Governing Little Fiefdoms: City Power, Fractured Politics, and Police Reform

In this article, I focus on Los Angeles' fractured political decision-making in the late 1980s and early 1990s to demonstrate how the city government functioned within constrained and fragmented conditions. Methodologically, I use interviews with public officials and archival data to demonstrate how the city government functioned and responded to a moment of crisis. I specifically focus on how police and developers grew and strengthened their political interests and economic power. The growth of the carceral state and the power of developers within the urban sphere have and will continue to have important and detrimental consequences for the American political landscape. Both police and developers are critical to reproducing urban inequality through formal and informal city policymaking, and are important to understanding how people within certain neighborhoods comprehend themselves as part of a polity and how they feel about governing institutions.