Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (3 page)

The image that Alfred Lomas, his Florencia 13
vato locos
and his crackhead customers were now watching on TV, however, was not that of Rodney King. They were watching Reginald Denny.

Meanwhile, other unlucky white, Asian, and Hispanic motorists, crossing the same intersection where Denny still lay, were busy ducking
chunks of concrete, rocks, bottles, and baseball bats shattering their car windows. Clusters of young black men then surrounded their vehicles, pulled open doors, dragged out occupants, and robbed and mercilessly beat them.

Earlier, just after the not-guilty verdicts were announced, outraged local residents had run into the street screaming “Rodney King! Rodney King!” Soon a crowd began to form, quickly attracting LAPD patrol cars to the scene. When two officers tried to make an arrest, they were encircled by a crowd hurling rocks and bottles at their patrol car and chanting “Fuck the police.” The lieutenant on the scene responded by ordering his cops to beat a hasty retreat, thereby leaving a void where hundreds of people were now either watching the corner show or were the show themselves. Dressed in L.A. spring garb—that is, thigh-length shorts, jeans, T-shirts, tank tops, hoodies, cheap nylon windbreakers, and baseball caps—they were busy gulping beers, sipping Cokes, and milling about the intersection like it was some kind of urban beach party. “
Fuck y’all, we killin’,” one snarled into the lens of a TV camera. “Cops gonna die,” promised a second. “Tonight it’s Uzi time,” shouted a third.

“Uzi time” was just another way of saying payback time. That’s what all those bats and
beatings—and the
looting and burning of Tom’s Liquor and Deli on the intersection’s corner—represented; that and the brutality of living life on the lowest economic rung of America’s increasingly slippery ladder of opportunity. Payback time for Rodney King.

Alfred
Lomas, a Chicano U.S. Marine Corps veteran and gun-totin’
enforcer of Florencia 13’s drug deals in the age of crack wars and easy
money, had understood that rage. Understood it in the way that one underdog understands another. So he should have been primed to vicariously feel the thrill of the brothers who were acting out their hatred of the LAPD on the head of Reginald Denny.

But Lomas and the others now watching the scene on a crack-house TV were not
down
with what was happening to the bleeding and now unconscious Denny.
Smashing a concrete block into some innocent guy’s head and then
dancing around in celebration while pointing and spitting on him solely because of his skin color—that was just
wrong
. Not to mention the guy who’d rolled Denny over and methodically rifled through his pockets,
stealing his wallet and taking off. What kind of shit was that?

Nevertheless, what the twenty-six-year-old Lomas and every gang banger in the room
could
relate to was the farce that was the acquittal of the cops who’d beaten Rodney Glen King.

A
semi-illiterate high school dropout who
worked at Dodger Stadium, King had a
Baby Huey image on the street and penny-ante criminal aspirations. Once a
$200 robbery of a 99 Market—during which he was chased out of the store by its irate Korean owner, who beat him with a three-foot metal rod he’d yanked off a display case—had landed him in prison for a year.

They could feel for King, a guy still
on parole who’d downed a
forty-ounce Olde English 800 malt liquor and was
speeding down the freeway in the outer reaches L.A.’s San Fernando Valley, lost in the music of the night, when his reverie was suddenly interrupted by two highway patrol officers ordering him to pull over.

Scared of being sent back to prison on a parole violation, the twenty-five-year-old King took the officers on a high-speed chase instead. Finally pulling over, he peacefully exited his
white economy-sized Hyundai, only to be
twice zapped with 50,000-volt Taser darts, brutally beaten, and then
hog-tied by the four LAPD officers from the local Foothill Division who’d arrived on the scene and decided to take the collar.

Twenty-seven other responding cops, meanwhile, casually stood around and watched the show while rubbernecking passengers in cars
and buses drifted by, and a plumber named
George Holliday, wielding a handheld video camera, stood on his condo balcony and recorded it all.

