In September 1984, Hollywood resident Jerry Martz wrote to the Los Angeles Times with a dilemma. Six years earlier, voters across California had passed Proposition 13 to constitutionally limit local property taxes to 1 percent of assessed value. The measure was the brainchild of Howard Jarvis, a Republican activist and real estate lobbyist regarded by his supporters as a champion of the people and by his detractors as a demagogue (Figure 1). In the weeks after the vote, as Los Angeles (LA) officials scrambled to keep the city’s head above water, they slashed funding for every department, including the police. Now, in 1984, anxieties about rising crime rates reached a crescendo, and the city council faced calls to adopt the “8500 Plan” proposed by Chief Daryl Gates to enlarge the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to 8,500 sworn officers—the number temporarily deployed when the city hosted the Olympic Games that summer. While Jerry Martz welcomed the idea of putting more cops on the street, he wondered where the money would come from. “Has anyone considered having the criminals pay for these expenses?” he asked. Only then would “the financial burden” of increased law enforcement not fall “solely on the law-abiding taxpayers.”Footnote 1
Howard Jarvis addresses his supporters and the media in Los Angeles after the vote on California’s Proposition 13. Source: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection, Library Digital Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. By permission of The Regents of the University of California.
By the time Jerry Martz wrote his letter, the consensus on crime policy among white homeowning Angelenos could be summed up in five words: more police; no new taxes. A majority of the city’s voters had already rejected a ballot measure to create a “special police tax” three years earlier. In angry letters to Mayor Tom Bradley, constituents made demands that would be familiar to historians of the nation’s punitive and “neoliberal” turn beginning in the 1970s: to “get tough” on crime and bring government programs to heel.Footnote 2 “The people have spoken,” one constituent wrote after the ballot measure failed. “Government is getting no more money.” In 1985, Angelenos rejected the special police tax for the second time in four years. And yet, while the 8500 Plan and its associated tax initiatives failed, the LAPD still managed to expand. While the department has recently struggled to fill a spate of vacancies since the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 George Floyd uprising, its budget nevertheless continues to grow even as the city faces a fiscal emergency. At roughly $2 billion, the LAPD is today the City of Los Angeles’s largest budget expense—accounting for almost 40 percent of all departmental spending even before considering related costs such as police pensions and settlements for civil rights violations. Now, four decades since Jerry Martz’s conundrum, the demands for more policing and limited property taxes appear to be reconciled.Footnote 3
How did this happen? At first blush, it perhaps comes as no surprise to historians of the modern United States that social austerity and punitive extravagance have become so tightly entwined. Indeed, one standard narrative of the “neoliberal revolution” describes how right-wing ideologues such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, in alliance with supply-side economists and central bankers, implemented a program of tight money, cuts to welfare, pro-business regulation, low taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and increased spending on the functions of law and order. More recent histories have moved away from this top-down and teleological account of neoliberalism, or have questioned the usefulness of the term altogether.Footnote 4 Yet the idea that austerity and punitiveness proceeded in lockstep appears commonsense at a time when policing and incarceration are the primary public response to urban social problems, from mental illness to poverty and homelessness.Footnote 5 What Naomi Murakawa terms “carceral state-building” has also reinforced the present age of inequality by foreclosing the political imagination.Footnote 6 As historians and scholars of social movements have shown, the beginnings of mass incarceration followed over a decade of struggles waged by workers, women and queer people, prisoners, and the poor to redistribute wealth and power and to extend the social wage beyond the white male breadwinner imagined by the New Deal order and California’s segregated welfare state.Footnote 7
Such scholarship has productively transformed the field of modern U.S. history. Fifteen years after Heather Ann Thompson called to make mass incarceration a topic of historical study, the buildup of the carceral state and the rise of neoliberalism have become essential to any understanding of the United States since the end of the 1960s.Footnote 8 Yet an unintended consequence of this booming literature is that the neoliberal and punitive turns now overlap to such a degree that their histories have become almost impossible to disentangle. Distinguishing between the two matters, however. Rather than being always two sides of the same coin, the expansion of carceral machinery and the economic policies associated with neoliberalism were in some cases at odds—especially at the local level. Today it may seem predictable, even natural, that calls for increased policing and lower property taxes would go together. In Los Angeles, however, reconciling demands for “more police” and “no new taxes” remained a riddle to be solved until almost the end of the 1980s. How they ultimately became reconciled is the puzzle at the center of this article.
A local approach focused on the fiscal dilemmas of police expansion reveals a more conflictual relationship between social austerity and carceral state-building than historians have typically suggested. At a time when state and federal governments built more prisons than ever using income taxes and bonds, cities such as Los Angeles struggled to navigate an urban fiscal crisis marked by diminished aid from Washington, growing indebtedness, and taxpayer unrest. This article adds to historians’ understanding of the urban fiscal crisis and the tax revolt by considering how debates around public safety intersected with battles over inflation, welfare, and especially the tax burden. By the mid-1970s, the runaway cost of the federally funded War on Crime raised doubts about the viability of what Max Felker-Kantor and others term “law-and-order liberalism.” In Los Angeles, the 1973 election of Mayor Tom Bradley—the city’s first African American mayor—brought a fiscal moderate to City Hall with promises to make government more efficient and accountable (Figure 2). A retired LAPD officer himself, Bradley curtailed police spending and urged voters to embrace a philosophy of law and order with limits. The passage of Proposition 13 seemed to confirm that voters favored balanced budgets even at the expense of essential services. Yet, as this article demonstrates, to interpret the vote as a mandate for fiscal restraint in general was a critical misreading. No sooner was the LAPD forced to accept a hiring freeze and budget cuts than Mayor Bradley was inundated with angry letters from the same white and homeowning neighborhoods that led the charge for lower property taxes. As one breathless Westsider explained, “YOU WANT OUR MONEY WE WANT OUR SAFETY.”Footnote 9
Mayor-elect Tom Bradley greets supporters at his victory celebration in 1973. Source: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection, Library Digital Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. By permission of The Regents of the University of California.
