Southern California governments have struggled to provide basic services to a rapidly expanding population spread over a huge area. The city of Los Angeles obtains an adequate water supply from the Owens River, with small amounts from the Feather and Colorado rivers, and from recycling facilities. It creates its own electrical energy from fossil fuels and hydroelectric sources, while the rest of Los Angeles county depends on private electric utility companies. Most other cities in the county (members of the Metropolitan Water District) draw water from the Colorado River and maintain wells and pumps that tap into ancient underground aquifers. The county and federal governments have gone to great lengths to control floodwaters throughout the basin. Many jurisdictions share the facilities of Los Angeles’s Hyperion Treatment Plant, which empties millions of gallons of treated wastewater into Santa Monica Bay daily.

Los Angeles homeowners burned combustible trash in backyard incinerators until 1957, when, in an attempt to reduce the eye-searing attacks of smog that were then plaguing the region, the practice was ended. Now, each day the city’s sanitation trucks collect several thousand tons of household trash and dump it into large local sanitary landfills. Hillside areas covered with tinder-dry foliage in the summer and fall create a huge fire hazard in the region. Wind-driven fires in Bel-Air in 1961 and over wide areas of the county in 1993 caused enormous property damage. Thus, in addition to their ordinary urban duties, firefighters from both the city and county departments must also contend with potentially disastrous brush fires, though the county bears the brunt of fighting the most damaging of these conflagrations.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was, until about 1965, considered one of the most highly professional and best-run law agencies in the country. In the 1950s and early ’60s the department prided itself on its ability “to protect and to serve” the sprawling metropolis and its growing diverse population. Then riots (or “rebellion,” as some called it) occurred in the predominantly African American Watts neighbourhood in August 1965. The outburst of arson and looting there was traceable to a host of underlying economic and sociological conditions and to the deterioration of police-community relations.

By the early 1990s the department had one of the lowest ratios of officers to residents of any city force in the country. The living conditions in South Los Angeles at that time were much the same as in Watts in 1965. Poor relations between the police and the community again set off rioting for five days in April–May 1992 when the police officers involved in the videotaped beating of African American motorist Rodney King were acquitted. The widespread disturbances that followed resulted in more than 50 deaths and caused extensive property damage. That riot differed from the Watts disturbance in that it also involved Latinos.

A blue-ribbon commission convened by Mayor Bradley looked into the overall management of the LAPD, including racial and gender bias, the process of external review, and hiring and training practices. The commission favoured the concept of community-based policing, in which officers spend more time outside patrol cars and engage local citizens in crime prevention. The Neighborhood Watch program, in which a designated lead officer meets regularly with local residents in order to combat crime and vandalism, has been successful.

One of the most intractable social problems in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was that of gangs and gang violence. The city had innumerable gangs and some two dozen separate programs to cope with them. The complaint of most reformers was that the lion’s share of funds went for suppression, which achieved limited results, and that the money could have been better spent on intervention, social services, job placement, and economic development. One point upon which most people agreed was that the city’s efforts were poorly coordinated.

Health and welfare

Southern California’s mild climate has long attracted health seekers. Beginning in the 1880s, thousands of tuberculosis and asthma sufferers were treated in numerous hospitals and clinics. Although this “health rush” ended long ago, the region has retained its outstanding medical facilities. The medical schools of USC and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the Kaiser Permanente, Cedars-Sinai, and City of Hope hospitals have won numerous awards for quality service.

Responsibility for protecting public health and welfare falls to the county. Its department of health services, the largest such agency in the United States, has long struggled with inadequate funding to serve an increasing number of poor clients. The county also handles all public welfare matters. Its caseloads rose by nearly half from 1988 to 1992, when 1.3 million persons were on welfare, a situation described as a social emergency of historic proportions. In the mid-1980s the welfare rolls swelled largely because of foreign immigrants, many of whom had entered the country illegally. More of those immigrants lived in southern California than in any other region of the United States. A welfare-to-work reform program instituted by national legislation in 1996 reduced caseloads significantly and connected people with social services. However, most participants in the program remained poor and worked at low-wage jobs without benefits. Owing chiefly to the influx of poor immigrant families, in the early 21st century Los Angeles county alone still had more cases to administer than did most U.S. states, and the concentration of poverty was increasing.

Education

The Los Angeles area is renowned for its institutions of higher learning, both public and private, and its distinguished faculties, including Nobel Prize recipients. UCLA, established in 1919, is the largest branch of the University of California system. The California State University system has four campuses in the county in Dominguez Hills, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Northridge. Among its well-respected private institutions, USC, the oldest independent university in the West (1880), has outstanding professional schools; the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has earned great distinction in the sciences; and the Claremont Colleges, Occidental College, and Loyola Marymount are among the excellent smaller institutions devoted to the liberal arts. Los Angeles pioneered the creation of two-year community colleges, which now channel thousands of students into California universities.

Southern California has scores of independent school districts. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest public school district in the country, is run by an independent elected board working under state—rather than city—jurisdiction. Turmoil erupted in the 1970s over court-ordered busing to eliminate racial segregation. This litigation never gained full public support and resulted in “white flight” into the suburbs and the formation of numerous private schools. The LAUSD had upward of 750,000 students in the early 21st century, the majority of whom were Latino. In recent decades the system has struggled to improve instruction and learning amid exploding enrollments and declining public funding for education.