Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (12 page)

Retrospectively, it seems astounding that such a plan of concentrated, indiscriminate mass arrests would be executed in a major, liberal American city a quarter of a century into the post–civil rights era. But then, in Los Angeles the tactic had a predicate: The LAPD had pioneered the modern use of the big-city police “dragnet” way back in the 1920s, when its officers would regularly fan out across ten or twelve major
boulevard intersections for no particular reason and stop to examine all passing vehicles in an effort to ferret out any “suspicious characters.” The tactical deployment apparently left such an indelible imprint on Jack Webb’s imagination that in the late 1940s he named history’s most famous LAPD radio/TV show after those infamously indiscriminate fishing expeditions.

Daryl Gates’s sweeps of 1988 cast an equally wide net. In one, tracked by the
Los Angeles Times
,
the DA filed just 103 cases out of more than 1,400 arrests.

But the sweeps weren’t only ineffectual and mindless. They were extraordinarily counterproductive as well. “
What the LAPD was missing,” as Charlie Beck would later point out, was that its strategy of declaring war on vast swaths of the city and arresting everybody it could was “completely eroding the department’s moral authority. The city’s gang members hadn’t dropped from the sky into a vacuum. They all had fathers, mothers, classmates, neighbors. And on the street, everybody wanted to get along with them because they had a huge presence and physical authority. By becoming everybody’s common enemy and building a collective animosity toward us [the police], it gave the gangsters a tremendous authority and strength—like ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ ”

Beck was right. Flush with federal funds, the intensity of the LAPD’s war on drugs and crime provided the rationalization for the criminalization of entire communities. Black and brown kids on the fringes of gangs were automatically labeled the enemy. The LAPD put a lot of serious thugs in prison. No doubt about it. But they were also arresting tens of thousands marginal drug dealers, users, petty criminals, and small-time hustlers, some of whom would then be sentenced to decades-long prison terms under California’s three-strikes law.

And to what end? As crime rates continued to rise,
California saw its annual corrections budget top $11 billion, as over a third of state’s prisoners flowed in from Los Angeles County. Meanwhile, the collateral damage that not just the LAPD but the entire criminal justice system were inflicting on the city’s poor black and brown communities was incalculable: kids traumatized and grandmothers terrorized during no
toriously abusive raids and sweeps; records hung on marginal or innocent teenagers and young men that would kill their already slim chances of getting a job; families broken up and made even more impoverished by long mandatory prison terms. Most of it did nothing to get at the root of the problem. But Daryl Gates and his LAPD would just keep doing what they did, which was all they knew or, worse, wanted to know.

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

The LAPD’s New Centurion policing philosophy and California’s mass incarceration policies, in short, were only further destabilizing the city’s low-income neighborhoods while dooming its young.
More than one in three young black men in Los Angeles was either in jail or prison or on probation or parole on any given day. It was an astounding figure, but one nevertheless that was similar to many other big American cities.

As was an additional consequence: death by police officer. During the seventies and eighties, hundreds of unarmed people were shot or choked to death by LAPD officers with virtual impunity. Often they were shot while holding nothing more than a typewriter, a sweatshirt, a wallet, keys, sunglasses, a silver bracelet, a hairbrush, a flashlight, a liquor decanter, a bathrobe in a shower, or, sometimes, nothing at all. From 1980 to 1986, for example, there were 372 shootings by LAPD officers. Many of those shot were unarmed, but no officer was ever indicted. Only one was fired.

The secretive LAPD stakeout unit known as the
Special Investigation Section, or the SIS, in fact, had been assigned to what amounted to a kill mission. The unit’s purpose was to follow repeat burglars, rapists, and armed robbers and wait for them to commit a new crime. In the case of the armed robbers, the SIS developed a tactical policy of watching and waiting until
after
a robbery occurred before taking action. Most big-city police departments didn’t have full-time surveillance squads like the SIS, and most would never have allowed an armed robbery to take place before intervening. It was too dangerous.
One in three people involved in armed robberies got hurt, according to U.S. Justice Department statistics at the time. Nevertheless, the SIS’s goal became not to
protect the people being robbed but to surprise and shoot the robbers immediately after the robbery as a way of taking them permanently off the street. Between 1967 and 1990, the
SIS would shoot and kill twenty-three people and wound at least twenty-three more as they exited banks and stores. In 1988, the
Los Angeles Times
examined thirty-two shootings by the SIS and found that in twenty-eight of them the suspects had not fired at the officers, and that “
SIS detectives over the years had shot 13 unarmed people.”

