Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (11 page)

From the Korean immigrant shopkeeper’s point of view, a significant number of their mostly impoverished customers were potential shoplifters with a sense of entitlement, always ready to rationalize their criminality with a sense of victimhood, always asking for something for nothing.

In the months preceding the riots, the animosity between L.A.’s blacks and its Korean residents had grown particularly poisonous. A year earlier, in 1991, a store security camera captured
Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year-old African-American girl, as she was shot in the back of the head by a Korean shopkeeper following a dispute over whether she was trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. Harlins had put down the juice and was walking out the door when the shopkeeper, Soon Ja Du, opened fire. For Harlins’s murder, Du received a sentence from a white judge of five years’ probation.

L.A.’s African-American community reacted with stunned outrage; white L.A. with a collective shrug of its shoulders. It was yet another insult black Angelenos were expected to swallow, yet another wound to be rubbed raw and left to fester. And fester it did. What was disagreeable, sometimes heated racial distrust in other cities like New York morphed into a race war in Los Angeles.

On the second day of the riots at least three waves of cars loaded with armed African-Americans targeted hundreds of stores in Koreatown. In the vacuum left by the LAPD, they were met by serious people: Korean men, some of them veterans of a Korean marine corps known for its toughness, armed with shotguns, automatic weapons, and steel pipes.
An eighteen-year-old Korean man was killed and three others wounded during hours-long gun battles with hundreds of would-be looters.

Earlier that morning Mike Yamaki and his small, three-patrol-car police caravan had driven through Koreatown en route to Watts. He’d been there the night before, and near the corner of Western and Olympic
Yamaki again
spotted the very same eyeball he’d seen lying on the same bus bench the preceding evening. And the man it belonged to was still there, still dead and awaiting pickup of his body. The same telephone pole that had been on fire, moreover, was still smoldering. And the same police officers he’d been with the night before were still talking about what kind of protection their small observer group might give people. And Yamaki repeated the same thing he’d told them earlier: “
We can’t give anyone protection.”

Michael Yamaki, Thursday, April 30, 1992, Watts

After leaving Koreatown, Yamaki and his small caravan headed to Watts, where the offices of the
Watts Community Action Committee—a social service agency which focused on jobs and assistance for the poor—were being mobbed. The offices and the surrounding complex of stores had risen from the ashes of the Watts Riots of ’65 in hopes of stemming the despair and rage that had caused that earlier insurrection. Today, however, about two hundred rioters were giving no thought to that fact. They looted and set the complex aflame, destroying not only the offices but also the commercial enterprises within the complex—whose earnings, as the
Times
pointed out, “
helped pay for a homeless shelter, job training center, and a senior citizens’ housing project.”

What would stick in Yamaki’s mind years later, however, was the turmoil emanating from a different source: Cops from departments outside the city were streaming into Watts by late Thursday afternoon, alongside the National Guard. They were ready and eager for some serious stick-time, but were running around without direction. “
We [the LAPD] didn’t have anything ready for them,” says Yamaki. “All we could do was ask them to cover a particular area, but we couldn’t
tell
officers we just met from other departments what to do.”

Finally, Yamaki and his entourage headed to the Wilshire Division station house for a breather, arriving at about 4 p.m. The division captain quickly asked Yamaki to jump into his role of police commissioner
and
address the troops. Yamaki tried, but had nothing to say. Outside the station house, fires blazed. Nobody seemed to know how to bring some order to the situation. And Mike Yamaki was no exception.

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

Meanwhile, Andre Christian, having returned to Moreno Valley, remained sitting in his chair watching the riots live on TV, shaking his head in disbelief. “
The cops, they’d waited just too long to respond,” Christian thought as he watched the riots spread that initial Wednesday night and into Friday. “Too many people were engaged now, too many supporting it. The gangsters, yeah, they were there. But there were just a lot of regular, normal citizens too.”

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

Historically, Los Angeles’s black citizens had always gotten the worst of both worlds when it came to cops and crime. Living in hyper-segregated communities crippled by violence, gangs, crack, and poverty, they were desperate for protection from a police department whose chief seemed to have no idea how to intelligently address their concerns. Instead, Daryl Gates led an army of occupation that waged war on the residents of black South L.A., Mexican East L.A., and Central American Pico-Union in the name of crime suppression.

