The Limits of Community Policing by Luis Daniel Gascón Aaron Roussell

Author:Luis Daniel Gascón, Aaron Roussell [Luis Daniel Gascón, Aaron Roussell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781479807567
Google: L1ZxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2019-07-23T05:25:29+00:00

5

No Place for the Mom-and-Pops

We don’t want the Home Depot to get up and leave.

—Captain Himura

One of the first challenges Captain Himura set for himself upon his arrival was to reduce Part 1 crime in the division by 5 percent. Focusing particularly on property crime, Himura decided to make strategic use of his community policing tools, strengthening the division’s crime-prevention capacity by increasing the size of the Community Relations Office and emphasizing the “Business Car.” Officers assigned to this car would liaise specifically with local business interests to learn about and service their “separate concerns,” as Himura put it. At the same time, he began organizing meetings with several corporate boosters, including Chase Bank, Bank of America, McDonald’s, Rite Aid, Ralphs, and Walgreens, to support the Lakeside Boosters, a nonprofit charitable organization sponsoring juvenile programs, college scholarships, and community events supporting LAPD crime-prevention operations, which acquired 501(c)(3) status.1 Although he invited neither the CPAB nor HO volunteers (nor us) to attend, Himura explained later that 80 percent of the proceeds from such closed-door meetings would go to support youth programming. Himura’s administration generally preferred to engage with and solicit Boosters funds from major corporations to the exclusion of mom-and-pop shops—smaller Black-owned businesses. This preference reflected LAPD’s view that the gradual disappearance of mom-and-pops and the influx of newer, brand-name, or “known” businesses—along with concurrent racial and demographic shifts—signaled that the community was moving in a positive, more secure direction, away from Lakeside’s disorderly and economically insolvent past.

Municipal redevelopment—sometimes called “urban renewal”—in LA was a key post-disturbance reform alongside community policing. LA Mayor Tom Bradley, formerly an LAPD Sergeant, helped set up the structure of both the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) in 1965 and Rebuild Los Angeles (RLA) in 1992. Both agencies aimed to address the social and economic needs of the areas most affected by the disturbances, but they did so in divergent ways. CRA was a city agency that favored activist social policies, welfare, public housing, and block grants to invest in the local community. RLA, on the other hand, was a private agency that focused on retail and commercial enterprise and generating consumption rather than revitalizing flagging production. Zilberg (2002) discusses these as emblematic of their respective political-economic eras—RLA had become hostile to CRA-era policies as undermining consumer capitalism by the mid-1990s. Community as a vehicle of political empowerment was replaced with an image of community as a hospitable environment for capital growth. RLA masked this shift by adopting War on Poverty–era language to frame the spaces they sought to target for redevelopment—the “neglected areas” and “zones of need.” Pico-Union, for example, the heart of Rampart Division, became “Cluster No. 1” in RLA’s redevelopment plans, beginning with the redevelopment of a mini-mall attacked in the city uprising. This site was also in the heart of 18th Street gang territory. Police and business partnerships at that time helped to bring together public images of the looter (threat to businesses) and the gang member (threat to public safety), positioning these toward RLA’s goals of redevelopment and LAPD’s goals of crime prevention.

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