Rise of the Warrior Cop (35 page)

The comments themselves would have been bad enough. Even worse was the fact that a culture existed within the department in which officers felt free to make them over police radio. The LAPD’s focus on reacting to crime instead of preventing it, the commission found, had isolated officers from the communities they patrolled. Cops were rewarded for putting up impressive arrest statistics and for being “hard-nosed.” The report found that drug and gang sweeps of the late 1980s had alienated LAPD cops from the community, creating reciprocal hostility and resentment. The LAPD did a poor job of screening applicants for violent backgrounds, and the department’s training put far too much emphasis on force and too little on communication and problem-solving. The commission found that when academy students went out in the field, they were quickly schooled to view the world from a “we/they” perspective. It also found that many of the field training officers who gave new cops their first experiences on the street themselves had histories of misconduct or excessive use of force.

The commission’s finding on how the LAPD handled citizen complaints was perhaps the most disturbing and enlightening part of the Christopher report. Of the 2,152 complaints filed against LAPD cops between 1986 and 1990, just 42 had been found credible by the department. Most were handled by the accused officer’s supervisors, not by Internal Affairs. Intake officers “actively discouraged” citizens who tried to file complaints, often with verbal harassment or by making them wait for long periods of time. Investigating officers made no attempt to find independent witnesses, meaning that the “investigations” often came down to the officer’s word against the complainant’s. After shootings, officers were usually granted an unrecorded “pre-interview” before they
were questioned on tape. The officers involved were also usually interviewed as a group, not individually. All of which gave them opportunity to work out any inconsistencies or contradictions in the story. Perhaps most tellingly, the commission found that when officers were disciplined, the punishment given to officers who had embarrassed the department (drug use, corruption, theft) was much more severe than the punishment given to officers who used excessive force or violated a citizen’s constitutional rights—again reflecting a culture of “us versus them.”
¹⁶

The Christopher Commission made a number of recommendations, but one made much more of a splash than the others: it recommended that Daryl Gates be removed as chief of police. Gates announced his intent to resign on July 13, 1991, three days after the Christopher report came out. But by the time the LA riots broke out the following April, Gates was still in office.

Sparked by a jury’s decision to acquit the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King, the riots themselves lasted four days, although there were flare-ups of violence in the days that followed. In all, 13,500 troops from the California National Guard, the Third Battalion First Marine, and the Fortieth Infantry Division and Seventh Infantry Division of the US Army were sent in to stop the violence. There were 53 fatalities, over 2,000 injured, and property damage of more than $1 billion.

The Watts riots in 1965 had made Daryl Gates a rising star within the LAPD. The helplessness that Gates and his officers felt while getting shot at by snipers in what had become an urban war zone had inspired him to create and push for the SWAT team, his most influential and lasting legacy. Twenty-seven years later, the riots after the Rodney King verdict effectively ended Gates’s career. By then, SWAT teams across America numbered in the thousands. Most of them weren’t responding to riots or Black Panther barricades or shootings like the one on Surry Street—most SWAT teams were spending most of their time breaking down doors on drug raids.

Though rioting gave birth to Gates’s legacy in 1965, his proudest legacy was powerless to stop the rioting in 1992. Order wasn’t restored
until the National Guard showed up. One other big difference between Watts and the 1992 riots: far more Americans were beginning to see problems with police brutality. When Gallup asked, “Do you think there is police brutality in your area?” in 1967, just 6 percent said yes. In July 1991, it was 39 percent.
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On June 28, 1992, Gates resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department—this time for real.

A
S NOTED PREVIOUSLY, AFTER IMPLEMENTING MANY OF
the community policing practices proposed by Norm Stamper, San Diego was seeing some progress. Crime had started to go down in the city even as it continued to rise elsewhere in the country, and police-community relations were improving. By 1992, Stamper was Burgreen’s right-hand man. Burgreen asked Stamper to conduct an audit of the entire department, instructing his top deputy to “concentrate on our warts.” After conducting his audit, Stamper made a number of proposals, but one of them was particularly interesting. He wanted to “demilitarize” the department.

Stamper knew of a few smaller police departments that had tried demilitarizing to various degrees, with mixed results. Back in 1970 the town of Lakewood, Colorado, built a new department from the ground up. Police Chief Pierce Brooks wanted a department that looked more like it was part of the community than an outside force charged with keeping the community in line. So the cops wore slacks and blazers instead of military-like uniforms. Instead of using Army ranks like sergeant or lieutenant, they took titles like “field advisor.” Rank-and-file cops were called “agents.” The Lakewood experiment was short-lived: by 1973, they were back to using traditional titles and the conventional police blues. Similar efforts in Menlo Park and Beverly Hills, California, hadn’t gone quite as far, but had been somewhat more successful.

Stamper’s proposal was relatively mild by comparison. As he writes in his book
Breaking Rank:

I knew there’d be a shit-rain of opposition—military titles are a cultural icon in civilian policing, as much a part of the cop culture as mustaches, sidearms, and doughnuts. But, win or lose, I thought it was important to air the
rationale
behind “demilitarization.” I hoped to encourage a departmentwide dialog on the principles of a more “democratic,” less militaristic police force. And since
language structures reality
, I was convinced that our military nomenclature stood between us and the community.
¹⁸

Stamper’s idea was to change the titles of “sergeant,” “lieutenant,” and “captain” to titles less evocative of the military. He suggested looking to federal law enforcement: the FBI, for instance, had “agents,” “special agents,” and “supervisors.” Burgreen was dubious, not because he necessarily disagreed, but because he knew the idea would be dead on arrival within the department. He gave Stamper two months to try it out.

