Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (5 page)

The attitude too had come right from the top. In 1986, two years before the Dalton Avenue raid, LAPD chief Daryl Gates was videotaped giving his end-of-year address, which was then broadcast to his officers at roll calls throughout the department. In it, Gates laid out the operational template, the black-and-white world—both literally and figuratively—in which his officers should operate. “It’s
like having the Marine Corps invade an area that is having little pockets of resistance,”
he told them. “We can’t have it. . . . We’ve got to wipe [the gang members] out.”

It was no wonder that, of the over
eighty LAPD officers who took part in the Dalton Avenue raid, nobody ever stopped to ask, “Wait a minute, what the hell are we doing here? What’s the end goal?”

Daryl Gates, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, LAPD Headquarters

When the “not guilty” verdicts were announced at 4 p.m., Charlie Beck had agreed with the general consensus at LAPD headquarters that despite the pounding in the press since King’s beating, “the department still maintained enough community support to head off any significant protests, and it could now get
back to business as usual.”

It was an astounding misreading of the situation, a catastrophic failure of intelligence gathering at the most basic street level, coupled with the inability of the LAPD high command to grasp the pulse and mood of the city it policed.

Earlier in April, in anticipation of possible trouble following the verdicts, Daryl Gates had earmarked
$1 million for police overtime and to make a contingency plan. But according to then Assistant Chief David Dotson, “
There never was a riot contingency plan. The Police Commission was never able to get Gates to tell them what it was, because it was nonexistent.”

In fact, on Tuesday, April 28—the day
before
the verdicts were announced and the riots began—the Los Angeles Police Commission had convened its weekly meeting in Parker Center. During a break, then police commissioner Anthony De Los Reyes privately asked Gates about the contingency plan. “
The jury was still deliberating in Simi Valley, so I said to Gates, ‘You know, I have been practicing law a long time, and you just can’t predict what a jury is going to do. What if these officers are acquitted?’ And he said to me in that drawl of his, ‘Well, Commissioner, we have a plan to take care of this.’ And I said, ‘Okay. Well, that sounds good.’ But we never saw it. . . . Later, just after the riots, he was interviewed by [CNN talk-show host] Larry King, and King asked him about
not having a plan, and Daryl came out with this big sheaf of papers and said, ‘There it is.’ And I thought, ‘No, that’s not it.’ ”

“
Nobody believed those officers were going to be acquitted,” Reyes’s fellow police commissioner Ann Reiss Lane would later recall, “so we never asked to see the plan he said he had in writing. . . . He assured us that everything was in hand, but it turned out it wasn’t.”

At a news conference early on April 30—the second day of the riots—Gates would nevertheless maintain that the department was “
as ready as we ought to be” and that “we deployed all that we could have deployed at that particular time without going in[to] some mode that allowed us to build our resources.”

Not having adequate resources at “that particular time”—just as the riots broke out—was precisely the problem.
Prior
to the riots, in fact, Gates had failed to even declare a tactical alert despite a court
news release issued by 10 a.m. that morning announcing that the verdicts would be handed down that afternoon. Instead, the department’s
one thousand detectives, who worked from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., were allowed, like Charlie Beck, to clock out and go home at the end of their shifts. Moreover, many of the department’s field captains, the critical ground-level operational decision makers in any police department, weren’t even in Los Angeles—they were
forty miles away, attending a seminar.

In addition,
Dotson, one of the LAPD’s most experienced assistant chiefs, was then considered persona non grata and went unused during the riots as part of his punishment for being critical of the department’s leadership when he testified before the Christopher Commission in June 1991.

Simultaneously,
Assistant Chief Robert Vernon was on leave pending his retirement. Earlier, he had been excoriated by the city council for preaching strict Christian fundamentalist practices to department officers, including, among other things, the benefits of using strict corporal punishment to discipline children and adolescents—advice that cumulatively would end his career.

