Police Crimes and Power Abuses

Reflecting broader trends in cities that had elected black mayors in the 1970s, Tom Bradley’s politics rested on a belief that law enforcement could provide equitable police service by committing to pluralist policies that were responsive to all city residents. As this chapter shows, however, reforms, such as diversifying the department, enhancing human relations training, and adopting community-oriented policing, provided only a semblance of civilian control of the police. As the police continued to aggressively police communities of color, it produced a new phase of anti–police abuse organizing, led by the Coalition against Police Abuse (CAPA), calling for an end to police crimes and power abuses. Some of the most notable demands were for an end to the use of the chokehold and for a police civilian review board.

The Year of the Cop

The LAPD’s postwar model of policing routinely served as a standard for departments across the country. Backed by federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funds and support from newly elected law-and-order governor Ronald Reagan, the LAPD led the way in bolstering its paramilitary function through riot control plans, the use of helicopters, and the invention of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, which was quickly adopted by other departments. At the same time, the department sought to legitimize the iron fist with the velvet glove of community relations and improved officer training. As this chapter shows, the LAPD engaged in a process of militarization and enhanced its martial capacity while expanding its reach through community relations programs.

High Noon in the Ghetto

Get-tough policing was not the only possible response to the urban uprisings of the 1960s as this chapter shows. African American and Mexican American residents challenged punitive crime policy, demanded police accountability, and promoted anti–police abuse activism. Residents and activists, such as the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, imagined the meaning of safety that rested on community control of the police. Yet the LAPD responded to these movements by framing them as a threat to order to justify increased officer discretion to harass, arrest, and repress. This cut short the possibility for alternative models of policing and ensured that grievances with the police persisted.

Introduction

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.

The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

Punitive conditions ultimately contributed to the eruption of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. The uprising occurred within the distinctly punitive context of the war on drugs and gangs. Solutions to urban social problems, this chapter shows, had become so entangled with the city’s and LAPD’s various wars on crime that the responses to the uprising depended on partnership with law enforcement and criminal justice programs, leaving police power intact. As this chapter shows, the post-1992 reforms, such as Project Weed and Seed, expanded the criminal justice system into new areas of municipal governance through the adoption of community and broken windows policing, which focused police enforcement on low-level and quality of life offenses to maintain urban order.

Policing an Internal Border

Within the context of global trade and migration to cities in the 1980s, the department remobilized to expand its discretionary authority to combat the growing number of undocumented migrants. Hoping to maintain the trust of new immigrant populations, officials limited police authority to make arrests based on immigration status. Yet, the LAPD constructed an “alien criminal” category to justify cooperation with the Immigration and Naturalization Service and to arrest undocumented immigrants and refugees fleeing South and central America. In the process, the LAPD employed racialized constructions of illegality that criminalized the city’s Latino/a population in the name of protecting the image of Los Angeles as a world city.

The Rap Sheet

The LAPD’s ability to maintain its independent partisan power in the face of procedural reforms and antipolice protest rested on its intelligence operations. Police spying, this chapter shows, targeted groups that challenged the status quo, none more so than anti–police abuse activists and movements for racial justice, using a capacious definition of “disorder.” But these same groups exposed the Public Disorder Intelligence Division’s surveillance operations (previously known as the Red Squad), leading to new regulations on the department’s activities, the end of the PDID, and the establishment of the department’s new intelligence unit, the Anti-Terrorist Division. The reforms, however, did not change the underlying power relations between the police and residents.

Kid Thugs Are Spreading Terror through the Streets

The Watts uprising and anti–police abuse activism ushered in a shift in politics and policing marked by Tom Bradley’s election and his commitment to liberal law-and-order policies. Focusing on the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice Planning and efforts to combat youth crime during the 1970s, this chapter shows how a combination of liberal and conservative politicians and criminal justice officials focused on reforming a juvenile justice system they believed to be too lenient on youth offenders. By posing rehabilitation and diversion as alternatives to arrest and imprisonment, they provided the police with new discretionary authority to enter social institutions to supervise youth of color. In doing so, the police created new anti-gang units, such as the Community Resources against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) units and drug bust programs to monitor youth of color.

Policing Raceriotland

Intensified policing and punitive crime policies in Los Angeles emerged from the response to the urban uprisings of the 1960s. Despite the belief among mostly white conservative politicians and police officials that Los Angeles was immune from urban unrest, this chapter foregrounds the racist police practices and violence of the LAPD targeting residents of color as the root and fundamental meaning of the Watts uprising. As such, the uprising was an antipolice protest and demand for an end to police practices that reproduced and upheld white supremacy, segregation, and inequality. Department officials and conservative policymakers, however, used the crisis for the police created by the uprising to target African Americans and expand police power. Watts, in short, became a police riot and excuse to arrest, criminalize, and contain African American residents.

Epilogue

Not until the Rampart Scandal (the exposure of wide- spread corruption in the LAPD’s Rampart anti-gang Community Resources against Street Hoodlums unit) in the late 1990s led to a federal consent decree did the LAPD face rigorous oversight. While leading to a new era in the LAPD’s history, such oversight also opened possibilities for expanded police authority because decades of get-tough policies embedded police power in urban politics. As the conclusion to Policing Los Angeles, this chapter demonstrates the continued operation of the police power as well as the ways activists and residents in Los Angeles have continued to push for reform and restructuring of the Los Angeles Police department.