Burgreen was right. The department erupted in protest. Letters to the editor of the department’s internal newsletter howled with derision. The
San Diego Union-Tribune
got wind of the idea and spat on it in an editorial.

Stamper had a few supporters, but only a few. (One of them, oddly enough, was former Reagan attorney general Ed Meese.) Stamper writes in his book about one lieutenant who initially scoffed at the proposal, but later came around. “The more I thought about it the more I realized, we’re
not
the military, we’re cops. We’re
community
cops. We ought to have titles that make sense to the community. What does ‘lieutenant’ or ‘sergeant’ mean to the average citizen?”

A related question: what effect do such titles have on the average cop? Still, as Stamper writes, of the department’s 2,800 employees, “the lieutenant’s change of heart brought the number of converts up to approximately eleven.”

Stamper’s proposal didn’t involve demilitarizing police tactics. He wasn’t suggesting that they disband the SWAT teams, or get rid of their guns, or even switch to slacks and blazers. All he was proposing
was that they ditch the military titles and jargon. And there was no way it was ever going to happen.
¹⁹

But Stamper wasn’t the only high-ranking law enforcement official growing concerned about militarization in the 1990s. In a 1993 article for the FBI’s
Law Enforcement Bulletin
, Lt. Tom Gabor of the Culver City, California, Police Department argued that SWAT teams were becoming too ubiquitous and being used in ways that were inappropriate for police work. Gabor wrote that the massive rise in deployments of SWAT teams across the country was more about “justifying the costs of maintaining [the] units” than about maintaining public safety. Even as early as 1993, Gabor had already noticed that “in many organizations, patrol leaders feel pressured to call for SWAT assistance on borderline cases, even though field supervisors believe that patrol personnel could resolve the incident.”
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In Wisconsin, Marquette County sheriff Rick Fullmer actually disbanded his department’s SWAT team in 1996. “Quite frankly, they get excited about dressing up in black and doing that kind of thing,” Fullmer told the
Madison Capital Times
. “I said, ‘This is ridiculous.’ All we’re going to end up doing is getting people hurt.”
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In New Haven, Connecticut, Police Chief Nick Pastore was facing growing pressure to collect military gear from the Pentagon and to use his SWAT team in situations where he thought it was inappropriate. Pastore told the
New York Times
that outfitting cops in battle garb “feeds a mind-set that you’re not a police officer serving a community, you’re a soldier at war. I had some tough-guy cops in my department pushing for bigger and more hardware. They used to say, ‘It’s a war out there.’ They like SWAT because it’s an adventure.” Pastore also worried about the martial rhetoric. “If you think everyone who uses drugs is the enemy, then you’re more likely to declare war on the people.”
²²
In another interview, with
The Nation
, Pastore pointed out that before he took over, New Haven’s SWAT team was being called out several times a week. “The whole city was suffering trauma,” he said. “We had politicians saying ‘The streets are a war zone, the police have taken over,’ and the police were driven by fear and adventure. SWAT was a big part of that.”
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After Pastore took
over, New Haven’s SWAT team was called out just four times in all of 1998. Lo and behold, reserving the SWAT team for true emergencies didn’t lead to a criminal takeover of New Haven. In fact, the city’s crime rate dropped at a brisker pace than that of the rest of Connecticut (which also dropped)—from 13,950 incidents in 1997 to 9,455 in 2000.
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In Colorado, the
Denver Post
ran an article in 1995 about three area deaths from no-knock drug raids in the area in thirty-three months—including a sixteen-year-old boy, a deputy sheriff, and a fifty-four-year-old grandfather of eight. “Such raids are very dangerous,” said Pitkin County sheriff Robert Braudis. “They are the closest thing I can think of to a military action in a democratic society.” Braudis explained that it was far safer to conduct surveillance, to learn a suspect’s routine, and to then do “a quick, quiet arrest when a suspect is in the open.” As for possible destruction of evidence, he said that his department would have the water shut off before serving a warrant (by knocking at the door and waiting for an answer). In some cases, they had arranged for a plumber to set up a “catch net” to capture anything flushed after police arrived to serve the warrant. But Braudis said that his concern went beyond the SWAT tactics. “The ‘war on drugs’ is an abysmal failure,” he said. “Even the term creates a dangerous war mentality.”
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In 1998 the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, commissioned an outside investigation after a series of questionable shootings and SWAT incidents. In one case that made national news, a SWAT officer said to his colleagues, “Let’s go get the bad guy,” just before the team went to confront thirty-three-year-old Larry Walker. The “bad guy” wasn’t a terrorist, a killer, or even a drug dealer, but a depressed man whose family had called the police because they feared he might be contemplating suicide. The SWAT team showed up in full battle attire, including assault rifles and flash-bang grenades. They found Walker “cowering under a juniper tree,” the
New York Times
later reported, then shot him dead from forty-three feet away. The city brought in Sam Walker, a well-regarded criminologist at the University of Nebraska, to evaluate the police department’s use
of lethal force. Walker was astonished by what he found. “The rate of police killings was just off the charts,” Walker told the
Times
. The city’s SWAT team, he said, “had an organizational structure that led them to escalate situations upward rather than de-escalating.” The city then brought in Toledo, Ohio, police chief Jerry Galvin to take over its police department. Galvin immediately disbanded the SWAT team, toned down the militarism, and implemented community policing policies. He told the
Times
, “If cops have a mindset that the goal is to take out a citizen, it will happen.”
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