In this second phase of the tax revolt, organized white homeowners regrouped behind a new demand: more police; no new taxes. The fact that even the LAPD was not spared after Proposition 13 turned the allocation of limited police resources into a distributive struggle. Focusing on the historically segregated areas of the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles, the article shows how a growing number of homeowners came to see themselves as deprived of their fair share of police protection by a city government they trusted less each year. Implicitly or explicitly, proponents of this homeowner populism favored a municipal government that prioritized their own lives and properties at the expense of residents they regarded as an economic burden. The perception that crime had invaded upstanding, law-abiding neighborhoods reflected an increase in sensationalized crime coverage in local and national media, and a concerted effort by law enforcement to blame the city’s first Black mayor. Such coverage was rarely subtle. Rather, headlines like “Marauders From the Inner City Prey on L.A.’s Suburbs” left no doubt in readers’ minds as to where to direct their fears. Crucially, the public attention paid to suburban crime obscured the fact that it was residents of South and East Los Angeles who experienced the greatest vulnerability to interpersonal violence. Black and brown communities staked their own claims on the LAPD. They too demanded to be recognized as “law-abiding taxpayers.” But as these Angelenos found, access to homeownership, rising property values, and whiteness provided other areas a powerful advantage when it came to shaping public policy. At the end of the 1980s, a tragic killing in West LA drew an overwhelming public response that broke the deadlock on police funding and began an era of blank checks for the LAPD.Footnote 10
At a time of political fracture and zero-sum thinking, arguments about the proper size, cost, and priorities of the LAPD raised fundamental questions—about what governments do, whose interests they serve, which lives and properties deserve protection, and who pays.Footnote 11 Demands for more police and lower taxes fit somewhat awkwardly within an image of the 1970s and 1980s as a time of weak public trust and diminished expectations. On this issue at least, tax revolters demanded more of local government, not less. Above all, they seemed to expect government to do more with less.Footnote 12 Yet it was not the case that voters expected “something for nothing,” as one influential study claimed at the time of Proposition 13.Footnote 13 Rather than an instance of magical thinking, calls to protect the Valley and the Westside—from lawbreakers and tax-takers alike—evinced a coherent theory of government: one founded on the inviolability of white property and the perpetuation of white homeowners’ fiscal power. How homeowner populism overcame the fiscal limits of law and order is the story to which this essay now turns.
Law and Order … with Limits
Perhaps nowhere illustrates the fiscal limits of law and order in the age of the tax revolt better than Southern California. Long recognized as a trendsetter in national politics, the Los Angeles region was both a tribune of the taxpayer revolt and a laboratory for the policies of mass incarceration as the nation’s “carceral capital.”Footnote 14 With the election of Tom Bradley as the city’s first Black mayor in 1973, LA also became an early test case for the idea that African American political leadership could advance the goals of the civil rights movement locally amid a racist backlash and welfare state retrenchment. Four months after Angelenos elected Tom Bradley on a platform of transformative change, the world fell apart. Three decades of unprecedented economic growth screeched to a halt in October 1973 when a consortium of oil producers placed an embargo on exports to the United States. A new and strange monster known as “stagflation” reared its ugly head as inflation and unemployment rose together. The nation’s mayors rushed “hat in hand, to Washington,” only to be turned away by Richard Nixon and later, Nixon’s post-Watergate replacement, Gerald Ford. Under Ford, even the federally funded War on Crime that trained and built up police forces in the 1960s was dramatically rolled back. Years away from the vote on Proposition 13, Los Angeles and other cities already struggled to maintain their payrolls and the quality of public services.Footnote 15
While the federal government starved cities from above, local governments also faced mounting fiscal pressures from below. First, high inflation caused property tax assessments to soar, resulting in higher tax bills for homeowners on both sides of the color line who were already angry at their loss of purchasing power. This squeeze on taxpayers resulted in anti-liberal backlash and failed bond measures that set the stage for the eventual vote on Proposition 13. A second source of cities’ budget woes came from public sector unions. As inflation galloped ahead, some 41,000 unionized workers in the City of Los Angeles fought hard to protect their real wages and benefits, such as pensions. In 1974, the city narrowly avoided a strike when the council voted to provide 16,000 employees with an average raise of 8.5 percent. As the price of short-term labor peace, the city was forced to dip into its cash reserves.Footnote 16
Restless taxpayers and overextended budgets sapped governments’ ability to invest in public services—including crime control. Before the 1973 recession, federal support for local law enforcement had seemed almost unassailable. Democrats and Republicans alike supported the War on Crime as an extension of civil rights and antipoverty initiatives intended to quell the long, hot summers of riots and protest that swept urban America in the 1960s. Testifying before the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (better known as the Kerner Commission), Chief Tom Reddin accurately predicted that 1968 would be “the year of the Cop.” Within a few years, however, both public officials and taxpayers had become disillusioned with the crime war and its vision of “liberal law-and-order.” As a response to the urban uprisings of the 1960s, this vision aimed to prevent and control crime and eradicate racist policing through a combination of enhanced training, professionalization, police-community cooperation, and procedural reforms. Spending on the War on Crime had ballooned from roughly $50 million to $880 million in only a few years, President Ford complained in a speech to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. At a time when Americans waited in breadlines or in lines for rationed gasoline, Ford drew the chiefs’ attention to another “shortage”: “the shortage of easy answers” on crime. He hammered home the same message in a speech to the California legislature. Far from solving or even reducing crime, the War on Crime had dragged on the nation’s economy and inflated Americans’ expectations about what government—including the carceral state—could accomplish.Footnote 17
