Rise of the Warrior Cop (24 page)

Fragmentation grenades are not funny. They are
meant
to seriously injure people. The SWAT request was made to John McAllister, the field commander. I picked up the microphone in my car and butted in. “You do not have permission to use fragmentation grenades,” I said—in effect telling John what
his
decision should be.

Had I been able to see firsthand what was going on, maybe I would have called the military, made the request. But instinctively,
I didn’t like a civil police force using a weapon designed for an army
.
⁸³

Again, it’s illuminating just how different attitudes were then than they are today. Here a heavily armed terrorist group had just opened fire in downtown Los Angeles. And we have Gates—the foremost proponent of militarized policing of his era—reflecting back on the incident, remembering that even under those circumstances, he had serious reservations about using military weapons against civilians.

When Gates arrived near the scene of the shoot-out, he saw the same sort of urban battlefield he’d seen during the Watts riots. “Here in the heart of Los Angeles was a war zone, something out of a World War II movie,” he writes, “where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.”

Minutes later, a dazed woman named Christine Johnson emerged from the house. She was one of the tenants before the SLA moved in. A SWAT officer ushered her away from the gunfire.

After about fifty minutes of heavy gunfire between the SLA and SWAT officers, the house caught fire. McCarthy again pulled up his bullhorn and offered to let the occupants surrender. The SLA responded with more gunfire. The fire raged on. There was little anyone could do. Understandably, LA firefighters wanted nothing to do with the blaze. They couldn’t get close enough to douse it with water without making themselves vulnerable to gunfire.

Two women did eventually emerge from the rear of the house. Both were shot dead by police. (LAPD officers claimed the women emerged firing guns. Investigators hired by the women’s families later claimed they were unarmed.)

The rest of the SLA remained inside as the building burned to the ground. Six more SLA members died, either from being shot, from suicide, or from the fire, including Cinque, the group’s leader. Between them, the SLA and LAPD fired more than nine thousand rounds of ammunition.

Patty Hearst wasn’t in the building. She’d later be arrested, charged, and convicted for her role in the bank robbery. She claims she had been brainwashed, beaten, and sexually abused by SLA members. The jury apparently didn’t find her sympathetic, but her
sentence was later commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and President Bill Clinton granted her a pardon in 2001, one of his last acts in office.

Ironically, the most enduring legacy of the SLA—an organization that seemed to see fascism just about everywhere—was to promote, popularize, and facilitate the spread of SWAT teams across America. For Gates, it was the perfect confluence of events. The SLA had attracted national attention when it kidnapped Hearst. The standoff with the LAPD and the FBI was not the result of a quick response to a bank robbery or mass shooting. It came after a full day of news reports that the group was in the city and law enforcement was in the process of tracking them down. That put news teams at the ready, so when it broke that the SLA had been located, they were prepped to send cameras and reporters. Gates, who mostly had an antagonistic relationship with the press, wryly notes in his book that as the gunfire dragged on, “I was briefly amused to notice that the hordes of reporters who had by now materialized were actually keeping their distance—for the only time I can remember.”

They may have steered well clear of the flying bullets, but Gates certainly benefited from their presence. Live video of the gunfight was broadcast across the city. The footage then went nationwide. Gates’s pet project, now eight years in the making, had finally found a national spotlight.

If the mission of Gates’s SWAT teams was to quickly defuse a violent situation with minimal casualties, the confrontation with the SLA was far from an unqualified success. The team’s decisions in the field had again led to a protracted exchange of thousands of rounds of gunfire in the middle of a densely populated urban area, not to mention a huge house fire and several deaths. But all of the deaths were SLA members. No police officers and no citizens outside the group suffered any significant injuries. And unlike the Black Panther raid, in which it could be argued that the police provoked a radical group that had some propensity for violence but for whom violence wasn’t the primary objective, the SLA radicals had been violent from the start. Violence was the means of the group’s activism. It had recently
committed violent acts, and gave every indication it would continue to do so in the near future. There was no provocation here. Even if the tactics themselves yielded less than optimal results, there was no question that a police agency charged with protecting the city had no choice but to confront the group once they learned of its location.

After the shoot-out, the LAPD was flooded with letters, as were city newspapers. The letters ran about five-to-one in favor of the police, with praise for the SWAT teams in particular. Chris McNab, a prolific author of books on police and the military, writes that after the SLA shoot-out, “SWAT was now on the public map, most viewers being enthralled by its toughness, others being appalled.”
⁸⁴

Gates himself writes:

One thing was certain. That night, SWAT became a household word throughout the world. They were intrepid; they were brilliant in their deployment; their execution was flawless. Soon, other law enforcement agencies began mounting their own SWAT teams. The whole nation had watched the shootout—live, on network TV.

