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.

While reading City of Quartz by Mike Davis, I began to understand the structure of Los Angeles.  Davis explains how the city is segregated, putting the rich and poor at different sectors of the city.  A place where such segregation takes place is Downtown, Los Angeles.  The structure in downtown was made to keep the poor on their side of the city. Davis explains that the rich people have a high demand for security in order to keep their power secure. And the rich will take public space and turn it into a realm only the rich can live in.

“The Second Civil War that began in the long summers of the 1960s has been institutionalized into the very structure of urban space” by taking public space. It began by putting surveillance cameras on buildings to ensure security.  The cameras watch over people and also inflict fear in them.  No one wants to be caught red handed by a camera therefore the poor people act in a manner that will not attract attention. I always hear how the USA is a free country but so far people still have to take precautions. Architects, playing a big role to create a fortress where the rich rule, use structure to keep the poor on the other side of the fence.  In downtown bus benches, or “bum proof bus bench” as Davis calls it, were built to make sure people have room to sit but also to prevent people from sleeping on the bench. It’s another way to say to the homeless “here have this bench, sit on it but don’t think about sleeping on it.”  The homeless people are force find another place to sleep or rest. And the city is not going to be responsible for those people. The whole city then becomes a playground for the rich. They destroy whatever they want and build their ideas on the remaining soil.

Davis also talks about police enforcement. Police stations are now popping all over the city. And although the police promise that they will act in a lawful manner, they don’t. All they’re doing is making sure that the poor stay under control or in other words they’re taking on the role of watch dogs. Police are also using new technology in order to maintain what they call “security.” Police borrows military technology, like helicopters. These helicopters are equipped with infrared cameras, that can spot the heat from a cigarette, and a flashlight, that can turn night into day, called the “Nightsun.” The helicopters maintain a nineteen hour per day over “high crime areas.” Police also paints numbers on the rooftops of people’s homes, turning the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid. The latest toy the police have put on their hands is ECCCS (Emergency Command Control Communications), a system made by NASA that would allow police to eliminate voice congestion and guarantees the secrecy of transmission.  ECCCS is another way to invade the lives of poor, innocent people. If this continues to happen, the people of Los Angeles City will have no choice but to become a part of a system that works to benefit the rich. The sate of California will become a police state and a bourgeois state.  Resources shouldn’t be a privilege but instead something that everyone has the chance to benefit from.

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.