Law-and-order liberalism also came under fire in Los Angeles. In August 1972, then-Councilman Bradley unveiled a new crime control solution for the city. Three years earlier, Bradley had run unsuccessfully to defeat the incumbent mayor Sam Yorty, who smeared Bradley as soft on crime and “anti-police” even though Bradley was himself a retired LAPD officer. With a rematch with Yorty on the horizon, Bradley looked to advertise his credentials as a crimefighter with a creative and cost-effective approach to public safety. He suggested that ordinary civilians could be trained to work alongside police officers to spot criminal activity. Patrolling the city in unmarked cars, these volunteers would help “saturate” communities and “deter crime.” “On the basis of twenty-one years’ experience as a police officer,” he intoned, “I’ve come to the conclusion that we simply have to have this kind of citizen cooperation with the law enforcement agencies if we’re ever going to win this battle against crime.” Bradley’s remarks indicated just how much debates about public safety had shifted. Historians have shown how Black liberal mayors sought to balance tough policing with policies to uphold fairness and racial justice. But Bradley also pursued these aims alongside the goal of fiscal discipline. He believed in a version of law and order with limits. Asked by a reporter whether he considered the LAPD to be understaffed, Bradley stood his ground. “No amount of police officers can do the job alone,” he answered.Footnote 18
The “year of the cop” was over. From his successful campaign for mayor to his retirement in 1993, Bradley pledged to make hard decisions, even if it meant cutting city services; even, it turned out, if it meant cutting police. Upon his inauguration, Bradley instructed each city department to come up with cuts that it could live with. The resulting budget shaved over $12 million in spending without resorting to layoffs or a significant reduction in the quality of services. The largest savings came from the police department, which faced a $2.75 million cutback, as a reporter was quick to point out at the budget press conference. But Bradley insisted that the police had not been singled out for austerity. As the biggest single budget item, the LAPD’s cut was proportionate to its outsize cost. The mayor was confident that Angelenos would not experience a decline in police services because, rather than laying off police, the savings would be realized through the cancellation of planned promotions and a more stringent use of overtime. While other cities were punished for their alleged profligacy in the 1970s, LA achieved a balanced budget. The bond rating agency Moody’s rewarded Bradley’s fiscal conservatism by upgrading the city’s credit rating from “Aa” to “Aaa”—the highest rating.Footnote 19
Even still, in cutting police spending, the new mayor waded into dangerous waters. Bond rating agencies were not the only audience the mayor needed to please. In the days that followed, Bradley fought back attacks that he had placed an “anti-police” budget before the council. He pointed out that, in percentage terms, the cut to the LAPD ranked nineteenth among all departments. These were lean times, and the city could not afford to protect any department from the new fiscal reality, he countered. “We are not cutting back on the number of personnel,” the mayor emphasized. “As a matter of fact, we expect to expand our police department in the coming years.”Footnote 20 This message—that fiscal restraint was compatible with growing an already large and powerful police force—would come to haunt his long tenure as mayor. Law-and-order liberalism’s reign was ending. The revolt of the homeowner populists was about to begin.
“There Is No Alternative”: Misreading the Tax Revolt
It was no coincidence that the taxpayer revolt first exploded in Southern California. With its available land and frontier attitude, no region better symbolized the promise of suburban plenty after World War II. All that seemed to change in the 1970s, however, as the privileges long afforded to suburbia came under existential threat. Here and around the country, homeowners experienced a sense of “suburban crisis” as an era of cheap single-family housing, low property taxes, and homogenous neighborhoods came to an end. Between 1960 and 1977, the Anglo share of the Valley’s population fell from 92 to 78 percent.Footnote 21 No longer an agricultural hinterland or even a segregated frontier, suburban Los Angeles was becoming more of a microcosm of Southern California in all its racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity.Footnote 22 Yet existing homeowners were not always willing to accept the shifting character of Los Angeles. Families that had bought their homes in segregated communities feared that their new neighbors would lead to a decline in their property values or put strain on public services. Changing demographics and the built environment also became wrapped up in debates about the growing influence of foreign investment. Under Mayor Bradley, LA emerged as not only the country’s second-largest city, but also as a global center of finance and real estate, spurred on by tax abatements and other policies to lure investment. Against Bradley’s vision of LA as a “world city,” homeowners in the Valley and on the Westside joined the movement for “slow growth.” As one angry Westsider put it, “The homeowner doesn’t care about the Pacific Rim.”Footnote 23
In Los Angeles, the slow growth movement laid much of the groundwork for the tax revolt. Believing that their taxes had been squandered, and their rights as property owners trampled, slow-growth activists sought to take power away from the Downtown real estate lobby and its enablers in city government. Participants in the movement upheld exclusionary zoning rules, blocked the construction of new multifamily housing, and steered development away from their own backyards. They found eager allies in a pair of longtime city council members. Councilman Ernani Bernardi represented the seventh district in the Valley from 1961 until his retirement in 1993. In 1975, Bernardi successfully sued his colleagues on the council as a private citizen to limit the use of tax incentives for Downtown redevelopment. Also in 1975, another champion of slow growth was elected on the Westside in Zev Yaroslavsky. In almost forty years in office at the city and county levels, Yaroslavsky made a name for himself defending ordinary residents against the power of developers and other special interests.Footnote 24
Concerns with crime at first figured minimally in the slow growth movement and the broader push for homeowner populism. “I am very pleased with the city Fire and Police protection,” a businessman from the Valley admitted even as he declared his support for the area to secede from Los Angeles. To the extent that policing was a source of anger in these circles, it was primarily as a symptom of the larger problem of a local government that wasted taxpayers’ money on Downtown. “Police protection is greater in the downtown Los Angeles area,” a local realtor and secession leader informed an audience in this period. And yet, “many communities in the Valley have a higher crime rate,” he claimed in 1976.Footnote 25 Yet perceptions of public safety soon began to change. Between 1977 and 1978, thirteen women were murdered in and around the San Fernando Valley. The story of the “Hillside Strangler” became one of the most notorious serial killings in the history of Los Angeles. It also became an immediate media sensation, given the victims’ identities and the gruesomeness of their deaths. In a city where Black and Latino youth died every week from gang violence and the drug trade, it took a serial killer preying upon mostly white and middle-class women to stir suburban Angelenos to action. As they demanded their “fair share” of protection from crime, white residents of the Valley and Westside ran up against an urban fiscal crisis that severely limited the city’s ability to provide basic services without raising taxes.
