Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (7 page)

Consequently, while most police chiefs served at the pleasure of elected officials, Daryl Gates was, in effect, accountable to no one. He used his independent status to cater to the two constituencies he cared most about: Los Angeles’s dwindling conservative white voters and, most especially, his own troops—whose brutality he fiercely defended. In return, his officers gave him what he seemed most to crave: their adoration.

For the city, however, the price of love was steep. Camaraderie and esprit de corps are the glue that binds together paramilitary organizations
like police departments. But under Gates those concepts were carried to such an extreme that they distorted the department’s core mission of public service by placing the desires of his cops and the dictums of their culture above the public good.

A competitive runner, Gates would tool off with the troops to police department competitions throughout California and the Southwest. Among those he ran with were many special-unit macho guys infamous for getting into trouble on and off duty. Gates instinctively protected these officers, subverting the disciplinary system in the process. “
In a lot of cases . . . an officer will appeal to the Chief,” David Dotson would later testify to the Christopher Commission in 1991, “and the Chief [would] mitigate whatever the situation may have been . . . based on the officer’s appeal. And he frequently did that without informing the chain of command that had been involved in the [initial discipline] recommendation.”

Most importantly, Gates’s acts of dispensation were having a direct effect on officers’ behavior on the streets of Los Angeles, particularly in the sprawling black areas that were part of South Bureau. There, the spirit of Gates’s disciplinary actions had filtered down to the captains, who were recommending slap-on-the-wrist penalties for serious use-of-force violations.

When Jesse Brewer, the department’s first black assistant chief, assumed command of South Bureau, he began overruling the captains and imposing stiffer penalties before sending them on to Daryl Gates for final sign-off. And “in every case—
every case
”—as Brewer would later emphasize, Gates overturned his recommendation and imposed the lighter penalty; and within a year the officer was again in trouble for a similar or identical use-of-force violation. Gates’s disciplinary leniency, as Brewer would later point out, was not just indicative of the department’s use-of-force problem but “
the essence of the [LAPD’s] excessive force problem.”

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

Bill Parker had never liked brutality for brutality’s sake. It was amateurish and unlawful, and did not fit the new LAPD image. But he recognized both its utility and perceived necessity when used in the department’s
number one mission—keeping order. For Parker, order was everything. He was a man with values and perceptions forged in nineteenth-century South Dakota, when South Dakota was still the Wild West, and law and order had been hard-won. Loosen the screws even a little bit and all hell could break lose.

So when Parker became chief, he’d added a new twist to the old
unwritten LAPD credo, one that would henceforth govern an LAPD officer’s conduct: If you beat, shoot, or otherwise abuse a suspect because you felt that’s what it took, we may not always condone it, but publicly we’ll always have your back. But if you steal even one penny, your ass is ours. And that’s the way it also was under Ed Davis, who’d served as chief throughout most of the seventies.

Daryl Gates’s contribution had been to take the first part of that credo and apply it in a wider, deeper, astoundingly audacious manner. By doing so, and by proudly thumbing his nose at elected civilian authority and departmental critics, “
Gates made himself a martyr within the Los Angeles Police Department—the guy who’d stepped up and died for their sins,” as Charlie Beck would later say. “He seemed to never realize he was already holding that suit of cards. In an organization with a huge belief in physical fitness, sharp appearance, and esprit de corps, he was an athlete with immense personal charm who could walk into a room and command it. They would have loved him anyway. But he thought he didn’t need the other cards, the other constituencies. He didn’t see that he could win a hand with that suit, but never the game.”

White conservative voters in areas of the city such as the San Fernando Valley loved him too. About two months after the King beating, they’d held a boisterous
luncheon rally for their beleaguered chief in a Valley ballroom. In attendance were blue-haired matrons from the mansions of Hancock Park, members of Encino Republican Women, Valley real estate brokers and salespeople, housewives and concrete-faced LAPD officers—essentially the same people who served on the Simi Valley jury that had acquitted Rodney King.

