Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (18 page)

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As he exited his sixth-floor Parker Center office on June 1, the hallway outside was filled with cops and staff applauding, crying, and shouting, “
We love you, Chief.” And so they did, including the “
phalanx of police motorcyclists” who, as the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “escorted [Gates] onto the southbound lanes of the Santa Ana Freeway”—sending him off to his beachside home-in-exile condo in beautiful San Clemente. From this haven he would leave for his new job as
host of a talk-radio show on a popular right-wing station. The show quickly failed, and afterward he’d periodically emerge to appear at old-timers’ retirement parties, always to ponderous applause, reminding the faithful of what once was, and had been lost.

Willie Williams, Late Eighties to Early Nineties, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The oldest of seven children, Willie Williams had grown up in West Philadelphia as a
spindly, asthmatic child so sickly, says Williams, that he was “in and out of hospitals four times as a youth” and had been
administered last rites on three separate occasions.

His father labored in a meatpacking plant, and when Williams was eight years old he began working at a neighborhood grocery store and
delivering newspapers.
By fifteen, he too was packing meat part-time, once
almost losing his arm in a meat grinder. Following his
1961 high school graduation, Williams got a job as a
city messenger for $2,600 a year. Afterward, he took the tests for both the Philadelphia PD and the city’s Park Police. When the latter responded first, he jumped at the opportunity to almost
double his annual salary overnight to $5,000.

He was just twenty years old, a hometown boy living the modest, working-class, apparitional life of those not fated for—or without interest in—making the middle class leap into college. When the Park Police merged with the city police eight years later, he merged with them. After he married, he and his
wife, Evelina—a clerk-typist for the Department of Licenses—
raised three children in a modest
three-bedroom row house filled with family photos and mementos in a modest neighborhood. There they acquired a
dog named Frisky, who was already fifteen years old by the time Williams was named Philadelphia’s police commissioner.

They would
live together in the city for twenty-three years, moving only when Williams was hired as chief in Los Angeles and after he’d sold the house to their son, who was also a Philadelphia police officer.

Williams worked and studied hard for promotions, but rose only slowly through the ranks. He
took both the sergeants’ test and the detectives’ test three times before passing, and the captains’ test twice. Meanwhile, he continued attending the
Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science part-time, graduating with a two-year associate degree in 1992, just as he was departing for L.A. Throughout his entire career, he would
never fire his weapon.

In 1980 he was finally
promoted to captain—where he might have remained, had not an event Williams himself would later refer to as “the Rodney King [incident] of Philadelphia” occurred: the
1985 dropping of a bomb from a Philadelphia PD helicopter onto the roof of the West Philly row-house headquarters of the radical black group MOVE.

The bombing—which set off a fire that killed eleven people and incinerated sixty homes—took place at the end of a daylong stalemate that started with the PPD attempting to serve some misdemeanor warrants. It then continued as the police fired from eight to ten thousand rounds into MOVE’s headquarters, and ended in a literal firestorm that was allowed to burn by order of a master strategist of a police commissioner named Gregore J. Sambor. So astounding was the event that former NYPD lieutenant and John Jay College criminology professor James Fyfe would later claim that “police officials around the country [considered it] the
single most stupid police action in this [the twentieth] century.”

In response to the bombing—and to a police shakedown and extortion scandal that resulted in the
federal convictions of Sambor’s deputy commissioner and over thirty commanders and officers—the city’s mortified black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, hired a former Secret Service agent named Kevin M. Tucker to reform the department.

The son of Irish immigrants, Tucker had grown up in
working-class Brooklyn and Rahway, New Jersey. He
joined the army after high school, and was working his way through college as a patrolman in Rahway when he
single-handedly arrested three men breaking into a car dealership. One of the suspects was wanted by the
U.S. Secret Service, and the agency, impressed, offered Tucker a job after he graduated. Tucker happily accepted. During his career as a Secret Service agent, his assignments included
guarding Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her children. He was heading the agency’s Philadelphia field office when
Goode named him police commissioner.