On June 7, 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13 in a landslide. They did so over the warnings of big business and big labor alike. Governor Jerry Brown, a centrist Democrat, dismissed Proposition 13 as “a mirage,” while Tom Bradley called it “a destruction of local government as I know it.” California officials predicted a loss of $3.9 billion to school districts in the first year and notified 29,000 of the state’s teachers that they may soon be out of a job. The Bradley administration braced itself to lay off 8,000 employees including 2,100 police employees and 1,000 firefighters. In the end, such appeals failed to sway enough of the electorate. “The talk of chaos and rapists in the streets is hogwash,” a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) economist declared shortly before the vote. In a victory speech from Downtown Los Angeles, Howard Jarvis fashioned himself as a revolutionary leading a righteous mob of sans-culottes ready to overthrow California’s ancien regime. “To ignore us will be political suicide,” he warned. Six months later, Jarvis appeared in a profile for People magazine. In the accompanying full-page photograph, “the father of the tax revolt” grins and raises his fist—the white taxpayer’s answer to the Black Power salute (Figure 3).Footnote 26
Howard Jarvis raises a triumphant fist for People in 1978. Source: “The Father of the Tax Revolt is Pleased with His Baby,” People, December 25, 1978, 82. Published with permission from PEOPLE©1978, People Inc. All rights reserved.
California’s cities were in serious financial trouble even before the surprise success of Proposition 13. Los Angeles’s 1977 budget contained $130 million in cuts, and the 1978 budget even cut from the police and fire departments. The success of Proposition 13 stunned public officials: the equivalent of being hit with a “two-by-four in the snout,” the Wall Street Journal imagined. Overnight, $234 million in property taxes—roughly a quarter of all revenue—evaporated from the city’s coffers. Sacramento stepped in to rescue cities, counties, and school districts using a one-time $5-billion surplus to forestall a total disaster. Even with the state’s bailout, LA was forced to make emergency, across-the-board cuts. Some 1,000 police officers would be let go in a decision that the mayor called unavoidable. “To those who say, ‘I don’t want any police layoffs’: I join you,” Bradley announced. The next words the mayor said would soon be made famous by Margaret Thatcher: “There is no alternative.”Footnote 27
For Bradley, the meaning of the tax revolt was simple: local governments had been living beyond their means for too long, and not just in California. In a speech at a conference for the nation’s mayors less than two years later, he warned that urban America was now “living on a fixed income” and “under orders to operate within a new set of fiscal restraints.” Yet the meaning of Proposition 13’s success was not actually self-evident. Contrary to Bradley’s assessment, most voters who endorsed property tax relief did not see it as a mandate for shrinking government. “No one disputes that the passage of Proposition 13 expressed a collective preference for lower taxes,” the political scientist Jack Citrin observed. “Such certainty dissolves, however, when one attempts to define the voters’ intentions in more precise terms.” For most supporters, the measure was less a revolt against government itself than a protest of the existing allocation of public spending. One poll found that 85 percent of Californians believed that government services could be maintained exactly as they were, if only government was “made more efficient.” If cuts had to be made, large majorities preferred to target one of two areas: welfare programs or public payrolls. Seventy-six percent of respondents favored cutting welfare personnel and 63 percent favored cutting welfare benefits.Footnote 28
Of all services, Californians were most opposed to cutting law enforcement. In fact, 16 percent hoped that police services would be improved now that Proposition 13 had passed. The measure’s architect, Howard Jarvis, shared this belief. Where the measure’s opponents had warned that cutting property taxes would devastate the quality of local services, Jarvis argued the inverse. In his view, property taxes should be spent on police and fire departments and other “property-related services” only. The same sentiment was expressed by members of the Valley-based Citizen-Police Support Council Corporation. “We need to get rid of all the deadwood [sic] in City Government,” the group wrote to Bradley, “so that we can have the money where it belongs—in protective services, both Police and Fire Departments.” The group perhaps did not realize that these services were already the city’s largest expenditures. Police, fire, and ambulance services accounted for as much as 40 percent of the budget that was paid for through taxes.Footnote 29
Following Proposition 13, Mayor Tom Bradley sought ways to reduce spending citywide. But Bradley recognized that being seen as “anti-police” was the third rail of local politics. He especially needed to tread carefully as the city’s first African American mayor. In the end, the final cut to the LAPD was only half of what Bradley first proposed, and no police were laid off. Still, the perception remained that Bradley did not take crime issues in the Westside and the Valley seriously. For one thing, the Hillside Strangler was still at large, and the trail had reportedly grown cold. Residents on the Westside were also growing restless. In early 1979, a flyer circulated alleging that crime was up 14 percent in the area because the LAPD failed to respond to 250,000 calls for a lack of officers. The City Administrator struggled to find where these specious statistics had come from. But it hardly mattered: the damage was already done. In one angry letter, a woman from the Valley wondered if the city should not just “abolish the police department” and start over. “I am not asking,” she told the mayor. “I am demanding what I have a right to ask for, equal protection for my property and my life.”Footnote 30
“They Don’t Want to Pay”