The crack-house crew, in short, understood exactly what had happened to Rodney King. They weren’t black, but they weren’t white either. They were Mexican-Americans who’d grown up hard in a gang-infested dump of a neighborhood in Huntington Park, just across Alameda Boulevard from the vast, impoverished, 650,000-strong black and increasingly Latino area known as South Los Angeles—an area better known by the name of one of its sections: South Central L.A. They knew about L.A. cops, and they knew about ass-kicking, L.A. cop–style—which, as Alfred Lomas would later tell it, “
basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious . . . punching, beating, kicking.”

Several actions, if taken by anyone like Alfred Lomas, would essentially guarantee an ass-beating. One was talking back. Another, as Lomas put it, would be “if they had to get out of their patrol car, or if you crossed over into a white neighborhood—that was always a surefire ass-beating.” In short, Lomas and the crew did not need some guy on TV droning on and explaining how what was happening now was related to what had happened to Rodney King fourteen months ago. They knew.

Stacey Koon, he knew too. The veteran LAPD sergeant, who’d directed the Rodney King show as the other indicted cops whacked away, had seen it as nothing particularly noteworthy, just a routine job, well done. Or as he later put it: “We take Rodney King into custody, he doesn’t get seriously injured. We don’t get injured. He goes to jail. That’s the way the system’s
supposed to work.”

And not coincidentally, that was just the way that Alfred Lomas understood both the beating and the system as he’d first watched George Holliday’s video fourteen months earlier.

In fact, Lomas and his crew’s first words as they watched the video were not “
Wow! The cops are beating his ass so bad!” but “Wow! The cops are beating his ass just like they always beat ours, so why are all these people [on television]
acting like this is something new, some big surprise?”

The reality was that the officers had done “
a lot more than just whack Rodney with their batons,” according to now retired LAPD assistant chief David Dotson, who’d been among the first to see the video and read the officers’ reports. “The arresting officers at the scene did not fully report what happened—that they had dragged him across the street, hog-tied, and Tasered him.

“
And once their report was handed in, nobody said, ‘Wait a minute, King’s injuries are not consistent with what was written in the report [which was falsified], because nobody thought that what happened shouldn’t have happened. They knew what they were doing was wrong and against policy and regulation, but the officers went to trial and said, ‘Well, that’s the way we do things.’ And, in fact, that
was
the way things were done then in divisions like Foothill”—in divisions with concentrations of poor blacks and Latinos who were moving, unwelcomed, into otherwise white areas and who needed to be taught the rules of the game.

The rules of that game had also been well taught inside the department, according to Dotson. “You told the story you thought would sell, and covered everything else up, knowing nobody would dig into it, because before the tape surfaced nobody thought that Rodney’s beating was anything out of the ordinary, much less a huge scandal or a landmark incident.”

Yet Alfred Lomas felt a twinge of excitement as he watched the King beating video. He realized that the misty clouds shielding the truth about how the LAPD
actually
dealt with people in L.A.’s ghettos and barrios were finally being lifted.

Now occupying his attention, however, was the scene of
Reginald Denny’s battered body still lying at the intersection, beaten, battered and unrescued. Earlier,
LAPD patrol officers had been present at the location. But when things started heating up, they’d been ordered to flee the scene and
report to a police command center thirty blocks away. As a result, viewers all around the nation started asking a variation of the question Alfred Lomas was now posing to no one in particular: “
Where the fuck are the cops?”

Tom Bradley, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, First African Methodist Episcopal Church; Bill Parker, Present in the Ether

As dusk settled across the L.A. basin that Wednesday evening,
two thousand people strode into the main chapel of South Central’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church. “Brothers,” a banner above the entrance proclaimed, “
Come Help Us Stop the Madness.”

The crush of the crowd had already spilled into the church’s packed, sweltering anterooms, basement, and foyer, and out into its parking lot, where about one thousand African-Americans from across Los Angeles had gathered after the church doors were shut. Some were in suits and ties; others were young brothers in Jheri curls, Raiders gear, and do-rags, standing beside elderly church ladies and families with children. They’d come to participate in the evening’s announced goal of developing a peaceful response to the Simi Valley acquittals—an endeavor already being mocked by the looting taking place just blocks away.