Vernon had been in charge of field operations long enough that Daryl Gates and his command staff had grown accustomed to him being their operational go-to guy. It was a big job—the
overseeing of
about 85 percent of the department’s cops, including patrol officers and detectives. But after Vernon had gone on leave, no one seemed able to pick up his mantle. A lot of people may have disliked Bob Vernon, but nobody had ever accused him of being afraid to make a decision on the spot—a command characteristic that was sorely missing as the riots began exploding.

Along with the leadership vacuum was the problem of communication. There was little between Gates and the Police Commission, and none between Gates and
Mayor Bradley, with whom he hadn’t spoken for over a year.

Most astoundingly, there had also been
no coordination with the Los Angeles Fire Department—a particularly grievous act of arrogance and ineptitude, given that Gates had personally watched Watts go up in flames during the ’65 riots.
Six hundred buildings had been burned, damaged, or destroyed by fires and looters in those riots.

“
One of the things that overwhelmed us,” Gates would say at that April 30, 1992, news conference, “was the number of fires that occurred and the attacks on the firefighters. It simply became impossible for the firefighters to go out and do their job without police protection. . . . Our resources were [consequently] engaged with the Fire Department and protecting the Fire Department.”

But it soon became clear that Gates had been making it all up as he went along. In a postmortem following the ’92 riots, the city’s fire chief bitterly complained about the LAPD denying his fire department’s initial requests for escort service into South Central to fight the fires because, as the firefighters were told, it was “
not a top priority.”

Rumors would later abound in the black community that Gates and the LAPD had simply let the initial rioting explode so that, as Bill Parker had suggested twenty-seven years earlier, the white public would later get out and “
support a strong police department.” But the truth was far more complex.

Morale in the department was at an all-time low. Its leadership was in disarray and feared being accused by critics of escalating the violence if it responded forcefully. As Gates put it the morning after the breakout of the riots, “
I think there was a lot of discussion that we [the LAPD]
were being provocative . . . and so we were very, very, careful not to show that provocativeness.”

But above all, the failure lay with Gates’s contempt for outside voices and his stubborn determination to continue policing and running the department the way Bill Parker had decreed. All these traits had become deeply embedded in the LAPD’s culture as well. Officers in station houses across the city literally cheered as the “not guilty” verdicts were announced. At the department’s Foothill Station, a young officer named Corina Smith pumped her fist in the air and told the
Los Angeles Times
, “I’m elated, absolutely elated. It’s like this sick feeling is finally going away.” Another officer offered a similar view: “I feel the truth came out,” he said, “and that the verdicts are a reflection of the truth.”

That was how a lot of LAPD officers, perhaps most, felt: that the officers had really done nothing wrong, and that Rodney King had gotten what he deserved. Of course, if you dwelt in a blue cocoon of cops in lily-white suburban enclaves like Simi Valley, how could you relate to the outrage others would feel at a “not guilty” verdict? Or as Police Commission president Stanley Sheinbaum put it, “
I don’t think [Daryl Gates] understood the ramifications of acquittals, because he was so sympathetic to acquittals.”

But it also had to do with how Parker’s legacy and Gates’s beliefs filtered down, operationally, on the street and at Parker Center. “
The people who get promoted [within the LAPD] don’t have differing points of view,” Thomas Windham, Daryl Gates’s former chief of staff, once pointed out. “The department is very slow to change, and rank structure from top to bottom thinks along the same lines, no matter what the situation might be.” Or as former Police Commission president Stephen Reinhardt summed it up: in the LAPD “you can’t bring in new people and get a cross-fertilization. Everyone is trained by the last generation [and]
a certain bunker mentality has resulted.”

Charlie Beck, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, Parker Center

Charlie Beck finally
arrived back at Parker Center sometime in the early evening. Stopping first at his locker, he changed into his LAPD blues and then went upstairs to try to figure out what to do next.

Much had happened since he’d left police headquarters that afternoon. A small crowd of demonstrators had morphed into a large enraged mob—many of them white, including contingents from the Progressive Labor and the Revolutionary Communist Parties. They’d massed in the heart of the city’s downtown
Civic Center, a four- or five-block expanse that was home to both the midcentury Bauhaus box that was Parker Center and the
Los Angeles Times
’s cement mausoleum of a headquarters. Across the street stood the majestic neoclassical city hall, and a short block away were Los Angeles’s principal Superior Court and District Attorney’s Office and various other criminal justice edifices.

