UC Irvine

Policing in Los Angeles (L.A.) has consistently been a site of contestation between the police, neighborhood residents, and state actors. As the third largest police force in the United States, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is known for being a lean, but aggressive military-styled force. It was the 1992 L.A. Uprising which nationally spotlighted the tense police-community relations and began a shift in LAPD policing tactics through reform-oriented approaches. Specifically, changes were manifested through their local community-policing programs and involvement in the federal program, Operation Weed and Seed, which redefined their image and role as police. Operation Weed and Seed was a federal and local response to neighborhood instability, which expanded police activities in local communities as part of a larger program of economic development, and intertwined policing with community development. This marked a moment of shifting investment into carceral solutions for social and economic problems. Starting in 1995, the LAPD, utilizing the language of reform and community policing, captured an increasing share of the city budget at the expense of other non-carceral solutions. To understand the current impact of this shift in policing as a prime city investment, the LAPD’s budget was $2,892,300,000 in the FY 2020-2021, representing 53.4% of the overall share of the city budget ($5,466,700,000), an increase of about $120 million from 2019-2020, where they captured 52.4% of the total city budget ($5,304,500,000).

This nexus of community development and policing is understudied within the fields of urban planning, community development, and public policy. With a focus on South L.A., I show how the LAPD’s community policing operations, spurred on Federally through Operation Weed and Seed, stands as a watershed moment in the trajectory of community development planning in L.A. Neighborhood stability became an explicit goal, carried out through a law-and-order approach to combat crime and criminality. Under the banner of community development and community policing, the LAPD’s role pivoted from a focus on resident safety to profit stability and the LAPD became engaged in a range of activities geared towards community development that it had not been previously associated with, including job and youth programs, spatial improvements, and establishing relationships with developers and key neighborhood actors. Explicitly, these were the “seeding” activities of Weed and Seed: cultivating the stable conditions necessary for private investment and enterprise zones. My dissertation is organized around three main questions: 1. How and when did the police, as street-level and institutional actors, take on community development activities in South L.A. while community development models simultaneously embraced policing solutions? 2. How have carceral development regimes regulated residents, space, and “development” in L.A.? 3. In what ways do organizations counter the effects of carceral community development and how does this propose an alternative community development?

I answer these questions through qualitative and archival methods to connect carcerality, community development, and labor. I investigate the ways in which Operation Weed and Seed in South L.A. intertwined the LAPD and community development activities, and I interrogate how the conflation of the two manifest as a new mode of urban governance: carceral community development. I operationalize carceral community development as a mode of development which places the police at the forefront of neighborhood stability and development through a rhetoric of law and order. In my dissertation I argue that police become the dominant response to neighborhood disinvestment. Operation Weed and Seed was premised on “weeding” out the “bad” guys and “seeding” in money for social service programs intended to “stabilize a community” for the creation of enterprise zones. Operation Weed and Seed provided a foundation for the community policing programs that the LAPD currently engages in and shaped the ways in which community development and reentry services are coupled with a carceral logic.

The implementation of Weed and Seed yielded the linkage of community members, criminalization, and extraction are linked to safety, social welfare, and community development. I then turn to an analysis of an organization which challenged carceral community development: Coalition Against Police Abuse (C.A.P.A.) C.A.P.A. highlighted the investment/disinvestment relationship which resulted in mass incarceration of community members, who are then excluded from the labor market. My dissertation uncovers this urban disinvestment through investment in carceral community development, which worsened economic outcomes, relied upon carceral solutions, and served to grow unemployment.