There were other costs as well. Gates’s “aggressive enforcement” policy was costing the city a fortune in
excessive-force lawsuit settlements—$11.1 million in 1990, over $14.5 million in 1991.
Rodney King was award $3.8 million in a civil suit against the city, and Hall of Fame baseball star and broadcaster
Joe Morgan won $540,000 in another federal lawsuit after he’d been thrown to the ground and handcuffed by an LAPD officer for the sin of looking like the prosperous black man he was at the city’s airport, and therefore a suspected drug courier.

The Christopher Commission Report detailed additional cases, far worse. A suspect in handcuffs and leg restraints was placed on an open driveshaft of a police vehicle and, with a police officer sitting atop him on a seat, driven to the station house. On the way he received “
large third-degree burns requiring skin grafts” and was awarded a $28,500 settlement. There was no LAPD investigation, and no officer was disciplined. In another case, a “white male” who was in custody for outstanding traffic warrants “
lost two teeth and suffered multiple concussions resulting in permanent brain damage” when officers punched him “over 15 times in the face, kicked him in the groin, and slammed his head against the floor.” The city attorney recommended settling the case for $300,000. The LAPD suspended two of the officers involved for five and ten days, respectively. One of them “
received seven [more] complaints between January 1886 and December, 1990. The other had 12 complaints . . . during the same period.”

To Daryl Gates the suits were nonsense—people without legitimate complaint were suing because they were eager to get big settlements from “sympathetic juries.” The same was true of those suing the department’s
canine units. Gates would explain away the extraordinarily high number of LAPD dog bites by blaming the victims, pointing out that the department’s dogs were “
the sweetest, gentlest things you’ll ever find, who
only bite if attacked.”

The lawsuits provided compensation and a measure of vindication to the victims. But they didn’t change how the department operated. Like William Bratton in New York, Daryl Gates had attended the Harvard Kennedy School of Government sessions that were then developing community policing strategies as alternatives to paramilitary policing. But Gates’s obsession with brute-force suppression nevertheless continued unabated, despite the fact that it wasn’t working.

Violent crime had risen dramatically from 1960 to 1989 across America. But in Los Angeles crimes reported per person grew at twice the national average. At the same time, the number of unsolved murders was piling up. By 2000, Los Angeles would have
eight thousand unsolved murders, about 75 percent of which were gang-related killings. And, after hundreds of thousands of arrests, L.A.’s gangs were not simply growing but metastasizing.

Charlie Beck, Late Eighties to Early Nineties, Watts

For the vast majority of LAPD officers working areas like South Central and housing projects like Jordan Downs, their experience in the years leading up to the riots was searing, “
wild and chaotic,” as Charlie Beck once described it, “on both the community and police sides.”

Once Beck was on a robbery stakeout in Watts. The task was to stop purse snatchers from the Nickerson Gardens Projects from sprinting across a major intersection, smashing the car windows of female drivers, and grabbing their purses as they sat backed up at long red lights.

Suddenly a smash-and-grab occurred. Beck, sitting in a backup response vehicle, followed the lead response car as it zoomed out to catch the perpetrator. As they sped out of the projects and onto the main street, the lead car smashed into a speeding Cadillac, killing one of the officers almost instantly. The wheels of the car seemed to still be
spinning as Beck pulled his fellow officer from the vehicle and started administering CPR. A large crowd quickly gathered. Their hatred was palpable. “Why you workin’ on him? Why not the brother? Go work on the brother [in the Cadillac].” Meanwhile, Beck’s partner was dying before his eyes because he’d been trying to protect innocent women driving through
their
neighborhood.

