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Leap on Challenges for New Style of Cop Show

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Jorja Leap, adjunct professor of social welfare, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about “East New York,” a new CBS show that aims to represent police officers and the communities that they serve through a restorative lens. This new style of cop show is heavily influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement and the killing of Black and brown people at the hands of police. The show’s creators are “trying to do the right thing and there are kernels of good ideas, but they keep taking shortcuts,” said Leap, who is executive director of the UCLA Social Justice Research Partnership. To better reflect the reality on the streets, “they’ve got to put some meat on the bones” by showing nuances of opinion among characters, noting that not all police officers oppose reform and not all community members are anti-police. “It’s not that everyone doesn’t want cops — they don’t want bad cops,” she said.

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Yaroslavsky, Newton on the L.A. Riots and Police Chief Gates

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Los Angeles Initiative Director Zev Yaroslavsky and Blueprint editor Jim Newton joined the Slate podcast “Slow Burn” to discuss the aftermath of the Rodney King beating in March 1991. A tape of the beating exposed brutality within the Los Angeles Police Department, prompting many to call for Chief Daryl Gates to step down. At the time, the LAPD “saw itself as a paramilitary organization, primarily white and male, and viewed its fundamental charge as maintaining the peace,” Newton said. Yaroslavsky pointed out that the police commission could fire Gates only for a case of moral turpitude. “It was never an issue of whether he would be fired; the issue was whether he could be persuaded to leave,” Yaroslavsky said. The Christopher Commission, launched by former Mayor Tom Bradley and chaired by Warren Christopher, recommended that Gates step down; he did not retire until June 1992.

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Weisburst on Impact of Expanding Police Forces

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An article in the College Fix highlighted research co-authored by Assistant Professor of Public Policy Emily Weisburst on how increasing the size of a police force affects crime and arrest rates. The researchers found that the hiring of an additional 10 to 17 full-time police officers prevented one new homicide per year — a decline that’s twice as large for Black victims in per capita terms. Yet with each extra officer came seven to 22 new low-level arrests for offenses such as liquor violations and drug possession. The research team analyzed police employment data for 242 U.S. cities with populations greater than 50,000 over a 38-year period. “This study provides an estimate of the historical trade-offs of investments in law enforcement and, critically, the resulting implications for communities of color,” the authors said. The findings, first published in a December 2020 working paper, will appear in a forthcoming issue of American Economic Review: Insights. 

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A Spotlight on Community Policing Research

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A USA Today opinion piece written by former Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck and prominent civil rights lawyer Connie Rice highlighted research on community policing led by Adjunct Professor of Social Welfare Jorja Leap. Beck and Rice were part of a team that launched Los Angeles’ Community Safety Partnership (CSP), which they described as a “ ‘whole of community’ alternative to paramilitary enforcement that changes neighborhood conditions to boost safety, build trust, cut police use of force and drop violent crime with fewer arrests.” After conducting an extensive independent review of the program, Leap’s team concluded that with CSP,  “the community feels protected and strengthened.” Beck and Rice wrote that Americans want policing that is holistic, racially fair and effective, but that true criminal justice reform is blocked by a lack of political will to dismantle the “labyrinth of exclusion” created by pervasive inequalities in the nation’s systems of employment, health, wealth, education, housing and justice.

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Measuring Public Support for District Attorney Gascón

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A Los Angeles Times story about a petition to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón cited this year’s UCLA Quality of Life Index, a survey that includes favorability ratings for selected state and local officials. County residents surveyed in March were nearly equally divided in their opinions of the reform-minded D.A., who had a 31% favorability rating compared to 32% unfavorable. However, more respondents had intensely unfavorable opinions (22%) than intensely favorable ones (9%), according to the index produced annually by the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA Luskin. To move forward, recall organizers must collect signatures of support from 10% of L.A. County’s registered voters — a little more than 579,000 people — by Oct. 27. Gascón has also faced lawsuits from prosecutors in his own office, interference on cases from other California law enforcement leaders and an outcry from some crime victims who claim his policies have abandoned them.

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Weisburst on Pinpointing the Source of Racial Disparities in Policing

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Assistant Professor of Public Policy Emily Weisburst co-authored an EconoFact article highlighting racial disparities in policing from an economics research perspective. Protests following the death of George Floyd have brought a new focus to racial disparities in U.S. policing. Economics research has historically sought to understand the role of police officer prejudice or bias in perpetuating the disparities. Newer studies have attempted to evaluate police use-of-force patterns and the effectiveness of reforms such as civilian oversight, de-escalation training and predictive analysis in hiring. Weisburst’s research looks at the extent to which disparity in treatment corresponds to widespread police behavior versus the actions of particular police officers. “Race disparities in policing reflect multiple potential sources of inequities and discrimination,” the authors wrote. They called for more research to pinpoint the source of the disparity and identify the most effective reforms.

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Lens on Disentangling Police Services

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Michael Lens, associate professor of urban planning and public policy, spoke to the Atlantic about the real meaning of “defunding the police.” In addition to dealing with violent crime, many officers are responsible for handling traffic accidents and low-level arrests. Modern policing often involves interacting with people showing signs of mental illness or alcoholism, but the article noted that officers are under-trained to intervene in these cases. Police also serve as “front-line workers for urban homelessness,” Lens explained. “A person who is unhoused interacts constantly with the police, but officers aren’t adequately trained to deal with the issues that those people are dealing with.” The article recommended that cities spend money on homelessness directly, instead of making police responsible for homelessness intervention in addition to other services. Programs in Eugene, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, have “unbundled” police services, instead dispatching medics and mental health counselors to homeless people or others in distress.

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