The LAPD is increasingly focused on serving as a space police rather than keeping us safe

An article in the Los Angeles Daily News [via LAist] discusses the Los Angeles Police Department’s benchmark of having 10,000 officers.  Some local politicians and city council members are calling for even more police:

Zine said the city will need a bigger force if the state proceeds with the early release of 27,000 prison inmates in a cost-cutting move.

“When these folks come back, there are no jobs and the economy is suffering. They’ll return to what they know, which is crime,” said Zine, a retired police sergeant. “Without these officers, it would be a dangerous and serious situation.”

A larger LAPD will only reinforce an oppressive cycle of poverty, violence, and imprisonment in Los Angeles.  Instead of hiring thousands of police officers, the city of Los Angeles should focus on green jobs.  The State of California is projected to need 10,000 solar workers each year over the next five years.  Funding real rehabilitation, job training, and green jobs, instead of more police officers to further the criminalization of communities, will initiate a cycle of cleaner neighborhoods, lower prices for photovoltaics, and more quality employment.

This NBC-LA article entitled “Move Over, Prius: Meet the Raptor” discusses a determined NorCal man who built his own fully electric car when he no longer wanted to pay for gasoline: “I can do what GM couldn’t” (or wouldn’t) – mass produce the electric car. I admire this man’s can-do attitude and his decision to drastically reduce his dependence on oil by converting his car, but his goal concerns me as a resident of a city so dependent on cars.

Were Angelenos to replace conventional gas-guzzlers with gasless cars, many relative benefits would emerge: air quality would improve, mobile and area source pollution by cars and gas stations would decline, drivers would depend significantly less on fossil fuels, and it might even help create sustainable jobs. Despite the magnificence of these prospective situations, I am skeptical because of the thought that popularizing less harmful cars might detract attention from the very serious problems of  structuring cities around these machines, regardless of their pollution potential.

Out of Business Gas Station - Crenshaw Blvd

Those problems include, but are in no way limited to, the continuation of urban sprawl, the ease of maintaining racial-residential segregation, and the preference of freeway construction over clean public transit, all of which have especially bad implications for the working-class, the poor, and urban minorities. While the mass-produced electric car would work wonders for the physical environment of Angelenos who can afford cars, the idea seems a merely novel one in the context of Los Angeles because it still supports an environmentally racist and unjust infrastructure.

I don’t mean to put down Mr. Atkinson’s accomplishment. If anything, I would encourage more people to take his lead by making changes on an individual level that would be accessible and reproducible, especially because I am reprehensibly dependent on my own gas-guzzler. His apparent enthusiasm for larger-scale production simply made me realize how dependent Los Angeles is on a machine that has been successfully used to support environmentally unjust decisions. We budget  more money for crime than for public transit and more for freeways than public education, which says nothing good about the problems and priorities of a car city.

In my freshman year of college, I wrote a term paper about integrative school busing in Los Angeles and its relationship to urban sprawl and residential segregation. Part of it discussed two decisive Supreme Court cases, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Miliken v Bradley, both of which argued that American neighborhoods were inherently segregated; the former used that argument to force integration by bus in public schools  and the latter to end it. Either way, our most powerful judicial body has declared more than once that residential segregation is a natural aspect of American society, and that all of its symptoms, such as segregated public schools, have resulted from this apparently immutable social fact.  I argued that minority schools, and neighborhoods in general, are disproportionately burdened by this segregation because it denies them easy access to invaluable sociocultural capital, to connections to the more affluent world, and to the values, behavior and ideologies of power, an understanding of which is required to transcend the limits of structural, racial and socioeconomic marginalization. I now realize that the maintenance of segregated neighborhoods has made environmental, industrial and transportation injustice almost too easy to achieve and easier to ignore.

American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass by Douglass S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, clarifies how segregation, federally financed or not, is an institution that has supported “other racially discriminatory processes and binds them together into a coherent and uniquely effective system of racial subordination” (8). Contrary to our Supreme Court’s rationale, Massey and Denton point out that “America chose to strengthen the walls of the ghetto,” and that, for a pair of decades after emancipation, black segregation was minimal (19). With the new century came a very deliberate new urban order that physically separates the dominant groups from the monorities, magnifying and naturalizing the harmful effects of other types of discrimination. An “oppositional” “Culture of Segregation” has consequently developed in urban ghettos, one that often clashes with the values of power, making integration extremely difficult (8). American neighborhoods are not intrinsically segregated, and their separation has not only prevented any significant number of minorities from achieving sustained upward social mobility, it has created a path of least resistance down which decision-makers can march to the beat of an exploitative drum, concentrating environmental hazards in ghettos.

Because minorities remain economically disempowered and politically underrepresented, their neighborhoods are targets for the placement of polluting industries. Los Angeles is no exception; it is divided first by race and then by socioeconomic class. With minorities ghettoized, dirty industry thrives conveniently out of sight and out of the minds of the people who have the politico-economic power to change and prevent environmentally unjust practices. Well shielded from the brunt of the problem by physical and imaginary color lines, the city’s elite have allowed and encouraged freeways over clean and efficient public transit, corporate development over community gardens, police over education, over the environment, over everything:

2008-09 LA City Budget Summary, p.8

Los Angeles Apartheid structures the city so as to force the heaviest social and environmental burdens onto minorities by maintaining enclaves of poverty and unemployment, violence and incarceration, instability and hopelessness. The environment includes more than issues of air quality and global warming: quality education, clean streets, green space, a sense of freedom, mutual respect, reasonable control, and honest representation contribute to the community health and safety that encourages residents to want to care about their environment, a feeling that is notably absent from LA’s poor black and hispanic ghettos.