Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (17 page)

De Los Reyes came to regard him as “a saint”; Lane was “
scrupulously honest, a straight-arrow human being”;
Mike Yamaki compared Brewer to the legendry UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, a man renowned as much for being an old-fashioned gentlemen who never swore as for being an extraordinary coach who led his teams to ten national championships.

But Brewer was also LAPD. He wanted to be called “Chief,” not “Commissioner.” And when Sheinbaum or any of the commissioners “started beating up on the LAPD
itself
,” recalls Yamaki, “
I could see the conflict in him. But he was too much of a gentleman to be confrontational about it.”

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

The other members of the commission also reflected Bradley’s rewarding political supporters and his desire for diversity. Ann Reiss Lane was his designated woman.

There had been a history of appointing people to the Police Commission who didn’t know much about the LAPD, and Lane fit that description perfectly. She was a resident of the wealthy enclave of mansions west of downtown L.A. known as
Hancock Park. At sixty-one, she still had the slim, wholesome good looks of the L.A. girl next door circa 1947, the year she
graduated from Beverly Hills High School.
After also graduating from UCLA, she
joined the League of Women Voters, where she grew to admire then city councilman
Tom Bradley, whom she decided to work for during his first campaign for mayor. She knocked on doors trolling for votes with the then unknown actor
Leonard Nimoy and their respective spouses. When the news came in that Bradley had lost, she
burst into tears. When he won on his second try, Bradley appointed Lane to the
Los Angeles Fire Commission, where she served for thirteen years, focusing on hiring and promoting female firefighters—with little success, due to the rigorous physical requirements. Then, in 1991,
Bradley appointed her to the Police Commission.

For the first three months Lane served on the commission,
Daryl Gates would pass her in the hallway without speaking or looking at her. He made it clear he that he didn’t like her, or more precisely—since he didn’t
know
her—didn’t like the very thought of her and what she represented: a liberal, Democratic, Jewish feminist.

But Lane’s comment when named to the commission might also have contributed to Gates’s attitude toward her. “
I have read [the Christopher Commission Report] and believe all of its recommendations should be implemented,” said Lane, “including a start in the transition of the chief of police.”

It took Lane a year on the commission before she began to decipher how things worked. But like Stanley Sheinbaum, she had the courage of her convictions, and the need to act on them.

Just as Gates surely felt he had to act on
his
. Gates wasn’t just philosophically and professionally
opposed to the feminist and gay rights movements, he was personally opposed as well. In the early eighties he’d been forced by a federal court order to hire more women and minorities.

Gates considered the order a disaster. He liked women. But not in his police department. According to Anthony De Los Reyes, Gates once told him that “
he’d gotten complaints from female officers about being [sexually] approached by other women in the locker room; and that he (Gates) thought that maybe ‘50 percent of the women being recruited were lesbians’ ”—a comment De Los Reyes found extraordinary, but one that Gates had also made to several command-level officers, according to De Los Reyes.

The forty-eight-year-old Anthony De Los Reyes held the commission’s Latino seat.
His father was a Mexican musician of the Latin big-band sound, and his mother was of Scottish descent. De Los Reyes had
come of age in East L.A.’s Lincoln Heights, in the heart of Mexican Los Angeles.

A
personal-injury plaintiffs’ lawyer, De Los Reyes had
supported Tom Bradley’s failed run for governor of California in 1982, and a year later he was
appointed to the city’s Civil Service Commission. There, he gained almost nine years’ experience helping oversee Los Angeles’s
personnel department. Soon after the King beating,
Bradley personally asked him to join the Police Commission.

Short, rotund, and ebullient, De Los Reyes was a friendly, open man who nevertheless was innately cautious in what he said and did—traits highly valued in Los Angeles’s political circles, where the general consensus for decades had been that there weren’t more than a hundred people in the city who really understood how it worked.

De Los Reyes was one of those people.

