Women Lose Out on Protection After 'Defund' Destroys This Vital LAPD Unit
Los Angeles was one of the first cities to jump on the idea that defunding the police could be pursued seriously.
Within two weeks of George Floyd’s death in May, the Los Angeles City Council signaled it would shift up to $150 million from law enforcement, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The proposal was backed by Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti; the original plan was to shift money into a larger initiative that would encompass youth jobs programs and “peace centers.”
In July, the focus seemed to change a bit, given the exigencies of the budgetary year. Instead, according to Deadline, up to $40 million of the $133 million cut from the budget would be used to avert more city furloughs.
Whatever the case, Garcetti had touted his actions as being ahead of an inevitable curve: “I got calls from mayors around the country, some of them saying, ‘I’m so excited,’ and other ones saying: ‘What the hell did you do? Now I gotta shift money,’” Garcetti said in a June speech.
Being ahead of the curve in implementing a policy generally means that you’ll be ahead of the curve in experiencing the results.
To that end, witness the announcement by the Los Angeles Police Department on this week that it would likely be eliminating the specialist sexual assault unit that was responsible for investigating Harvey Weinstein, adult film performer Ron Jeremy and former University of Southern California gynecologist George Tyndall.
“The sexual assault unit, this is one of the cutbacks that we’re doing within the realignment, those specialized detectives will be moved out to the geographic bureaus,” LAPD Chief Michel Moore told KNBC-TV in Los Angeles.
The initial reduction will focus on specialist divisions so as to focus on responding to emergencies, though KNBC reported that “the proposed reorganization … is still being contemplated.”
Other specialized units would see reduced staffing under the proposed reorganization and the Animal Cruelty Task Force — a small, three-person unit — could be eliminated entirely.
“I can’t take those 350 people out of patrol, they would just absolutely decimate our patrol, staffing,” Moore said.
“So we’re looking at our specialized areas. And some of them we’re downsizing and others we’re eliminating, if the work can be done by a general detective or a detective at an area level, or uniform officer at a station.”
However, KNBC noted that the specialist sexual assault division out of the Robbery Homicide Division has “been successful investigating complex matters, sometimes involving serial acquaintance rapes, previously unsolved cases with new DNA leads, and stranger abductions, because its detectives typically have had more time to dedicate to each investigation than those assigned to neighborhood police stations.”
Yvette Lozano, chief programs and operations officer of Peace Over Violence, a nonprofit which focuses on victims and survivors of domestic and sexual abuse, said she hopes “it doesn’t have a negative effect.”
“My concern is that victims do not get discouraged and know they can still report assaults,” Lozano said. “I wonder if they will get the same response if there’s some serial rapist out there. Will the case be solved as quickly as it was with the dedicated unit at [the Robbery Homicide Division]?”
“There must be some mistake,” added Jack Weiss, a former member of the Los Angeles City Council and federal prosecutor who advocated for increased DNA collection and testing during his tenure on the council.
“Support for this type of specialization has been universal for decades. It doesn’t make sense.”
It would have to anyone paying attention to where this whole thing was going.
In June, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department announced that if there was a significant move to defund the police, one of the first things to be eliminated would be the Special Victims Bureau, which investigates sexual assaults and crimes against children. Three other specialist units, including one that dealt with gang-related crimes and another which dealt with fraud, would be on the chopping block as well.
“It’s unconscionable,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said in a news release.
“These are the major detective units of the entire department. They serve the entire county of Los Angeles. Those four units … are the cream of the crop of investigative units throughout the entire nation, and as the largest county in the nation, I cannot see how we move forward without these four units.”
Villanueva is a controversial figure on the left, though, one who’s spoken out repeatedly against defunding the police. Perhaps they thought tough choices weren’t going to have to be made. That law enforcement in the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County was just larded up and this was just an alarmist call.
And wasn’t Mayor Garcetti announcing new bureaus? In July, he talked up the new Community Safety Partnership bureau “to ensure equity and justice and fairness for every Angeleno.”
The new bureau, according to Deadline, would place officers in communities for up to five years as part of a “co-ownership” approach.
“This new bureau makes CSP both a program and a philosophy,” Garcetti said, in which officers would “develop relationships with the people they serve … moving from a warrior mentality to a guardian mentality.”
Lest you be fooled, however, Garcetti noted in the same media briefing that “this is part of a wider strategy of reducing force through training, tactics and recruitment, changing cultures where we have to.”
And while that changing culture might be moving away from a warrior mentality, let’s not kid ourselves: It’s going to be moving away from a guardian mentality, as well.
For victims of sexual assault, they’re losing a powerful tool in their pursuit of justice. There’s no amount of “co-ownership” that will replace that, particularly when it comes to a unit that helped bring down one of the most prolific and powerful sexual offenders in modern history in Harvey Weinstein.
Remember all of those mayors who called Garcetti to tell them how “excited” they were about defunding the police? Perhaps they’ll be the ones calling him again in the coming months, asking, “What the heck did you do?”
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