‘92 WESTSIDE ELECTIONS : ELECTIONS / WEST HOLLYWOOD : Voters Reject Bid to Create City’s Own Police Force

In the end, West Hollywood voters did support their local sheriff.

They rejected a bitterly divisive ballot measure to create the city’s first police force and end the $8.4-million patrol contract with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Proposition AA, sponsored by a residents group claiming that the Sheriff’s Department is hopelessly insensitive to the city’s many gays, lost by 53% to 47%. The vote seemed to reflect general satisfaction with current protection and deep concern that the costs of setting up a police force would bankrupt the city.

The proposal pitted the city’s traditional leaders against a group of newcomers who upset the city’s politics as usual, although the proposal was not taken seriously until late in the campaign. By late last week, supporters’ massive spending on a succession of campaign mailers had thrown City Hall into near panic.

Although boosters described Tuesday’s 8,349-to-7,462 vote as surprisingly close, opponents said it sent an unmistakable message.

“Almost a thousand votes says something loud and clear. I’d like to see this issue die down,” said Ruth Williams, head of the Save Our Sheriff coalition that opposed the proposal. The alliance included almost every civic group, including the City Council and the renters’ rights Coalition for Economic Survival, traditionally influential in city elections.

West Hollywood Citizens for Better Police Protection sold its proposal as a way to gain better control over law enforcement as well as move the 8-year-old city into adulthood. Critics called it a drive to create a gay police force by a fringe faction of the city’s homosexual community, which accounts for up to a third of the 36,000 residents.

“There was a lot of confusion. When we were at the polls yesterday, I got a feeling that people were very, very angry--the perception that the gay community was trying to take over,” Williams said. “It’s not a gay city. It’s a diverse city. We have to live together. We have to work together.”

She predicted stepped-up attempts to improve relations between the department, the city and gay residents. The Kolts report released this summer praised the Sheriff’s Department’s community policing programs in West Hollywood.

Paul Amirault, who headed the ballot drive, said the results indicated wide dissatisfaction with the department and city leadership, but he did not predict whether the issue will come up again. The campaign sprouted last fall in the wake of huge street protests in West Hollywood against Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto of AB 101, the gay-rights bill. It was led by virtual unknowns but funded almost entirely by gay-rights activist Christopher Fairchild, who lent the campaign about $50,000.

“I don’t believe that anyone at City Hall or the Sheriff’s Department is sitting pretty this morning,” Amirault said. “We were the little guy up against every coalition, commission, committee and group the city could throw at us.”

Supporters had hoped new activism, plus top-of-the-ticket Democrats would mold West Hollywood gays into a solid voting bloc, helped by strong support from women. Gays seldom vote as a bloc on city issues.

It is not yet possible to determine how different parts of the city voted, but many voters interviewed at the polls said a new police force is unnecessary and expressed fears that it would be far too costly for the cash-strapped city.

“I think the sheriffs are doing a fine job and I don’t want to spend the money for a new police department,” Jill Lowy said. Lowy said deputies nabbed an intruder in her west-end home after a break-in last year.

Lowy said the measure appeared to be solely a gay issue.

“They want to be accepted into this community and that’s great, but I don’t think it should be through an authority like a police department,” Lowy said.

“It’s the extremists in the city that are pushing it for all the wrong reasons,” echoed Michael Johnson, a 29-year-old film student.

One possible casualty of the heated campaign is Councilman Paul Koretz, who steadfastly refused to take a stand on the matter until Monday night, when he announced at a City Council meeting that he had voted in favor of the measure by absentee ballot.

Williams, who clashed with Koretz in a failed 1988 bid for a council seat, acidly characterized Koretz as a waffler and predicted he would suffer a political backlash. Koretz led all candidates in April’s council elections and doesn’t face reelection until 1996.

“Paul can’t be trusted to come out on a stand. He should have put his money where his mouth was and he didn’t,” Williams said.

Koretz said he was torn over conflicting accounts about how much a new police department actually would cost. Finally, the councilman said, he decided that “it’s a good enough idea to give it a try.”

“I don’t think it could fail to hurt me to do something other than support the Sheriff’s Department,” Koretz acknowledged Wednesday. “If it has some consequences, so be it.”

He said the voting results signaled “a fair amount” of discontent with the Sheriff’s Department and might encourage another ballot effort in the future.