More Police, No New Taxes: Proposition 13 and the Fiscal Limits of Law and Order

Abstract

In 1980, Chief Daryl Gates of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) unveiled the “8500 Plan”: his proposal to increase the number of sworn officers in the city by roughly 25 percent. Two years earlier, the passage of Proposition 13 in California placed strict constitutional limits on local property taxes and required that any new tax be approved by a two-thirds majority of voters. In the following years, Angelenos proceeded to reject a “special police tax” on two separate ballots—even as opinion polls and letters to city officials revealed that most tax revolters also preferred a larger and more responsive LAPD. Yet, as this article demonstrates, what at first seems like a contradiction or case of magical thinking turns out to have been—like the tax revolt—a distributional struggle over public resources and recognition. Tracing the interrelated histories of police expansion and antitax activism reveals a more conflictual relationship between “neoliberal” austerity and carceral state-building than historians have typically assumed.