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The simple-but-wrong answer is capacity; you can squeeze more flights in, and LAX gets busy. But that's not as true as you'd expect, for wake turbulence and flight separation reasons.
The more complex answer... LAX's terminal design is a mess, and a lot of runway incursion concerns were (and remain!) about other types of collision. Especially at the time, Tenerife was the Central Example of a fatal runway incident, and involved an aircraft taking off and colliding with another aircraft taxing to takeoff that had crossed the runway; the next most well-known in 1991 would have been Heartsfield's landing-landing impact.
Using the 'far' runways for LAX for arrivals and 'near' runways for departures (as is the current practice, though it's still not always applied) would reduce the risk of landing on someone trying to take off, but it also means increased risk of collision between and aircraft taking off and an aircraft taxing, because simply using the 'far' runways with LAX's layout requires crossing the near ones. Runway crossing during taxi was both a well-known risk at the time, and one that was believed to be harder to mitigate. So the thumb went on that side of the scale.
The solution that comes to my mind is using the North runways for departures and the South runways for arrivals (or vice-versa). Would this cause taxi times to be unreasonabe? Aerodynamic turbulence issues?
Wouldn't be great for taxiing, but that's probably solvable, especially since LAX keeps getting additional taxi options.
Bigger issue's minimum separation distance: the FAA rules for wake turbulence are arcane, but the north runways are either on the hairy edge of being so close that they hit the delay requirements as a rule or well within them, and the south pair are only a little better. There are still rules for mixed operations on nearby parallel runways, but they're a lot less strict, and allow much higher capacity.
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