Democracy vs. Bureaucracy: The Devil’s In The Details
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
Key charter reform proposals—including city council expansion and police accountability reforms—are in danger of being abandoned following the June 10 release of a report by LA’s Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon Tso. In response, LA Forward’s Deputy Director, Godfrey Plata, posted an Instagram appeal for people to email councilmembers to restore those key reforms, before the City Council votes on them next Tuesday and Wednesday.
But they weren’t the only reforms put off by the CLA report. Altogether, the CLA recommended 11 reforms for the November ballot, 22 for further study, and 24 for “note and file.” While some of the recommendations against placing reforms on the ballot may make sense—charter reform may not be needed for some, while others truly may need more time to get right—police accountability and a suite of democracy-enhancing reforms are long overdue, and should not be withheld from the voters in November.
To better understand what’s happening, Random Lengths spoke with Plata about the endangered reforms, and why they need to move forward now. Regarding police accountability, he prefaced his remarks by noting, “The police department is the most funded department in the entire city, and takes up a lot of our energy and capacity in any of our governing,” and “they also have weapons,” so there’s a lot of interest in improving accountability.
Two proposals are LA Forward’s top concerns, Plata said, “One, ensuring that LAPD honors all ordinances passed through city Council processes, and then two, allowing the chief of police to remove officers with repeated histories of harm. We think of these are common sense.” In fact, most folks probably think they’re already law.
“Most voters when they vote for city council members believe that those city council members have legislative power around all things related to the city,” Plata said, but “right now because of the way our charter is written. LAPD does not have to follow ordinances that are passed through normal city council processes.” The best that a council majority of 8 or more can do is passing a policy recommendation. It’s up to the appointed board of police commissioners to actually set policy. The proposed charter change wouldn’t alter things dramatically, as with the Harbor Department, the existing commissioner would retain primary responsibility, but the city council could make policy if needed. “Simply by enabling them to make policy for LAPD does not mean they will use that tool, does not mean that everything that comes to city council will become policy. We think that this is still a high bar,” with a majority needed to pass, and committee processes to go through before that. “So LAPD honoring ordinances we think is just a simple clarification related to the powers of the city council.”
Similarly, the police chief’s inability to fire officers with repeated histories of harm “is something that really throws off voters,” Plata said. “We see on the news all the time instances of police brutality and sometimes internally police harassment amongst each other as well. And right now the chief of police, who was in charge of the department does not have the power to release folks who have a repeated pattern of repeated history of harm or misconduct.” Most Angelenos would not expect to keep their jobs if they acted similarly, nor would other city employees. As it stands, the worst that might happen is reassignment to a desk job, still collecting a paycheck from taxpayers.
There are two other police reforms LA Forward backs, although one needs more work. The other is “the honoring of the First Amendment, that the chief of police is able to support its police department to be able to honor all the things under the First Amendment including right to assembly right to speech, etc., including journalists,” which again is something folks might already assume is the case, despite repeated violations over the years.
What needs more work is “a police reform around creating liability insurance,” to help address the problem of “paying inordinate amounts of our taxpayer money toward liabilities,” when victims of police violence or rights violations sue the police department. “We believe that there is a world of solutions to explore” about how to change things, such as making individual officers responsible via individual insurance. But, “The commission proposes a really specific reform,” and the math doesn’t seem to work out. At the same time, city council has been working to explore similar approaches, and “We think there’s promise there,” which could be ready “by the next budget cycle in 2027,” which wouldn’t require any charter change.
As for council expansion, “we have the highest ratio of residents to representatives in the nation,” Plata said. The number of districts hasn’t changed since 1925, when LA’s population was 600,000, compared to about 4 million today, and council expansion has been discussed for years, so the need for further discussion seems far-fetched. The County Board of Supervisors is already scheduled to expand to 9 when redistricting occurs in 2032, and “if we choose to expand now in 2026…. we would give ourselves a runway of time to be able to implement this really well by 2032,” he explained. The longer we delay, the more rushed, and possibly more careless the process will be. It’s really just that simple.
Other democracy-enhancing proposals have also been needlessly sidelined by the CLA report, despite the fact that other jurisdictions have already adopted them. Ranked choice voting is one: San Francisco has had it for two decades, while New York City has just adopted it. LA Forward hasn’t taken a position on it, “but certainly there is popularity in the idea of it amongst different community members who are interested in democracy reforms,” Plata said.
