Policing an Image: Los Angeles and the 1984 Olympics

The 1984 Olympics was a pivotal moment for Los Angeles’s emblematic transformation, demonstrating how modernization, cultural production, image-making, and the spatial politics of policing reshaped the city’s landscape and identity for a global audience. In examining the entanglements and mutually constitutive processes of image-making and policing leading to the 1984 Games, this project reveals how populations within South Los Angeles, particularly the unhoused, bore the brunt of these processes through surveillance, hyper-policing, and forced removals as the city aimed to “sanitize” the areas around the Los Angeles Coliseum for the incoming international audience and global media. The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC) used art and visual culture to craft an idyllic, metropolitan, yet distorted image of Los Angeles, reflecting a vision detached from the city’s reality in the early 1980s. While the 1984 Olympic Games was a unique juncture, Los Angeles has a long history of racialized, spatial urban development reflected in the imagery from the beginning of the twentieth century. This presentation bridges multiple fields of scholarship to explore how the ephemerality of the Olympics exacerbated preexisting anxieties about the aesthetics of urban space that led to a rapid rise of policing, which reverberates throughout the twenty-first century.