Yet those residents weren’t feeling any safer. The streets, in fact, were even more dangerous, despite the fact that those very residents were daily seeing a cop, talking to a cop, or interacting with somebody who’d just encountered a cop. And therein lay not just a problem but the heart of the matter. In the 1970s, ex–LAPD officer turned novelist Joseph Wambaugh put a name to the LAPD’s self-image and their perception of their job. “The New Centurions,” he called them.

And ever since Bill Parker’s reign in 1950, that’s exactly how the LAPD had policed: aggressively confronting and commanding anyone with whom they came in contact, owning the streets, and stomping out the street lice. The definition of “lice” was extremely broad and zealously adhered to. As Gates later boasted: “
If someone looked out of place in a neighborhood, we had a little chat with him. If a description
of a thief could be obtained, we stopped everyone fitting that description, even if it meant angering dozens of innocent citizens. . . . Using these proactive tactics [the] LAPD . . . became the most aggressive police department in the country.”

Aggressive policing was more than just an LAPD modus operandi, however; it was a career-advancement imperative. Reputations were made and promotions bestowed based on high arrest numbers and, as David Dotson once put it, by “
pounding the fear of God into people.” Making lots of arrests was the measure of the man, the gold standard of one’s worth among peers and supervisors—not just
one way
to achieve a public safety goal, but the goal itself. Few, however, dared question if aggressive policing correlated to
effective
policing. Instead, stepping out of the LAPD’s narrow tactical and philosophical box, and using one’s experience to develop new crime prevention strategies, was cause to be branded an upstart, a malcontent, a subversive.

Patrol was consequently looked upon as a dead end, dominated—as Wambaugh once wrote—by “
super-aggressive twenty-two-year-olds, full of testosterone . . . absolutely immortal, and unable to admit [or] verbalize fear, even to themselves.” This was not exactly a revelation, and certainly not exclusive to the LAPD. Tens of thousands of white cops who grew up in segregated white neighborhoods and went on to work in black areas in the decades preceding the ’92 riots knew that feeling described by Wambaugh. Seeped in the racism of white America, and usually no more than high school educated, they policed a historically abused people whose experience and worldview most couldn’t begin to fathom—a people who were also continually subject to the criminal behavior of a small but significant number of their own neighbors. For most of those white cops, their initial reaction was bewilderment followed by disgust and contempt—emotions that justified their special task of keeping all those racially segregated have-nots away from the white-skinned haves by using the violent power of the state.

James Baldwin, that prophetic messenger of what it meant to be black in Jim Crow America, spelled out the experience in the sixties in his book
Nobody Knows My Name
: “
He is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. He moves . . . therefore,
like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where, he is.”

By its “aggressive” policing philosophy the LAPD was exacerbating what was already a highly charged situation, and literally mandating that Wambaugh’s twenty-two-year-olds initiate racially volatile encounters where they’d constantly be challenged. As David Dotson later told the Christopher Commission: “We expect [our officers] to go out and
aggressively identify people and investigate people. And that . . . results in police officers bluffing their way into situations, and when they stop people on the street, frequently the guy knows, ‘you don’t have anything on me’ . . . and time after time, we get into these conflict situations that end up frequently with uses of force, frequently with manufacturing . . . probable cause.”

Rewarding high arrest numbers might initially have had some merit, had it been part of a wider, long-term crime-prevention strategy. But the LAPD had no such strategy. Instead, as Charlie Beck later pointed out, “it was all search and destroy and
blunt-force military tactics and assaults.” The philosophy had deadly consequences. “There was a period at the time when I entered the police department in the fifties until 1977 when there was
no shooting policy,” says Jack White, a former LAPD commander and Police Commission chief investigator. “And this was by design. It was felt that a shooting policy would limit an officer’s activities in a department [with] a proactive morality of seek out the criminal and take action. [Consequently], we shot people running away from us for a long time.” As a result, among the police departments of the six largest cities in the United States, the
LAPD ranked number one in killing or wounding the largest number of civilians, when adjusted for the number of officers on the force.