On the other hand, LA Forward has taken positions on two other reforms: allowing non-citizens to vote in city and schoolboard elections and lowering the voting age to 16 for those elections as well. Both proposals are only to change the charter so that the city council can make these changes, if a majority votes for them, which is why delay makes little sense. It’s not a rush to decide anything, only to make it possible to decide sometime in the future.
But the logic for the proposals is strong.
“What we know is true is that there are many folks served by LAUSD. In particular, and by the city regardless of citizen status. People are impacted. People’s children go to schools served by LAUSD. And right now they don’t currently have a say as to the nature of the point of view of the board district member representing their schools and students. They don’t have a say.”
The idea isn’t new. For most of US history non-citizens have been allowed to vote in local elections in some jurisdictions, following the same basic logic.
Similarly, the voting age was lowered to 18 during the Vietnam War, and other countries hav lowered their voting ages even further since. In America, we have a problem getting young people to care about politics. Letting them vote at 16 on issues directly affecting them would help make our democracy healthier for all.
There are other democracy reforms that LA Forward hasn’t taken a position on—a trio of reforms to strengthen neighborhood council’s ability to do outreach and advocacy, and changes to ballot access requirements by extending filing deadlines & lowering signature thresholds. But these are supported by groups and individuals that LA Forward has worked with.
It seems troubling that so many democracy-strenghtening proposals were nixed by the CLA report, so I asked Plata what he thought might explain it.
“Who knows what is really happening,” he said, but “there’s two theories that have come to my attention.” The first “is we’ve created a rushed process,” not in the commision’s work, but in the time afterwards. “The rules committee has has had only a month to work through 60+ reforms,” and the committee members have asked the CLA to report back on a large number of questions. “A month is not enough time for the CLA to be able to produce great rigorous reporting on 60+ reforms….So it’s not completely surprising” that the CLA would say “More study is needed. Of course they would want more time to produce all of the reports that they’ve been asked to do. So as a function of time, it seems that they are telling their truth, the CLA would love the opportunity to provide further study,” even though “what we would argue for things like expansion, is we have actually been taking a look at this concept for decades.” There’s also been workshops, discussions, reports and polling all showing the desire for expansion. More study is needed to get the details right, which is why it should be voted on now, to provide the long runway for getting everything in order.
But, “On police accountability reforms, we aren’t actually sure why we would need further study on the ability of a councul to create law that the LAPD would have to follow. That is simply a decision to make. We don’t know why we need more time for the chief of police to study how the chief of police would uphold the First Amendment in how they guide the police department. We have had centuries of constitutional study on the First Amendment and what it means. We don’t think we need more time for that.”
Another reform that’s been put on hold is restructuring the City Attorney. But in this case, LA Forward is cautiously optimistic. The most fundamental concern is that when the attorney is
providing legislative counsel to the city Council and city departments, as well as taking on lawsuits, “Those things become politicized when we have an elected city attorney.” A prime concern is that “they are bound to have conflicting views and interests,” In particular, “Given their responsibilities for defending the city against lawsuits, pf course, the city attorney is likely to be far more risk-averse.” and will tend to advise against councilmembers creating new law and policies, which their constitutuents may have elected them to do. The charter proposal to bifrucate the office would address this proble, but there’s now a more modest idea “to create an office of legislative counsel to handle the drafting of legislation for our city council that is currently assigned to the city attorney’s office, removing that piece of the puzzle,” but leaving everyting else as is for now. “We think that this is a viable first stop toward rethinking the entire city attorney’s office,” Plata said. “We know that there cities like New York, Chicago, Seattle that I found it useful to have this type of set up as well for their city councils. It kind of similar to what our state legislature has as well.”
One final stalled reform I asked about was doubling the budget for parks—a proposal that probably had the most varied and widespread support in public comments to the Rules Committee. “This is one of the reforms that we didn’t take up and go deeply into,” Plata said. But there seems to be a division in the city council between some “that are more hesitant to do any sort of ballot box budgeting” as they call it, and other that “are interested in the doubling of of parks funding.”
In contrast to all the above, two significant budget planning reforms backed by LA Forward were recommended for the ballot: shifting from an annual budget cycle to a two-year cycle, with provisions to ensure public comment at various points in the process, and adopting a Capital Investment Program on a five year cycle effective immediately. “These two things in tandem, we think, will begin to hopefully help us make use of our taxpayer money in a much more responsible way,’ Plata said. “That’s great and we think representation and police were accountability are still two things that we can do will alongside those things.”
Editor’s note: If you want to support LA Forward’s effort to put police accountability and council expansion on the ballot, the letters they have drafted can be found here: