Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (6 page)

But now, with the fallout from the King beating and a riot gathering steam, Gates could sense that power slipping away. This Christopher Commission charter-amendment proposal was the first step in that process. Heading to Brentwood, Gates rightly understood that he was in the fight of his professional life.

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

Daryl Gates’s tumultuous reign as chief had begun in 1978, when Los Angeles was still deep in the throes of a second remarkable demographic and generational shift that would utterly transform the social and political architecture of the city, along with its ethnic and racial composition, size, culture, and sophistication.

The first had begun with a trickle in the 1920s and ’30s, before exploding during and after World War II, when hundreds of thousands of migrating black, Jewish, and various other white Americans joined the relatively small numbers of Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican minorities already in Los Angeles. Together, they would form the backbone of the coalition that would elect Tom Bradley as L.A.’s Democratic mayor.

Unfortunately for L.A.’s African-Americans, just as they were seeing a black man in charge in city hall, their fortunes in other ways were
fast declining as America’s corporate titans began shutting down their unionized factories with their well-paying jobs in the 1960s. By the mid-eighties they’d completed their task, setting up their production facilities in the sweatshops of Mexico and South Asia, and sending black unemployment soaring as the Bloods and Crips were birthed and the city’s crack wars ignited.

Meanwhile, a second extraordinary new wave of immigration was erupting. Starting in the early 1970s and running well through the 1990s, about
eight hundred thousand immigrants from the developing world would pour into the city from Mexico and Central America above all, but from Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Israel, and other parts of the Middle East as well.
By 1990, 87 percent of Los Angeles City’s public school students were Latinos and/or other minorities.

Desperately poor rural Mexicans moved into low-income and working class neighborhoods throughout the city, searching for jobs and scratching out a living doing L.A.’s service work.
By the late eighties Latinos would comprise a rapidly accelerating 40 percent of the city’s population.

Simultaneously, just west of downtown, the district known as Pico-Union began overflowing with tens of thousands of equally impoverished Salvadorans and Guatemalans crammed together in substandard pre–World War II apartment buildings. Farther west, in the historic Mid-Wilshire district, Koreans were also arriving in numbers so high that a large section of the area would later be officially christened “Koreatown.”

Concurrently, a generational revolution was also hurtling forward, one that began in the mid-1960s. Initially it featured civil rights and antiwar marchers and skinny college students with radical hair throwing off the corseted social constraints imposed by aging white men with beer guts and buzz cuts. By the early 1990s those students were middle-aged and now part of a social revolution being spearheaded by a new generation of Latinos, blacks, women, gays, and political and social liberals demanding equal rights, opportunities, and the right to be free of police repression.

At the same time, older white, conservative supporters of the LAPD were continuing to beat a rapid retreat from the city that had begun soon after the Watts riots.

What emerged from the historic turmoil was a city where race and class tensions pervaded the atmosphere. The very rich were mostly walled off in hidden mansions, and much of the white middle class remained living in hyper-segregated neighborhoods. The brown, black, and immigrant working class and poor—who were becoming the bulk of the city’s ordinary people—were rarely seen by well-off, white L.A. unless they were cleaning houses, weeding gardens, working nonunion construction, driving buses, parking cars, stocking shelves in big-box factory stores, or cooking food and mopping floors in every restaurant in town.

By the early nineties L.A. was still being billed, along with New York, as the capital of American style and glamour. But in reality, over the last two decades of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was a city awash in crisis, led by people without answers, and filled with residents suffering the consequences.

Disastrously, no organization was less prepared or less willing to adjust to this transformation than was the LAPD and its leader, Daryl Gates.

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Named chief in 1978, Daryl Gates entered office with a choice: to buck the headwinds of America’s social revolution, or to try to accommodate it. His decision was never in doubt.

The
son of an alcoholic and absentee father,
Gates was raised in abject poverty in Glendale—a small city adjacent to Los Angeles—during the 1930s and ’40s. It was a time when L.A., sans Hollywood, was still Peoria with Palms, still a city that billed itself as America’s pure “White Spot,” still a place where a mainstream mayoral candidate would proudly declare Los Angeles “
the last stand of native-born Protestant Americans.”

Though shaped by the legacy of that time and place, Daryl Gates would be required to police a new Los Angeles whose residents were demanding dramatic change in its institutions.

First and foremost that included an LAPD that was so notoriously racist and homophobic that it would take a court-mandated federal consent decree to force the department to start hiring more than a token number of women, blacks, and Latinos.

Daryl Gates, in short, was not just opposed to any changes to his LAPD; he was
appalled
by the very idea. For decades the LAPD had been portrayed on network TV as America’s quintessential police department—sharp, trailblazing, efficient, effective, and admired by law enforcement organizations around the world.

In large part that image had been a PR coup fueled by the department’s own skillful self-promotion and crafted by movie industry and public relations veterans. But there was also reality to the myth. Initially, Bill Parker had been a much-needed reformer. Entering office in 1950, Parker had been among the first to eliminate the kind of systemic, on-the-take corruption that had been part of the DNA of the LAPD and many other big-city police departments since their inception. And he did so at least a decade or two before other police forces in cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Curbside courts where traffic cops would shake down bribes from errant motorists quickly vanished. And so did the routine black-bag payoffs to vice-squad detectives so perfectly personified by the all those brass-knuckled police detectives played by Ward Bond in the
film noir
1940s.

Under Parker, the LAPD also became independent from the big-business downtown oligarchy that for more than half a century had used the department like a private army to muzzle dissent.

Parker himself had a hand in the creation of the LAPD myth. Not deliberately—at least, not at first. But he wanted to protect and project the department’s newfound reputation (in white L.A.) for upright professionalism. His chance came in the early fifties, when radio/TV producer/actor Jack Webb sought the department’s cooperation in mounting a TV series based on a fictional LAPD detective. Parker’s approval came with a price: the department would have to approve all scripts and monitor the filming on the set. He used his office’s oversight not just to ensure that his organization was portrayed as he wished but to reshape Ward Bond into Webb’s signature
Dragnet
LAPD detective, the righteous Joe Friday.

And when Webb needed the department’s cooperation to introduce a new series about a couple of LAPD patrol officers, Parker again got what he wanted with
Adam-12
: actor Martin Milner playing a toothy, all-American model cop—white, clean-cut, athletic, with a moral code far superior to the people he policed. In all these things Bill Parker seemed nothing if not the police reformer for whom the city had yearned.

But in real life his model patrolman would quickly fall victim to Parker’s extremely bleak, conflicting view of human nature. The department’s Martin Milners were required to view their jobs
not
as one of service to the community but as a “
thin blue line” protecting a venal public against the evils of “
man, the most predatory of all in the animal kingdom” while policing in an America that was “
the most lawless nation on Earth.” By intent, his officers would therefore be distant and divorced from the city’s social fabric. People are nice to cops only when they want something, Parker believed, and having professional relationships with the public could only corrupt them.

No one bought into Parker’s policing philosophy and worldview more than Daryl Gates. And as the LAPD’s new chief, Gates would regard himself as nothing less than the guardian of that legacy, the perpetuator of that myth, the keeper of Bill Parker’s revered flame.

Early in his career, Gates had been fast-tracked by the childless chief, who treated him like a surrogate son. As an awestruck, impressionable twenty-three-year-old rookie, Gates had served as Parker’s daytime chauffeur and bodyguard, and later as his adjutant and executive officer. Frequently in ugly, hungover moods during which he’d viciously berate unlucky members of his command staff, Parker nevertheless would heap praise on his superbly conditioned, sharply tailored young driver during the speeches cum sermons he’d deliver almost daily to his large, 1950s-conservative political base. “
Now, look at him,” Parker would sometimes tell his audiences, pointing to Gates. “Stand up,” he’d say to him, “I want you to stand up!” And when Gates stood up, he’d say: “Now, this is a
policeman
 . . . look at him!”

