The Chickens Have Come Home to Roost

Abstract

Punitive conditions ultimately contributed to the eruption of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. The uprising occurred within the distinctly punitive context of the war on drugs and gangs. Solutions to urban social problems, this chapter shows, had become so entangled with the city’s and LAPD’s various wars on crime that the responses to the uprising depended on partnership with law enforcement and criminal justice programs, leaving police power intact. As this chapter shows, the post-1992 reforms, such as Project Weed and Seed, expanded the criminal justice system into new areas of municipal governance through the adoption of community and broken windows policing, which focused police enforcement on low-level and quality of life offenses to maintain urban order.