By the end of the 1970s, the belief that the Bradley administration failed to protect hardworking, taxpaying Anglos and their property was a force to be reckoned with. “West L.A. man beaten ‘for no good reason,’” blared the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in a front-page headline above the fold. “Los Angeles is experiencing the worst crime wave in its history,” the Valley-based Daily News also declared around this time. “Residents of our city—particularly in the high-crime areas which includes the San Fernando Valley—are afraid to go out at night.” Though coverage of crime was sensationalized and often misleading, this did not mean that fear of violence was always unfounded. The Hillside Strangler remained at large in 1979, having killed thirteen women throughout the Valley. In fact, the killer—or rather killers—had already become known to the LAPD. Near the end of 1979, police in Washington State arrested Kenneth Bianchi for the murder of two women in their jurisdiction. Bianchi then confessed to having carried out the Hillside murders alongside his cousin, Angelo Buono. It turned out that at least three different women in Los Angeles had called to report Bianchi to the authorities. “After questioning Bianchi in late February 1978, an LAPD detective decided ‘there was nothing to connect him’” to the killings, despite clear evidence to the contrary. In another chilling detail, Bianchi had once tried—and failed—to enroll in the LAPD.Footnote 31
In September 1980, Gates debuted his 8500 Plan at a press conference. Los Angeles was on its way to recording over 1,000 homicides that year—a figure that placed it behind only “the murder capital of the nation,” New York City. The reported number of burglaries, robberies, and other property offenses also increased in 1980 in both the Westside and the Valley. Gates’s proposal would raise the authorized number of officers by 1,600—an almost 25 percent increase. Besides the obvious fiscal challenge of budgeting for more police, implementing the 8500 Plan was made more difficult by state and federal law. The LAPD had come under a federal consent decree to diversify its personnel by hiring more women and minorities. In 1977, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration—the agency created to carry out the federal War on Crime—brought legal action against the City of Los Angeles over its pattern of race- and gender-based discrimination in police hiring. An appeals court upheld the decision in 1979, cutting off federal funding for the city’s crime control initiatives including programs related to gangs and drug abuse. The resulting court-ordered reforms became an easy scapegoat for voters already convinced that the LAPD had been unfairly maligned and defunded. Mayor Tom Bradley began to receive angry letters blaming affirmative action policies for violent crime. One demanded that all “vacancies in the Police Department be filled NOW without regard to sex, race, color or creed.”Footnote 32
Opposition to affirmative action policies dovetailed with plainly racist coverage of suburban crime. From the beginning of the War on Crime, policymakers and the public had conflated “lawlessness” with young Black men living in riot-torn urban neighborhoods. Now, more than a decade later, a new narrative had taken shape nationally. “The wave of violent crime is reaching into homes, restaurants, churches, even halls of justice,” reported a 1981 investigation in New West magazine titled “Is Anyone Safe Anymore?” “Over the last five years, the murder toll in Los Angeles rose by more than 58 percent,” a pull-quote informed the reader. “During the same period, manpower in the police department dropped by 1,000 officers.” The next month, Time ran a major story of its own on “The Curse of Violent Crime.” No longer confined to “the ghettos and depressed cities,” senseless acts of violence now threatened Americans “everywhere,” the story warned. As evidence of this trend, Time highlighted a recent mass shooting at a diner in West Los Angeles, committed by a disgruntled former waitress and her two friends. The trio had entered with guns, herded nine employees into the meat freezer, and opened fire. The perpetrators were “all black,” Time made sure to note.Footnote 33
In all the racist and alarmist crime coverage of this period, one story became more notorious than any other in Los Angeles. “Marauders From Inner City Prey on L.A.’s Suburbs,” blared a front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times in 1981. Over a decade before experts and lawmakers coined the term “super-predator” to justify zero-tolerance policies against Black and Latino teenagers, Los Angeles’s newspaper of record likewise warned that a new breed of “senseless” youth was committing acts of unprecedented “savagery.” The authors claimed that these inner-city “marauders” were responsible for 42 percent of all “predatory crime” in the “western suburbs.” According to a “computer analysis,” the typical “marauder” or “predator” was a Black man from the Southside between the ages of 18 and 24. The accompanying illustrations—a map of the freeways “marauders” used to invade the suburbs, a graph of “predatory felonies” broken down by race, and photographs of public housing tenants drinking beer and playing craps on welfare “check day”—only reinforced the idea that dispossessed youth were waging race and class warfare by robbing and burglarizing the rich. So outrageous and sensationalized was the article that the Times issued a formal retraction and apology in 2020, almost forty years after its publication.Footnote 34
The suburban crimewave narrative helped make local debates about crime and public safety into a struggle over the distribution of police capacity among neighborhoods already segregated by race and class. By the end of 1980, the LAPD predicted the city would hit 1,000 murders, 20 percent of them “gang-related homicides” in the Westside, Valley, South Bay, and Downtown. Vice and property crimes were also reportedly up in wealthy areas. “Chic Studio City turning into vice ‘combat zone’ at night,” warned the front page of the Valley News. “LAPD Shows 16% Hike in Primarily Affluent W.L.A. in 1979,” announced the front page of the Westside section of the Times. The article quoted the commanding officer for the area, who attributed the spike in robberies and break-ins to three groups: Black youth, heroin addicts, and “undocumented aliens.” The officer added that the last of these groups often avoided suspicion “because they are taken for domestic workers” in wealthy residential neighborhoods. He therefore urged Westside readers to be vigilant—to “challenge” people “who don’t appear to belong.” According to this logic, any homeowner who failed to observe the suburban color line would become “easy prey” for “‘have-nots’” seeking money or primal revenge.Footnote 35