When Gates walked in, the place broke into an ear-shattering standing ovation. Women rushed up to kiss him and men to shake his hand. The intensity of their emotions went well beyond political support. It
was visceral, tribal. He was the defender of a city that was once theirs—a city that was now fading as surely as were they themselves. If they had still constituted a viable, influential majority in Los Angeles, no political force could have gotten rid of Daryl Gates. But they didn’t. Los Angeles politics were now was dominated by the white and black liberals who had put Tom Bradley in office, along with a rapidly growing base of Latino voters. Gates’s cops and a conservative white base that was fast becoming irrelevant could no longer shield him.

For over a decade Gates had ignored, suppressed, and made enemies of his department’s other constituencies. Together they comprised a virtual Who’s Who of much of Los Angeles’s civic establishment: Mayor Bradley and his police commissioners, city council members, the black establishment, the ACLU and Latino civil rights organizations, women’s and gay organizations, social-service nonprofits and academics, civilian organizations trying to decrease gang violence, and the local press corps, led by the
Los Angeles Times
.

It had not always been that way with the press. From the start of Bill Parker’s tenure through the early 1980s, in fact, the local media had been what former Police Commission president Stephen Reinhardt had famously described as a “
patsy for the police.” By the early seventies, however, the once deeply right-wing, fiercely anti-union
Times
—the paper of record—had liberalized most of its coverage. But it was still failing to do hard-eyed, investigative reporting of the LAPD. The
Times
, after all, had been the embodiment of the ruling Los Angeles oligarchy that had made astounding fortunes in land speculation and selling real estate to middle-class, Midwestern immigrants flocking west to invest their savings in the happy home of sunshine and palms. News of local corruption and scandal was therefore studiously ignored. Consequently, the
Times
never developed a tradition of doing big, systemic investigative journalism. Bad news was bad for business.

But reporters who’d come of age during the 1960s were now being hired at the
Times
and other local media outlets. Young and unwedded to local assumptions, they were filled with questions about why the LAPD was going uncriticized for actions that would get them lambasted in other cities.

In 1976, newly arrived KABC reporter Wayne Satz produced a Peabody Award–winning series about the astounding number of unarmed people shot and killed by LAPD officers. The reports questioned not only the department’s whitewash investigations but the lack of oversight by the DA, the coroner, the Police Commission and the city council.

Outraged, LAPD chief Ed Davis denounced Satz as “an enemy of law enforcement” over the LAPD’s closed-circuit TV station. “Satz Sucks” bumper stickers began appearing on LAPD patrol cars, and Satz’s picture popped up on targets at the police academy firing range. “Their arrogance was incredible,” Satz would later say. “
They didn’t think they had
any
public accountability.” And “they”—Ed Davis and the LAPD leadership—were right. Despite Satz’s searing broadcasts,
nothing
changed.

In 1979, the now-defunct
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
began covering the LAPD with new intensity. By focusing on the police-shooting death of thirty-nine-year-old South Central housewife
Eulia Love over a $22.09 unpaid gas bill—and on dozens of other shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later police killings and inexplicable choke-hold deaths—the
Herald-Examiner
embarrassed the
Times
into action, and the paper began reporting on similar incidents.

But they would still pull great investigative reporters like
David Cay Johnston off stories that dug too deeply into the LAPD’s clandestine inner workings. Working for the
Times
, Johnston had found out amazing things. That, for example, undercover LAPD officers were having sexual affairs with peaceful political activists in order to gather political information; that an LAPD lieutenant had posed as a Communist and traveled to Moscow and Havana; that LAPD agent provocateurs had infiltrated black and Hispanic organizations and were constantly calling for violent action; and that Gates had over two hundred officers working for his spy division. Johnston’s stories got printed, but usually in just one edition, without background or explanation. Eventually he was forced off the beat.