Inside the church, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley rose and walked toward the podium. The man who had once been hailed as L.A.’s black savior, the six-foot, four-inch man with the winsome smile, preternatural physical grace, and effortless charisma, appeared—for perhaps the first time in his remarkable nineteen-year tenure as the city’s first African-American mayor—to be bent and weary, and not just from the weight of his
seventy-four years. He was, after all, aware that while responsibility for the calamity building outside the church’s
Passion of the Christ stained-glass windows fell squarely on the shoulders of the LAPD, the fault was also partly his.

**************

Raised a poor black boy in Depression-ravaged 1930s America,
Tom Bradley was
born the son of a humble, churchgoing housemaid, two generations removed from slavery, and a former Texas sharecropping cotton farmer who deserted the family in Los Angeles. Despite that, Bradley had managed to beat the long-shot odds in a nation still deeply in the thrall of Jim Crow, going to
integrated Los Angeles public schools, becoming an All-City and All–Southern California high school
track star, and attending
UCLA for three years before leaving in 1940, at the age of twenty-two, to join the racially segregated LAPD.

Over the next two decades he graduated from law school, passed the bar, and made lieutenant—then the glass ceiling for black LAPD officers—before retiring after twenty-one years, with head held high, never agreeing to condone the department’s deeply racist, brutal treatment of its black citizens or to play the role of token, showcase Negro apologist for its abuses.

In 1965 he’d become one of Los Angeles’s first
elected black city councilmen and, during a city council hearing on the causes of the Watts Riots, had electrified the black community by challenging the legendary architect of the modern-day LAPD, Chief William H. Parker.

Parker had testified that the riots had been caused by black radical conspirators inflaming the area’s criminals against the police, while the good Negroes of South Central had stood by aghast. Bradley, working as watch commander in a tough black district, had heard the pre-riot rumble in the streets and knew that the community’s rage against the LAPD was widespread, and not just the work of some malcontents. But he’d waited his turn to reply to Parker.

Raised in the hard Black Hills and bleak
Badlands of South Dakota, Parker was a man in constant struggle to reconcile his notorious
alcoholism with his deeply ingrained nineteenth-century Victorian morals—a struggle that resulted in a disposition so cold that former LAPD sergeant turned TV writer Gene Roddenberry was said to have based the
Star Trek
character of
Spock on him.

Pale, thin, and ailing with a
bad heart that would kill him within a year, Parker was also famously short-fused. And now Tom Bradley was questioning his veracity. It was unheard-of for a
white
city councilman to question him in such a manner, much less a newcomer, a black man,
and
a former LAPD officer.

He was, after all,
Bill Parker, El Jefe
of L.A.’s criminal justice establishment. On becoming chief in 1950, it was Parker who had conceived and set in motion the policies, events, and departmental culture that culminated not just in the ’65 Watts Riots but also those that would
explode twenty-seven years later when the Simi Valley acquittals were announced.

Parker had decreed that his new LAPD would be a small, mobile force of faceless officers in patrol cars and on motorcycles able to rapidly traverse Los Angeles’s sprawling
465 square miles. The department he created would be a
top-down paramilitary organization steeped in the precepts of the United States Marine Corps and trained to aggressively seek out and often jack up “potential” criminals—a wide-ranging category focused mainly on young black and Latino men who had happened to be out on the street or behind the wheel of a car at the wrong moment and come into a cop’s view.

On the ground in L.A.’s black neighborhoods, the LAPD acted as if it were an army of occupation. L.A.’s black population had skyrocketed from 62,000 in 1940 to
170,000 by 1950. Just fifteen years later, as the Watts Riots shocked L.A., Bill
Parker would make the case for his army on a local television show. “It is estimated that by 1970,
45 percent of Los Angeles will be Negro,” said Parker. “If you want any protection for your home and family . . . you’re going to have to support a strong police department. If you don’t, God help you.”

The subtext behind Tom Bradley’s challenge to Bill Parker in the city council chambers that day in ’65 was therefore all about who would control the historical narrative of the causes of the riot. The LAPD’s role in precipitating the rebellion was at stake and Parker knew it in his gut.