In early 1981, the LAPD launched “a 300-officer task force” from its Van Nuys Division. By reassigning officers from other areas of the city to the Valley, the LAPD made seventy arrests in two days—mostly of “truants.” Immediately, the department announced a major reduction of crimes including robberies, home burglaries, and auto thefts: the offenses that likely mattered most to area homeowners. “These truants and narcotics users are burglars,” the area’s field commander told the Los Angeles Times. By rounding up wayward youths who should be in school, the LAPD was “getting the burglars off the street,” he contended. The increased police attention did not last, however. Right away, two Black city council members asked why a predominantly Anglo area should receive extra police “protection” at the expense of Black and brown communities (Figure 4). Councilman Robert Farrell accused Chief Gates of “playing to the media” now that a greater number of suburban whites were dying from violence. Added Farrell, “Do we not die in South and East Los Angeles?” Ultimately Farrell’s argument won the day. Near the end of January, the LAPD shifted the Crimes Task Force from Van Nuys to the streets of South Los Angeles; or, as the Los Angeles Times put it, from a “predominantly white” community to one “where barred windows are a way of life.”Footnote 36
Residents demonstrate against crime and gangs at a Baptist church in South Los Angeles in 1983. Source: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection, Library Digital Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. By permission of The Regents of the University of California.
This racialized double standard when it came to public safety had also touched the Hillside Strangler case. Though most of the women killed were white and middle class, the Strangler’s first victim, nineteen-year-old Yolanda Washington, was neither. Washington was a Black sex worker who plied her trade on Sunset Boulevard, which made her vulnerable to violence at the hands of clients and police alike. “There were stories about the kind of life Yolanda was leading in Hollywood during the months before her death,” hinted a lengthy profile in the Los Angeles Times. It seemed the police had also heard these “stories,” and that Washington’s reputation made solving her case less of a priority for detectives. “I felt they acted like she was a prostitute and they get killed every day,” Yolanda’s sister said. “I still think that’s how they’d feel if it wasn’t for the others.” The lack of concern officers apparently showed toward the murder of a Black “prostitute” was mirrored by how the Times covered the Hillside Strangler killings. The newspaper’s profile of a white and middle-class victim from that same month made sure to dispel any victim-blaming on the part of the reader. “Slain Girl Trusting but Cautious,” read the headline. “Victim Loving and Very Generous, Best Friend Says.”Footnote 37
For Mayor Tom Bradley, sensationalized crime coverage and reports of a police department that was spread too thin could not have come at a worse time. Local media interpreted Gates’s increasingly public persona and willingness to criticize Bradley as signs that the chief was considering a run for mayor. In the LAPD’s annual report, Gates penned an open letter addressed to “The People of Los Angeles.” With the city facing “a tidal wave of violence,” he warned, “accompanied by an unprecedented loss of police officers,” the LAPD could not “provide the same level of protection and service” residents expected. Meanwhile, the city was mired in negotiations with the police union over its demand for an 18 percent raise backed by the threat of a strike. Bradley began to soften his position on the 8500 Plan, and, in early 1981, came out in favor of an “anti-crime” parcel tax to increase LAPD hiring. Bradley’s support took the wind out of Gates’s sails as the chief ultimately declined to run for mayor. In another rematch with Sam Yorty, Bradley cruised to victory. The next day, the front page of the Los Angeles Times announced that the mayor had bested the police and fire unions who sought to remove him. One business executive from the Valley commended Bradley for standing up to these “special interest groups.” Now was the time, he urged, for the city to “get on the attack.”Footnote 38
Unfortunately for Tom Bradley, he also needed the Police Protective League. Two months into the new term, the mayor and the police union reluctantly joined forces in the campaign to pass the special police tax, labeled as Proposition A. The ballot measure had been designed to circumvent the constraints of Proposition 13, which allowed for cities to establish a “parcel tax” on property with the support of two-thirds of voters. Enlarging the LAPD enjoyed broad electoral support. While radical civil rights organizations, including the Black Panther Party and the Coalition Against Police Abuse, organized to defeat the measure, the combined resources of antipolice groups paled in comparison to the forces of law and order. The District Attorney and the Police Commission endorsed the measure, as did the Los Angeles Times editorial board. The city’s paper of record also provided implicit support through its crime coverage. “Undermanned, Underappreciated: LAPD Morale Down as Crime Rate Rises,” declared one headline. Predictably, Proposition A’s most ardent advocate was the Police Protective League, which went door-to-door canvassing and ran a radio advertisement that falsely reported a 410 percent increase in the Valley’s murder rate. “If the night watch stays small,” a narrator warned, “the bad guys stay free.”Footnote 39