Unfortunately for the LAPD and Los Angeles, Gates remained frozen in that moment, unable to put himself in the shoes of those outside his narrow background, learn from experience and failure, or grow with the times. Instead, he became an uncompromising defender of the status quo, emerging in the process as a tough-talking symbol of the counterrevolutionary forces fighting against the transformational sixties and
seventies. In the process he became among the last incarnations of the audacious, angry, socially divisive white police chiefs who rose to power during the era’s historic turmoil.

On the East Coast the breed was best exemplified by Francis “Blackjack Frank” Rizzo, the former police commissioner who became mayor of Philadelphia in the 1970s. Rizzo was beloved by the white working class, who hated and feared black Philly. They cheered when Rizzo proclaimed that the best way to treat those who broke the law was “
Spacco il capo
”—break their heads—and applauded his department’s crime-reduction strategy, which was to “
make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”

Gates too sent messages to his troops and conservative supporters. “
Casual drug users,” he said, “should be shot.” Of the demand that the department hire openly gay cops, he replied disgustedly, “
Who would want to work with one?” Of a man who was awarded $170,000 by a federal jury after LAPD officers had broken his nose during a search of his home, Gates countered that the victim was “
lucky that was all he had broken,” and then asked and answered his own question: “How much is a broken nose worth? I don’t think it’s worth anything.” During a 1985 interview on CBS he lauded Philadelphia’s first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, as “
an inspiration to the nation” after Goode had approved dropping a bomb from a helicopter onto a row house in a densely packed, black, residential Philadelphia neighborhood. The aerial bombing resulted in a massive wall of flames that caused the death of eleven residents, including five children, and the incineration of sixty-one surrounding homes. In response, a federal jury awarded over $12 million to the homeowners. Nevertheless, Gates told wide-eyed reporter Lesley Stahl that Wilson Goode had “
jumped on [his] heroes list,” and “by golly,” he added, “that’s not a long list.”

That same year, as the crack cocaine epidemic began to sweep across L.A., Gates searched his arsenal for a weapon to knock down fortified crack-house doors. He found an armored military personnel carrier with a fourteen-foot protrusion that the department then christened the “
Battering Ram.” Acting on an unsubstantiated tip to narcotics officers, he decided to ride shotgun on its maiden voyage. The vehicle geared
up and smashed a giant, gaping hole into the suspect house while the invited press looked on. As officers poured in, they found only
two terrified black women, a couple of kids eating chocolate-swirl ice cream, and a small amount of grass for personal use.

Despite all this, Daryl Gates was nevertheless taken very seriously by supporters and critics alike. Crime was high and fear was rampant, and the city’s politicians had no stomach for the fierce, polarizing battle it would take to get rid of a ready-to-rumble law-and-order chief with
no
legal limits on his tenure in office. Statutorily, the part-time civilian Police Commission, appointed by the mayor, had the power and duty to set department policy and hold the chief accountable for its implementation. But in reality, the commission was simply ignored by Parker and his successors, who ruled the department unchallenged. Gates had even bragged about his job security in his 1992 autobiography,
Chief
: “
To fire a police chief,” he wrote, “a public charge [is] required and must be proven at a hearing of the Board of Civil Service Commissioners. Even if the board can demonstrate ‘good and sufficient cause’ for removal, the chief may appeal to the California Courts.”

And “good and sufficient cause,” Gates failed to mention, would be extremely hard to come by in his case, thanks to a bizarre act of political obsequiousness on the part of Mayor Bradley’s part-time civilian police commissioners. In an effort to buy peace with Gates, they had allowed him to write his own civil service performance evaluations—which unsurprisingly, were uniformly “excellent.” So any move to fire him, even in wake of the King beating, would directly contradict the favorable civil service evaluations on which the commission had already signed off.