While on the Civil Service Commission, De Los Reyes helped to extend affirmative action hiring and promotion examinations to all city departments—including the LAPD. “
I had cops and others’ records right in front of me . . . every week for eight and a half years. So I knew a lot, and also knew how hard it was to get information.”

At Parker Center he quickly learned exactly how hard. Every ranking officer there had his own agenda, De Los Reyes discovered, and sorting through them was an exercise in Byzantine bureaucracy, particularly given that the commission met only one morning a week. In the 1970s former Police Commission president Stephen Reinhardt had called the LAPD command staff “
masters of the half-truth” in dealing with the commission. In the early nineties De Los Reyes learned that little had changed. “I learned that
I had to ask very specific, precise questions to get any kind of information,” he says, “and if I made a recommendation and didn’t write it down, it might not ever come up again.”

De Los Reyes nevertheless maintained a cordial relationship with Daryl Gates until they finally clashed over placing an LAPD recruiting booth at the annual Sunset Junction Festival. “
He was adamantly opposed to having uniformed officers in a recruiting booth at what was predominantly a gay festival,” recalls De Los Reyes.

Gates vehemently opposed allowing gays to join the LAPD, and
when one officer publicly came out, he was so viciously harassed that he left the department so fearful that he set up an answering machine specifically so he could monitor all incoming calls.

Gate’s
stated
objection, however, was liability-insurance costs. That and he didn’t want to pay two officers to sit in a recruitment booth
for four hours. When De Los Reyes discovered that the department’s
total
cost would be just $400, he told Gates “that given the present [antagonistic] relations between this department and the [gay] community, four hundred dollars was simply not too much too pay.” “
He was very upset,” says De los Reyes, “when the commission voted to approve the money.”

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

Interviewing all finalists for a new chief to replace Daryl Gates
took the commission sixteen hours—six of which were exclusively devoted to Willie Williams. His public persona was his calling card. It earned him the
highest grade among the initial civil service selection committees, and then from the Police Commission. Well prepared, he answered questions confidently, was current on the issues facing the LAPD, and spoke as if he’d been carefully reading back issues of the
L.A. Times
.

“We’d been having
confrontations with every single LAPD person dealing with us,” recalls Mike Yamaki. When the LAPD candidates came in, he explained “it was obvious they were bullshitting us.” As both Yamaki and De Los Reyes would later tell it, they all did terrible jobs during their interviews, arriving unprepared to answer the questions they’d been asked to address or to propose innovative solutions to long-standing LAPD problems.

Underscoring Williams’s charm and preparation was a report the commission received from Ann Reiss Lane and Jesse Brewer. Earlier, they’d
flown to Philadelphia and, working off a list from L.A.’s personnel department, interviewed fourteen people. Lane was particularly impressed with Williams’s community policing program, finding it somehow significant that a woman at one of the community policing stations had cried and said, “
Please don’t take my police chief away.”

After vetting Williams in Philadelphia, Lane sat down at the commission’s table and announced, “
If I was looking for a job, I’d like to have fourteen people say the things about me they said about Willie.”

The commission’s first vote was three to two in favor of Williams, with Yamaki and De Los Reyes voting against Williams because they felt an insider who knew the LAPD and the city might be better prepared to
lead the department. Once it was established that the three-vote majority was determined to vote for Williams, the commission voted unanimously to recommend him to the mayor. They had to present a united front and move on—that much was clear. And none of the other candidates were impressive enough to fight over in any case.

It wasn’t, as they saw it, as if they had any other really viable choices. The candidate who’d come in second—the autocratic African-American LAPD assistant chief,
Bernard Parks—was disliked by both Lane and Brewer. As Lane would later put it: “
Remember, Bernie Parks was our second choice, and everybody knew what
he
was like.”