Despite these efforts, it was the argument for more police but no new taxes that carried the day. Only 42 percent of voters backed Proposition A—well below the two-thirds majority needed under Proposition 13. The only area with majority support was Zev Yaroslavsky’s Westside district: the city’s bastion of law-and-order liberalism, where robust support for policing combined with a more permissive view of taxation. While Angelenos soundly rejected Proposition A, this was not necessarily a vote against police expansion. As Daryl Gates put it in a speech to the LAPD rank-and-file, “The people didn’t reject the idea of more police.” The lesson of Proposition A’s failure was that voters “want more police officers, they just don’t want to have to pay for them.”Footnote 40
“A Budget Is a Statement of Priorities”
Los Angeles in the early 1980s was at an impasse: a deadlock between the demands for more police and no new taxes. At the same time, a decade of cuts to public services could no longer be hidden. Libraries had seen their hours cut by a third. Three hundred and ten thousand trees needed trimming. Decades-old garbage trucks sputtered through potholed and crumbling streets, now scheduled to be resurfaced every forty-four years. The police budget now absorbed almost as much funding as the fire department, public works, parks, and libraries combined. Caught between the strictures of austerity and demands to crack down on crime, LA officials increasingly adopted regressive and predatory fiscal policies to enhance the LAPD’s power and capacity. The 1981–82 budget enabled the city to hire sixty new parking enforcement officers with the explicit aim of generating revenue. Revenue from parking tickets and increased fees on city services provided an advantage over property taxes as they were not subject to voter approval. Yet this budget strategy was at best a partial workaround to the limits imposed by Proposition 13 and the taxpayer revolt. At worst, it set a dangerous precedent that anticipated the infamous police gangsterism and “catch-and-release” tactics of cities such as Ferguson, Missouri, in the Black Lives Matter era. As in twenty-first-century Ferguson, the strategy of relying on predatory fines and fees in the absence of a progressive tax system guaranteed that poor and criminalized Angelenos of color became targets for the extraction of wealth by the state. Yet ironically, it was “law-abiding taxpayers” who continued to see themselves as victims of government overreach and plunder. “A mans [sic] home is not his castle anymore,” one couple from the Westside complained to the mayor, but rather “a rip off for the politicians and freeloaders in this country.”Footnote 41
While predatory and regressive taxes helped keep the lights on, the city appeared to be running out of options to hire more police. With an anticipated $250-million budget deficit in 1983, Bradley appeared on local television and radio stations to plead for a one-time $90 tax increase. The boost was necessary to ensure the city could meet its basic commitments, he argued, including paying the police it already had. The deadlock showed signs of cracking after the 1984 Summer Olympics. The temporary deployment of 8,500 LAPD officers using federal and Olympic funding convinced some taxpayers of the value of a major increase in law enforcement. Yet the experience of the temporary Olympic security buildup also made police expansion more difficult by renewing the distributional struggle over LAPD resources. In November, an estimated one hundred protesters from the Valley showed up at a Police Commission vote on whether to change the deployment policy. “Hands Off Our Police,” their signs read. Six months later, another special police tax lost at the ballot box. “Prop. 1 Pits Concern Over Crime Against Dislike of Tax Hikes,” the Los Angeles Times reported. Though more than half of voters backed the measure, it still fell over twenty points short of the necessary two-thirds majority set by Proposition 13.Footnote 42
The police expansion issue languished for over two years following the defeat of Proposition 1. But a sudden tragedy in 1988 handed Daryl Gates a breakthrough. In February, a young woman named Karen Toshima was killed by gangs in a trendy nightlife district in Westwood. Toshima was celebrating a promotion at the advertising agency where she worked in Studio City, in the Valley, when a “young South L.A. gunman” shot twice “into a crowd of Saturday night strollers.” Up to that point, the Westwood neighborhood had seemed immune from the drugs and violence reportedly spreading into the Valley and other parts of the Westside. Toshima “died not in a gang-dominated neighborhood,” the editors of the Los Angeles Times opined, “but on a stroll through lively Westwood Village near the UCLA campus. Her death is a reminder that gang terror knows no boundaries.” The newspaper’s editors called for a complete crackdown on street crime, no matter the cost. “More money, more police, tougher laws and harsher penalties belong in every community arsenal to cut down on the cross fire.” In 1989, a twenty-one-year-old gang member was convicted for Toshima’s murder and sentenced to twenty-seven years to life.Footnote 43
The political impact of the Toshima killing is difficult to overstate. Within days, the city council funneled millions of dollars in emergency funds to the escalating war on gangs and drugs. Police patrols in the area tripled. At least thirty detectives were assigned to solve the case, boosted by the promise of a $25,000 reward for any information leading to the killer’s capture. The LAPD declared 1988 “The Year of the Gang” and organized a “gang summit” attended by police departments from around Southern California. In April, the LAPD made over 1,400 arrests in a single sweep as part of “Operation Hammer.” To accommodate the influx of arrests—the most in one day since the 1965 Watts uprising—police turned the grounds of the Memorial Coliseum in South Los Angeles into a makeshift detention facility. That same month, a crowd of three hundred police officers, their families, and other supporters packed the city council chambers to demand further LAPD expansion. “A budget is a statement of priorities,” echoed Councilman Yaroslavsky. “[I]f fighting gang violence in this city is our highest priority, it should be reflected in our budget and it will be at the expense of virtually anything else.”Footnote 44 Twenty years removed from the 1960s War on Crime, a new “year of the cop” had arrived (Figure 5).
