INSIDE VIEW–L.A.’s Very Size Has Led to the Collapse of a Municipal Ideal Fall of a Giant

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First of two parts

The municipal ideal of Los Angeles, born early in the 20th century amid optimism and vision, is dying a slow death early in the 21st. Virtually every institution associated with the city from the Department of Water and Power to the Community Redevelopment Agency, the Los Angeles Unified School District and now the Los Angeles Police Department has become stigmatized, perhaps beyond the point of recovery.

In this desultory scene, the Rampart scandal may be the cruelest blow of all. For many Angelenos, particularly in places like the San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles Police Department was one of the few civic institutions with which they could identify. For generations, the LAPD represented professionalism, commitment, and a kind of noble tradition of service critical components of any civic culture.

That reputation has been undermined for years by outbreaks of brutality and stupidity. Insensitive chiefs like Daryl Gates, and incompetents like Willie Williams, have left a true professional, Bernard Parks, holding onto a department that now has lost its one-time stature as America’s best police department. The thin blue line has been broken, become a prisoner of what Parks admits is “mediocrity.” It is questionable that it will ever fully recover.

Chance to wreak havoc?

Now that the Johnnie Cochran types are back in force, we can be sure that L.A. taxpayers, as well as good cops, will be in the laser-sights of the legal parasites and their favorite constituency, the criminal class. We will pay and pay and pay both with our wallets and with the knowledge that many lawbreakers will now be back on the streets, feeling more assured than ever that they can wreak havoc at will.

But it is not the cop on the beat, or even the bureaucracy, that was most responsible for the collapse of the department’s stature. Instead it was mostly a political culture a City Council dominated by second-raters that allowed Gates to run wild; a petty mayor, Tom Bradley, who systematically starved the department; and, finally, led by Mayor Richard Riordan, the push for a rapid buildup of personnel that focused more on meeting politically correct quotas than on quality.

Much of the serious damage to the department and the city can be traced to the events surrounding the Rodney King incident. This was another example of L.A.’s collapsed political culture. Although the beating was inexcusable, the willingness of political leaders in the black community to exploit it and fan the flames of discontent played a critical role in the devastating riots that undermined the spirit of the city.

One only has to see how New York’s African-American community has reacted to the recent Diallo verdict (as well as the sense that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police force was not about to allow people to run wild in the streets) to see the difference between a political culture that has legs and one that does not. Compared to the likes of Maxine Waters and others who seemed to delight in putting a match to the community’s dry kindling, even a buffoon like the Rev. Al Sharpton comes off as Mahatma Gandhi.

But the police are not the whole story. The Community Redevelopment Agency’s incompetence has brought precious little to the city, spending millions to make sure that North Hollywood, for example, is no better off than other parts of town that have not received tens of millions in funds. The Department of Water and Power, arguably the historic linchpin of the civic culture, now gives us water with some of the highest arsenic levels in the region.

L.A.’s fading vision

This last example perhaps best illustrates the failed vision of Los Angeles. As historian Carey McWilliams has noted, the city’s evolution was not so much natural but the product of growth “carefully organized, plotted, and manipulated.” In a sense, Los Angeles was the epitome of the 20th century mega-corporation, using the power of giantism and professionalism to its full advantage.

The city of L.A. grew not only because its people were entrepreneurial but because its leaders used the technology of the time and leveraged it to maximum advantage. L.A. pioneered zoning and after the 1920s, professionalized its police and other city departments along the lines of scientific management. It built better water and power systems and used them to create massive economies of scale.

Outlying areas, like the Valley, joined Los Angeles not only because they were forced to but because it had benefits better electrical and water service being the most obvious. Even as late as the 1970s, Los Angeles city areas often seemed better maintained than adjacent parts of places such as Culver City, Santa Monica or Burbank.

But like many big corporations in the late 20th century, Los Angeles gradually fell afoul of its giantism. Bureaucracies grew in power and, with the rise of public employee unions, incompetence and lack of accountability achieved cult status. Like firms such as General Motors, the Los Angeles civic enterprise also lost its sense of mission, becoming more interested in succoring its own employees and entrenched interests than the public interest.

Today, the decades of rot are eating away at the soul of L.A.’s municipal culture. Despite the sometimes-heroic efforts of individuals, including Riordan, to breathe life into the city’s institutions, the decay has turned gangrenous and there seems little way to save the patient short of amputation.

But there is hope for Los Angeles, much as there has been a revival of the U.S. economy after the decline of the mega-corporations. A civic version of the entrepreneurial revolution that changed the economy has taken place in a host of smaller, more innovative cities ranging from green/red Santa Monica and gay West Hollywood to doughty Burbank and sanitized Calabasas that have re-energized their parts of the L.A. geography. No wonder, like the executives leaving mega-companies such as Disney, that the people of the Valley, Hollywood and the Harbor area want to try this new approach for themselves.

Part II: How L.A. Can Restore Its Municipal Culture.

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