Liberal Law-and-Order: Politics of Police Reform in Los Angeles/

After his election in 1973, Los Angeles’s first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to implement reforms that would increase civilian oversight and accountability of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Ensuring procedural fairness that treated all residents equally, Bradley and other liberals believed, would lead to reductions in police harassment, abuse, and shootings. Placing their faith in the power of government to effectively manage the police allowed liberals to pledge both strong support for tough law enforcement and propose police reforms. This liberal law-and-order, however, did not result in similar police reforms, such as civilian review, pursued in other Democratic-run cities. No event demonstrated this limitation of Bradley’s liberal law-and-order approach to police reform as the Rodney King beating and the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Rather than demonstrating the failure of liberal reform, Los Angeles shows how liberal law-and-order facilitated the expansion of police authority after the 1960s.