LAPD Chief Daryl Gates (middle) and LA County Sheriff Sherman Block (right) receive a metaphorical “blank check” for gang suppression from Governor George Deukmejian (left) in 1986. Source: Los Angeles Times Photographic Collection, Library Digital Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. By permission of The Regents of the University of California.
This outpouring of grief and fear in response to the Toshima tragedy stood in stark contrast to the relative indifference shown toward Black and brown victims of gang violence. Residents of South and East Los Angeles had endured hundreds of gang-related tragedies in recent years that hardly seemed to register outside these communities. “We are tired and we’re not going to take it anymore,” California Assemblywoman Maxine Waters told an audience of Black Angelenos days after the Toshima killing. “[O]ur babies cannot play in the front yard because they might be shot.” Like other Black liberals in the crack era, Waters accused the federal government and the Democratic Party of turning a blind eye to “the lethal infestation of drugs in our communities.” Writing in The Nation magazine, she echoed 1988 presidential candidate Jesse Jackson in calling for a robust federal response that combined enhanced policing and sentencing with investments in urban communities. The call to fuse punishment with prevention harkened back to the War on Crime and its conception as an antipoverty and equal rights initiative. Meanwhile, the suggestion that Black neighborhoods were systematically under-policed anticipated the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. By then a member of the House of Representatives, Waters voted against the enormous crime bill over its expansion of the death penalty. In doing so, she broke with the majority of the Congressional Black Caucus, which cited federal funding for police departments and community policing as reasons to pass the law.Footnote 45
In the meantime, the tragic death of Karen Toshima rallied support for liberal law and order in Los Angeles. “[A]s long as the actual violence was more or less confined to the ghetto,” Mike Davis observed in 1988, “the gang wars were also a voyeuristic titillation to white Yuppie Westsiders devouring lurid accounts in the L.A. Times Magazine.” Taken as evidence that gang violence could strike down anyone, anywhere, Toshima’s murder bolstered the case for limitless spending on the LAPD. As Councilman Yaroslavsky predicted, the city’s next two annual budgets included money to add more than 900 officers and a new garbage removal fee. With a robust budget of $875 million and a force of 8,400 officers, the department was bigger than ever. Not wanting to be outdone by the Westside council member, Tom Bradley named crime fighting his “number one priority” and called for yet another 400-officer increase alongside a doubled sanitation fee and a new tax on parking.Footnote 46
Conclusion: When More is Less
The massive investment in police, jails, and prisons in the United States, like “actually existing neoliberalism” around the world, has been a geographically uneven process. As such, it is profoundly shaped by political struggles at the scale of the city and neighborhood, as much as by federal election outcomes or debates in the global realm of ideas. In Los Angeles, in the vise of the urban fiscal crisis, “tough on crime” and fiscal restraint were pitted against each other. As the Bradley administration struggled to contain the costs of the LAPD, angry voters in the Valley and on the Westside blamed the city’s first Black mayor for reportedly out-of-control crime and cuts to the LAPD that they read about in local newspapers. In angry protests to the mayor, they invoked their identity as taxpayers and homeowners, trampled by a corrupt or incompetent political establishment that in their view coddled criminal offenders, failed to uphold public order, and refused to protect the law-abiding majority. These homeowner populists demanded a redistribution of power, resources, and safety from alleged tax-takers and lawbreakers to the purportedly helpless homeowner. It took the tragic murder of Karen Toshima in 1988 to overcome the fiscal limits on law and order that anti-tax homeowners themselves had helped to impose.
Over thirty years since their reconciliation, homeowner populism and law-and-order liberalism are still locked in an awkward but lasting embrace. At the time of Tom Bradley’s retirement in 1993—hastened by the previous year’s uprising and the scandal of the beating of Rodney King—the LAPD had reached a force of 8,400 officers. Revenue from licenses, permits, fines, and fees now accounted for a quarter of the budget, surpassing property taxes and state and federal funding as the largest category of revenue. Bradley’s successor, Republican Richard Riordan, made crime control the top priority of his administration with a promise to add 3,000 officers in the first term. To fund the expansion, Riordan considered privatizing sanitation services and selling off public assets including the Los Angeles International Airport and the Department of Water and Power. While Riordan’s plan proved controversial and ultimately failed, the idea to extract money for policing from other city services and infrastructure continued a trend established in the Bradley era. In the end, it took Washington’s help with the 1994 crime bill to achieve even a more modest increase in officers than what Riordan first pledged. More innovative than Riordan’s attempt to cannibalize local government or his acceptance of federal funding was his decision to issue city bonds to cover the mounting cost of legal settlements from LAPD misconduct. Such instruments—which critics call “police brutality bonds”—are today offered by a growing list of cities navigating the impossible costs of unlimited policing. In Los Angeles alone, $289 million of the annual $1-billion deficit pays “for police misconduct, trip and falls, and other lawsuits” caused by an unaccountable police force and dangerously neglected public infrastructure alike.Footnote 47
That cities are today the prisoners of short-sighted fiscal policies and the imperatives of law and order makes it more remarkable that the LAPD’s ambitions were ever kept in check. In the nation’s carceral capital, a birthplace of the neoliberal consensus, the gears of police expansion ground to a halt in the 1970s and stayed stuck for several years. Understanding how they jammed in the first place begs a reconsideration of the historical connection between mass incarceration and neoliberalism. Only then does it become easier to imagine a future without either.
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