It was then that Charlie Beck began to develop the white-cop-in-the-ghetto attitude so prevalent during the era. To develop that combination of hatred, fear, and utter incomprehension at the crazed, hopped-up violence he was seeing. And to begin to transfer his disgust at “the actions of the 5 percent” doing the crimes to the entire population of the area. He saw himself “becoming very affected by the drama [of his] everyday existence,” and by seeing how jaded the older cops he was working with—“
the Vietnam vets, the very old-school LAPD—had grown.” Feeling himself slipping into the insane logic of it all, he asked for a transfer out of the Southeast Division, and got it.

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

The LAPD wasn’t the only institution in the city bereft of ideas other than the big stick. Ira Reiner, the white, Democratic district attorney, offered up his own solution, declaring that his office would stop plea-bargaining and “
use each occasion that a gang member was arrested for a crime, no matter how minor, to remove him from the streets for as long as possible.”

Reiner was understandably frustrated at being unable to stem gang violence. But there were
over seventy thousand young men in Los Angeles identified as gang members. “
Well under five percent [of gang members],” however, were “engaged in serious criminal violence,” according to a 1989 study done by UCLA. Many more were only loosely affiliated with their neighborhood gangs, and some were not involved in crime at all. But all a police officer had to do was conduct a “field interview” and fill out a card identifying a kid as a gang member, and he became one, no crime or proof required.

No matter. Reiner would take his lock-them-all-up approach one step further and suggest that an entire generation of L.A.’s marginal young,
nonwhite males needed not simply to be locked up but “written off” as beyond hope.

But Gates’s sweeps and Reiner’s casually racist remarks barely registered with most white Angelenos. The truth—the hard, ugly, tribal truth—was that the city’s power brokers and its politically liberal middle-class electorate simply did not care about L.A.’s poor black and brown population, or at least did not care
enough
to demand meaningful, comprehensive action to stem the violent deaths of over ten thousand of L.A.’s young men from 1970 to 1990. It was too hard, politically risky, and expensive. Too difficult to figure out how to do. It was far easier for their hearts to bleed over human rights abuses in then totalitarian regimes in South Africa, Central America, and the Soviet Union. At home, keeping the violence of the city’s ghettos and barrios from spilling over into their neighborhood, and threatening their families and property values, was the real bottom line.

Curtis Woodle, Thursday, April 30, 1992, Los Angeles Police Academy, Elysian Park

Early Thursday morning LAPD sergeant Curtis Woodle drove through the lush, secluded confines of Elysian Park to the Los Angeles Police Academy, where he was working as a training officer. At thirty, Woodle stood six feet, seven inches tall, weighed 270 pounds, and had shoulders so wide, and a physique so massively muscled, that he appeared ready to burst through his tailored LAPD blues at any moment.

A veteran LAPD officer, he’d known all about the LAPD and its tactics long before he’d joined the department. He had grown up in South Central in the Blood gang territory of the Six Deuce Brims, but had stayed away from them. His mother was a no-nonsense woman who raised him and his two brothers and three sisters in a two-bedroom home while she cleaned other people’s houses. She made sure that when Woodle left their house, it was only to go to school, attend football practice, make deliveries on his paper route, or do yard work for the neighbors.

Consequently, Woodle never got into trouble. Nevertheless, the
LAPD treated him as if he were a gang member, subjecting him to the same treatment generations of African-American males in Los Angeles had experienced as a pervasive rite of passage: routine vehicle stops and car tosses for no discernible reason, equally regular walking-down-the-street stop-and-frisks enhanced by curbside prone-outs and handcuffs.

Over the decades, what was once a peculiar, unique LAPD ritual had permeated the national police mentality. David Dotson observed it developing. “
Watch any episode of [the TV reality show]
Cops
,” he’d once pointed out. “Everything is overkill. Look at the tactics and techniques—most of which were pioneered by us and rippled out all over the country. Everything is ‘down-on-the-ground’ high volume. That’s what we [the LAPD] taught in the name of officer safety.”

On at least a dozen occasions, Woodle had been stopped and put through some variation of the routine
:
lean over and support your weight on your hands atop the hot hood of an idling patrol car; or get down on your knees with hands clasped behind your neck, and closely and immediately follow barked order after barked order. Be prepared for their constant mind games, for them to try to lay something on you, to make you feel like a chump, or “
to find a reason,” says Woodle, “to kick your ass.”