But beyond the inevitability of Williams’s selection, more pressing questions about this appointment seemed to either not have been asked or not fully answered by the Police Commission. What, for example, had Willie Williams accomplished in his nearly four years as Philadelphia’s police commissioner that was
transformational
? How original, innovative, and
effective
had he been in changing the culture of brutality, racism, and unaccountability within the Philadelphia Police Department? And besides his charm, did Williams have the strength of character, physical energy, sense of urgency, and political and managerial skills to get the hard things done?

In 1990 the Philadelphia police union official Richard B. Costello remarked that
Willie Williams had “the right temperament” to reform the Philadelphia PD. “He’s not one of these sword-swingers that wants to change things tomorrow. He’s made changes, but he’s done so gradually.” Costello’s appraisal seemed an endorsement of a quality that did not fit the high expectations of the powerful reform coalition of politicians and civic, civil rights, and civil liberties organizations awaiting him in Los Angeles. They were expecting big things, a visible, dynamic change, a swift beginning to a reform process that in their eyes was decades overdue.

And there was this: Willie Williams was coming to L.A. as not just an outsider but an outsider from the East Coast—synonymous, in the minds of many LAPD cops, with dirty, on-the-take corruption.

And perhaps even worse in their eyes was that Williams was coming from
Philadelphia
—then a tired, regressive, extraordinarily dysfunctional second-tier city—
and from a police department with a
reputation
worse
than the LAPD’s.

The top command staff of the LAPD, people like David Dotson, knew exactly what the PPD was, and considered the department a know-nothing
joke
. “You have to understand
how the Philadelphia police operated in those days,” says Dotson. “It was right after the MOVE row house bombing. And they came out here to get advice from the LAPD, asking us how to keep officers on the straight and narrow, how to conduct personnel investigations—really basic stuff—and when we told them how to do it, their reaction was like, ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’ That was the kind of department Willie came from.”

In addition, Williams was completely unfamiliar with Los Angeles and its intrigue-ridden, deeply xenophobic police department—a department, not incidentally, where he had absolutely no power base and no friends. A department that, although bruised, battered, and demoralized, nevertheless still considered itself the best police department in the world,
unneedful
of reform.

Most officers, moreover, still admired Daryl Gates, despite everything the department had been through. For them he was still the symbol of the glory days, the man who, as Charlie Beck once sardonically put it, “
had died for our sins.”

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

Soon Stanley Sheinbaum began intriguing daily with the mayor’s chief of staff to get rid of Gates and assert the commission’s power. Given
Gates’s performance as chief, a
disapproval rating of 81 percent, and a
distrust score of 85 percent, Sheinbaum certainly had a point. The guy had to go.

The problem with that approach, as Mike Yamaki saw it, was that while Sheinbaum was forcefully asserting his and the commission’s power, in reality the commission didn’t statutorily have the
legal
power to force him to leave—nobody could—because nobody in all of Gates’s fourteen highly controversial years as chief had built a negative civil service case against him.

Yamaki’s attitude, therefore, was “
Okay, fine, let’s celebrate him, give
him a retirement party and all that stuff, and get rid of his ass, not try to humiliate him.”

Yamaki was right in terms of calculated, strategic governance. But a lot of people in Los Angeles had long hated Daryl Gates and his department, not just for their cavalier brutality and officer-involved killings of the unarmed but for their hard, preening arrogance and their contemptuous dismissal of complaints voiced by an extraordinary host of reputable critics both in and out of the body politic.

Going-away party? No. What they wanted was revenge. And if all they could get was Stanley Sheinbaum pissing off Gates, they’d take it.

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

It would require a
Sunday-
morning emergency meeting of all five police commissioners to get Daryl Gates to finally leave his department and his troops behind. Not much earlier, Gates had told the head of the city’s Civil Service Department that he wasn’t going to leave. Hence the call for an emergency meeting, during which the commissioners made clear that they intended to get him ready, threatening “to explore ways in which he could be held to his earlier commitment to leave.” “That’s when he finally caved,” says Anthony De Los Reyes. There was nothing on the books that said he had to go. It was just that his support outside the department had almost entirely collapsed.