based, antiviolence, and neighborhood-based politics.

To Help “La Gente”: Examining Helping People as a Motivation for Becoming an Officer in the Los Angeles Police Department Among Male Mexican American Officers

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 452-463
Author(s):  
Roberto Gallardo
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Police Department ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Minority Communities ◽  
Los Angeles Police Department ◽  
Perception Of Police ◽  
American Police

The most commonly declared motivation for pursuing a career in law enforcement is helping people. As part of a study focusing on male Mexican American police officers in the Los Angeles Police Department, data were collected on initial motivations of police officers. The data reveal that a significant motivation for respondents was not only helping people but specifically helping minority communities receive improved services. This motivation stems from their interactions and perception of police while growing up in minority communities. Based on the findings, this article concludes with a call for a more grounded approach to research on Latinos in law enforcement.

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