Council Kills Bernson’s Proposal for a Larger L.A. Police Department

Los Angeles City Council members Wednesday refused to put on the April ballot a proposal by Councilman Hal Bernson to boost the size of the Police Department, saying it would compete with a similar proposal the council approved just the day before.

The difference was that the council’s ballot measure would ask for a tax increase, and Bernson’s would not.

Bernson said he would try to get his competing proposal on the ballot through the initiative process.

By an 8-3 vote, the council killed Bernson’s proposal to ask voters to back a City Charter amendment requiring the mayor and the council to increase the Police Department to 10,000 officers by adding about 550 officers per year. The department now has 7,800 officers.

His plan would force the council to make police manpower its top budget priority every year, said Bernson, who represents the northwestern San Fernando Valley. After funding police, city budget-makers would allocate whatever money was left over to the city’s other services, Bernson has said.

If the council and the mayor stuck to such a pro-law enforcement agenda, such a plan would not require new taxes, Bernson said Wednesday.

The Bernson plan was defeated one day after the City Council voted 12 to 2 to again ask the voters to approve a proposal to increase property taxes to finance the hiring of 1,000 additional police officers. The increase would amount to $73 a year in additional tax on a 1,500-square-foot home.

Last month, Proposition N, an identical plan, was narrowly defeated when it got 63% of the vote--three percentage points short of the two-thirds vote needed to win approval.

The proposition’s narrow defeat encouraged its supporters to try it again.

Councilman Marvin Braude, a Prop. N backer who initiated the proposition’s revival, said Bernson’s plan would only “mislead the voters” about the real options available for increasing the police force and prove “divisive and confrontational.”

Councilman Zev Yaroslavksy argued that the Bernson plan was not “intellectually honest” because it failed to outline the “services and departments that would be closed” if it were approved by voters.

Yaroslavksy reminded his colleagues that the council, during its budget debate last week, showed no taste for proposals to slash the city’s $150-million deficit with modest layoffs in the planning and building departments.

“If we couldn’t make that cut, how the hell are we going to make the cuts to pay for this” plan of Bernson’s, Yaroslavsky asked.

Bernson was resigned to the fact that his plan would not win council approval.

But he warned his colleagues that he will now mount a campaign to place his plan on the ballot through the initiative process. By gathering more than 100,000 voter signatures on a petition, measures can be placed on the Los Angeles city ballot without council approval.

“Wherever I go, people love this idea,” Bernson told his colleagues. “If you choose not to put this on the ballot, the people will do it for you.”

Bernson also predicted that the “tired old” tax hike plan advocated by a majority of his colleagues would be defeated again.