He concludes, “Clearly, SWAT had arrived.”
⁸⁵

E
ARLY IN THE MORNING OF
F
EBRUARY
24, 1975, O
FFICER
Robert Duran and his partner, Officer Jim Street, were cruising in their squad car. A call came in about a potentially violent domestic disturbance. “Lovely,” Duran said. “They’re at each other’s throats already.” He pulled the car up to the intersection of the reported dispute. Nothing to speak of. “Quiet as a tomb,” Duran said, forebodingly. “Are you sure we got the right number?” The next day would be Duran’s birthday. His pretty wife was pregnant with their third child. All was right with the world. Then a shot rang out. Then several more. The two officers were caught in a deadly triangle of three snipers. Duran went down.

Street held the snipers at bay until the SWAT team could arrive. But by the time SWAT captain Hondo Harrelson and his team
could scramble to the scene and ascend to the rooftop where one of the snipers was perched, all three gunmen had already left their positions and met back up on the street. Harrelson could only watch in anger as the assassins hopped into a gold Ford Maverick and sped away.

Sgt. Deacon Kay jooined his colleagues on the rooftop.

“The call was a phony, just like all the others,” Kay said to Harrelson. “Ambush. Cold-blooded assassins. But
why?
”

“Because of the color of their skin,” Harrelson replied. “Not because they’re black or brown or white. But because they’re
blue
.”

And so opened the first episode of the ABC drama
S.W.A.T.,
a cheesy, violent (for the time) melodrama from producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg. Just eight years earlier, SWAT had been nothing more than a thought bouncing around in Daryl Gates’s head. Now, thanks to a series of high-profile raids climaxing with the 1974 rescue of heiress Patty Hearst from the Symbionese Liberation Army, the concept had entered the mass consciousness. Gates’s idea was now a prime-time network television show with an audience of millions. The show was set in a large, unnamed California city that vaguely resembled Los Angeles. Former LAPD SWAT officer Richard Kelbaugh was a technical adviser for the show. The first episode followed Hondo Harrelson as he recruited Street, Luca, and others for a second SWAT team to be run out of the “Olympic” division of the police department—all while also hunting down the ambushing cop killers (played by a not-at-all-intimidating trio of middle-aged white guys who delivered lines like,
Man, I just want to ice some pigs!
). Over the course of the first season, Hondo’s new SWAT unit took on a suspiciously Manson-like cult leader and mass murderer, mob assassins trying to kill a former associate before he could testify before a Senate committee, a militant leftist group that had taken a professional basketball team hostage, an assassin from India sent to kill a US senator by infecting him with plague, terrorists who took a Nobel Prize–winning scientist hostage in a plant loaded with explosives that could eradicate half the city, and—in his toughest battle yet—a pretty young journalist sent to profile Hondo
who didn’t really like cops. Cops, she said, are “a necessary evil, but more evil than necessary.”

The first season did well, and ABC ordered a second. Milton Bradley soon put out a
S.W.A.T
. board game. Kids could take their sandwiches to school in
S.W.A.T
. lunch boxes. There were
S.W.A.T
. action figures, View-Master sets, jigsaw puzzles, and die-cast miniatures of the S.W.A.T.-mobile. The show’s theme song, an uptempo instrumental by the funk-disco band Rhythm Heritage, was released as a single in 1976. It sold one million copies and briefly hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. When the second season of S.W.A.T. was set to premiere, Hondo Harrelson made the cover of
TV Guide
.

SWAT had hit the pop culture.

A
T THE SAME TIME, REAL
SWAT
TEAMS WERE SPREADING
throughout the country. According to a
New York Times
investigation published in July 1975, by the middle of the 1970s the number of SWAT teams in the United States had grown to around five hundred. Criminologists were concerned. “It is the kind of thing that quickly catches on in police departments because of the pressure to be up to date without any knowledge of what they’re actually getting into,” said Marvin Wolfgang, director of the Center for Studies of Criminology and Criminal Law at the University of Pennsylvania. Someone the
Times
identified only as “a nationally-known police expert” added, “It reminds me of the nineteen-thirties when some smart salesmen went around the country selling submachine guns to every police department on the theory that they were going to have a shootout with John Dillinger some day.”
⁸⁶

In its survey of police departments, the paper found that in large cities SWAT teams were usually deployed only in emergency situations and that they tended to perform professionally and skillfully, using their extensive training to deescalate violent situations, often successfully. But smaller towns and suburbs were adopting the SWAT idea too, or at least some version of it. And in many
communities SWAT teams and similar units were mostly used to bully protest groups, counterculture enclaves, and minority activists.

Some police officials feared that the SWAT trend, particularly in smaller cities and towns, would succumb to what the philosopher Abraham Kaplan called “the Law of the Instrument”: when you’re carrying a hammer, everything looks like a nail. “There are some cops who want to solve all society’s problems with an M-16,” one police chief told the paper. “Some of these men have lost perspective of their role in society and are playing mental games with firearms. . . . And if you set yourself up to use heavy firepower, then the danger exists that you will use it at the first opportunity, and over-reaction—the opposite of what the [SWAT] concept is about—becomes a real danger.”
⁸⁷