After his departure, however, the
Times
finally started covering officer-involved brutality and shootings, and stayed with the coverage year after year, breaking scores of investigative articles and holding the LAPD’s
feet to the fire in ways that the city’s politicians simply would not. It was the
Times
, in fact, that broke the Brentwood fund-raiser story, establishing how long Gates had stayed at the event. On
Face the Nation
the weekend after the riot, Gates said he remained at the fund-raiser for
ten minutes. An audio of his Brentwood speech obtained by the
Times
, however, revealed that he had in fact stayed at the gathering for
about
twenty
minutes. Factoring in his travel to and from the event, Daryl Gates left his post for
at least an hour and twenty minutes
at the very moment when the riots might have been limited with a disciplined, centrally directed show of force. He may have been monitoring radio calls as he traveled, but if he was making decisions, they certainly weren’t being reflected on the street.

Reginald Denny and other motorists were being beaten at Florence and Normandie during that time. And nobody from the LAPD even ordered the blocking-off of feeder roads into that chaotic intersection. Leaving the fund-raiser that night, Gates was asked about Denny and the others caught without police protection. “
There are going to be situations where people are without assistance,” he replied. “That’s just the facts of life.”

Bill Bratton, New York City, Early 1990s

As L.A. continued to burn on Daryl Gates’s watch, three thousand miles away another police chief was taking center stage in another renowned American city. His name was William J. Bratton. And unlike Gates, Bratton liked new, outside-the-box ideas. Studied them, invited them, championed them; recognized that new crime prevention strategies were desperately needed by police departments across an urban America seething with racial fear and animosity. Nowhere was this truer than the agency that Bratton had taken charge of in early 1990: the New City Transit Police Department (NYTPD).

The NYTPD was then independent of the New York Police Department, and its primary mission was to protect the
three and a half million daily riders of New York’s heavily traveled subway system—a
mission in which it was failing.
Transit crime had risen by 25 percent a year for the past three years—twice the rate of crime in New York City as a whole—and
robberies were growing at two and a half times the rate of those in the city, which itself was experiencing record-high crime numbers. The department’s
3,500 officers, moreover, were demoralized, and looked it.

They were also ill-equipped, as well as ill-used, by an old, tired leadership cadre whose policies focused on reacting to crimes after they occurred, as opposed to trying to systematically reduce or prevent them.

Meanwhile, thousands of homeless people were living in cardboard packing-box bedrooms on the far ends of subway platforms, and hundreds were becoming sick or dying after being bitten by rats, bitten by frost, or killed by speeding trains.

Simultaneously, subway riders were jumping over turnstyle subway entrances at the rate of about
170,000 a day. Often panhandlers and hustlers would cover turnstyle token-slots with gum or wet paper so tokens couldn’t be inserted. Then they’d hold open the entry gate and demand tokens from the already harried riders.

Aboveground, New York and the NYPD were absorbed in their own ongoing crisis.
The city’s 1989 homicide rate of 1,905 had set a sorry record, one promptly broken the following year with an astounding
2,245 murders. Nor was that the whole story. In 1993, a year of 1,946 killings in the city, a total of more than 5,800 people had been shot.

Seven hundred thousand serious crimes had been committed in New York in 1989—one crime for about every ten residents. Increasingly, New Yorkers were feeling overwhelmed by muggers, street corner crack dealers, crackheads, and crack wars, a record number of auto break-ins, in-your-face street hookers, sometimes violent, often mentally ill homeless people urinating and defecating on the city’s sidewalks, and menacing squeegee men demanding a buck at every red light for rubbing your windshield with a rag that was often dirtier than your windshield.

All of this was compounded by the city’s geography. Unlike car-centric Angelenos, New Yorkers of all working and professional classes and races converged in the city’s subway cars or on its crowded streets. Mostly black and brown young men living in improvised areas of the
Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens were hopping on subway trains and “going to work,” as they called it, robbing and terrorizing their fellow riders. At the same time African-Americans entering white ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens were being viciously beaten by impromptu gangs of raging young white men.