Soon, about three hundred of the protesters peeled away and strode down the Civic Center’s streets, chanting “
No justice, no peace,” throwing rocks, rolling over and setting fire to an LAPD patrol car, demolishing a Rolls-Royce, and torching small, cheap coffee shops and taco stands. Nearby, they smashed display windows, looted a bridal shop and a Radio Shack, and shattered every ground-floor window of the
Times
’s city-block-square building.

Others remained at
Parker Center, facing off against a disciplined, stone-faced line of LAPD officers in riot gear, members of the department’s fearsome Metro Division—known as “the shake and bake boys” for their attacks on protesters for the slightest provocation.

But not that evening. Demonstrators hurled eggs, bottles, and aluminum cans at the officers, who impassively held their positions as they were hit by the projectiles. Protesters screamed in their faces, and a kiosk in front of the entrance to Parker Center was set ablaze. One enraged young African-American mockingly denigrated a black cop in front of an
LA Weekly
reporter. “
You should be out here with us throwing stones,” he told the officer. “You can’t hide your color behind that uniform. You take that off and you’re just another nigger to the LAPD.”

Then an American flag was stomped on and burned, and as dusk
settled in, protesters began heaving rocks through the windows above Parker Center’s entrance doors.

Meanwhile, police commissioners Anthony De Los Reyes and Ann Reiss-Lane were passing by in an unmarked police car just as the kiosk outside Parker Center was going up in smoke. Deciding to play it safe, they headed to the mayor’s city hall office across the street. “
It was,” recalls De Los Reyes, “the most sobering, somber experience I can ever remember.” Sitting there with Mayor Bradley, Lane, and a couple of other people, the silence was so complete, remembers De Los Reyes, that he could hear the air-conditioning system humming and smell the smoke from the burning kiosk outside.

Daryl Gates, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, Brentwood, California

Just as the downtown protest crowd was exploding, sixty-five-year-old LAPD chief Daryl Francis Gates, looking trim and tan, had slipped out of a rear basement door of Parker Center and emerged into the building’s tumbledown parking lot. He was headed to a fund-raiser in
Brentwood, a Beverly Hills–style west L.A. community of multimillion-dollar homes located far from the escalating riots.

The event was to help defeat a forthcoming city charter ballot
amendment to limit an LAPD chief’s lifetime tenure and make it easier to replace him—reforms that had specifically been recommended by the Christopher Commission the year before.

It would say an enormous amount about Daryl Gates, a forty-three-year veteran of the LAPD, that he chose to attend the gathering rather than stay at the helm and direct his department at such a fraught moment in the history of Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, his decision at least had the logic of self-preservation. Daryl Gates was in trouble. Following the King beating, the Christopher Commission had bluntly
called on him to resign, as had Mayor Bradley, the
Los Angeles Times
,
La Opinion
, the
Los Angeles Daily News
, the local CBS television affiliate, then U.S. Senate Judiciary chair Joseph
Biden, three of L.A.’s most powerful U.S. congressmen, California senator Diane Feinstein, the UCLA Law School faculty, and Gates’s favorite columnist, George Will.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Black Caucus; California’s African-American assembly speaker, Willie Brown; the NAACP; the Urban League; Jessie Jackson; and a coalition of black churches and ministries were all pressuring Mayor Bradley to encourage his police commissioners to at least suspend Gates while figuring out a way to permanently get rid of him—an action that even two years earlier would have been unthinkable.

Ever since Bill Parker was named chief in 1950, L.A. mayors had come and gone, but its police chiefs had remained as long as they wished. “
I don’t want to be mayor of Los Angeles,” Gates’s predecessor as chief, the bombastic Ed “Crazy Ed” Davis had once famously said. “I
already have
more power than the mayor.”