What made it all so maddening was the same-old, same-old nature of the problem. In 1980, Gates had only been chief for two years when the American Jewish Committee, the Urban League, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews released a study of the LAPD’s treatment of the black community fifteen years after the Watts Riots. It concluded that
virtually nothing had changed in terms of the department’s abusive treatment of African-Americans. A year later, in 1981, LAPD deputy
chief Lou Reiter warned in a retirement speech that the police in South Central had become “a
hard-charging street army” that had “developed the philosophy that everyone who is black is a bad guy.”

During his tenure as chief, from 1978 to 1992, Daryl Gates not only failed to address the problem, he made it worse. In pursuit of his war, Gates expanded the LAPD’s traditional deployment of techno-cop machines and military tactics. Eighteen
Bell Jet Ranger or French Aerospatiale helicopters with state-of-the-art surveillance technology would regularly circle deafeningly low in the city’s ghettos and barrios. Sixteen-round, 9mm, double-action, semiautomatic Berettas had become the department’s standard-issue sidearm. Search-and-destroy missions like the infamous 1988 raid on South Central’s Dalton Avenue became an integral part of the department’s drug war. Fierce-looking, heavily armed officers from the department’s special-unit Metro Division—the department’s “elite” shock troops—were deployed at the first hint of trouble, or just to make a point. By tradition, Metro’s officers were pulled from the toughest divisions. Their mission, as Daryl Gates once described it, was to “
roust anything strange that moved on the streets.” And they did, brutally, at demonstrations, marches, and rallies, or in areas like South Central when things looked hot. And in 1988, they had been sizzling indeed—a prelude to the pot that would boil over into the flames now engulfing Los Angeles.

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

Separated by great distances, and cursed with a slow, inefficient mass transit system, street crime in Los Angeles is more a local, neighborhood affair than in more densely packed cities. But in January of 1988, there occurred an exception to the rule. As twenty-three-year-old
Karen Toshima was strolling through Westwood she got caught in the crossfire between two warring black gangs and was shot in the head and killed. Toshima was just one of ninety-six homicide victims killed by alleged gang members in the city of Los Angeles in the first five months of 1988. Ninety-five of them were just business as usual.

Toshima’s, however, had taken place in Westwood, a once small college town abutting UCLA. Over the years, it had grown into a commercial
hub of restaurants, movie theaters, shops, and high-rise office buildings surrounded by the homes of the wealthy inhabitants of residential Westwood, Brentwood, Holmby Hills, Bel Air, and a string of million-dollar condos known as the Gold Coast. Consequently, not only did the largely white upper middle class feel threatened by Toshima’s killing, but
Entertainment Tonight
’s wealthy “Hollywood Royalty” did as well. So while Toshima’s shooting was an anomaly notable only for occurring where it did, it set off a furor. If you weren’t safe in Westwood, where
were
you safe? In response, Daryl Gates ordered “
Operation Hammer.”

Crudely conceived, Operation Hammer was a series of LAPD “gang sweeps” during which streets were barricaded, police poured into South L.A., and at least
twenty-five thousand overwhelmingly black men of all ages were corralled and arrested. The arresting officers’ orders, as once summed up by a department spokesman, were simultaneously extremely vague and startlingly clear: “
Pick ’em up for anything and everything.”

Posting those massive arrest numbers took diligence as well as brute force and imagination. Using techniques they’d employed for decades in black L.A.,
motorcycle and patrol officers multiplied their justification for initiating stops, issuing tickets, and making arrests. Cars parked twenty-three inches from the curb when the law said it should be eighteen were ticketed, as were those whose windshield wipers didn’t work, or that had a missing floor mat. And if a driver or passenger had an outstanding parking, jaywalking, or traffic violation, it was off to jail. Alternately, officers would
find
a reason to deem a car “unsafe” and have it hauled off to an impoundment yard where it would sit, gathering daily fines so large that many owners couldn’t pay them and consequently would lose their vehicles.