The
fourth-largest police department in the nation, the Philadelphia PD that Tucker inherited had a long history of “
favoritism, corruption, and brutality”—an assessment delivered in 1987 by a blue-ribbon task force appointed by Goode. Their report would also describe the department
as “
unfocused, unmanaged, unaccountable, undertrained and underequipped.”

In terms of corruption, brutality, and unaccountability, the report portrayed much the same department that Frank Rizzo led in the late 1960s as commissioner and nurtured in the seventies as the city’s two-term mayor. A six-foot, two-inch
South Philly high school dropout, infamous for
his love of the blackjack as his weapon of choice, Rizzo personified all the hatred, ignorance, and fear that white ethnic Americans were feeling toward African-Americans. It was a time of rising street crime, enormous social change and upheaval, and a rapidly growing
black population that by the 1980s would comprise about 40 percent of the city’s residents.

For Rizzo and his overwhelmingly white department, they—the Italians, Irish, Jews, and Eastern Europeans of Philadelphia—were the public, and black Philly—with its high crime rates and growing population threatening its neighborhoods—was the enemy.

Rizzo was credited with keeping crime relatively low. But the price was high: large numbers of shootings of unarmed civilians by a police force that
as late as 1980 had no shooting policy, and
Saturday night raids, personally led by Rizzo, on gay bars and counterculture coffeehouses and cafes. His officers
stripped Black Panthers naked in the street after raids, and Rizzo himself used a secret unit of the police department to
spy on his political opponents. Overall,
acts of police brutality were so “widespread and severe” that in the mid-1970s the Philadelphia PD became the
first department ever sued by the U.S. Justice Department for engaging in systemic brutality.

It was understood that Kevin Tucker had only been named commissioner to address these issues, initiate reform, and leave. He wasn’t, after all, even a cop. But with no one to court, appease, or pay back in a hidebound city, Tucker, known for being a particularly thoughtful strategic manager, could move ahead unimpeded by normal career-advancement constraints.

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Unlike the LAPD, which had a tradition of college-educated senior officers, the PPD didn’t bother to keep records of its officers’ education levels or even require recruits to have high school diplomas. Tucker started confronting the situation by
sending fifty commanders and other officers to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to participate in three-week management and supervisory training seminars. At the time, the school was working with law enforcement officials and social scientists to develop the idea of community policing. A then evolving concept, community policing focused on officers in local neighborhoods closely working with community organizations and city and private agencies to solve problems and systematically
prevent
crime—as opposed to just responding to crime calls. Tucker liked community policing and began applying some of its precepts to the Philadelphia PD, in particular by establishing small, local police substations in high-crime neighborhoods.

He also began
diversifying the department, rapidly promoting black officers like Williams, whose rise under Tucker would be meteoric—a jump of
three ranks to deputy commissioner in just the two and a half years.

When Tucker resigned in June 1988, he was replaced by Willie Williams as Philadelphia’s new police commissioner. He handed off to Williams both the initial building blocks of reform and a
195-page blueprint for the future with over one hundred recommendations for reforming the department, written by a task force of prominent criminologists and criminal justice and civic leaders. During the nineties someone in the PPD looked for the task force report, and there was not a copy to be found within the department.

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A year and a half after Tucker’s departure, in the winter of 1990, some strange things were happening. For one, the chair of the city council’s Public Safety Committee was comparing police commissioner Willie Williams’s police department to “
a Mutt and Jeff” comedy act; Williams himself was depicting Philadelphians as “
living in a climate of fear”; and the city’s district attorney was characterizing its criminal justice system as “
on the verge of collapse.” In the wake of all this, many of Kevin Tucker’s reforms already seemed ephemeral, a brief respite in the Philadelphia PD’s otherwise dismal history.

The heart of the problem wasn’t just Williams or just the PPD. The city’s entire criminal justice system was falling apart, caught between a city government in dire financial straits and Philadelphia’s settlement of a
1988 jail-overcrowding federal lawsuit. The city’s ruinous solution to the overcrowding was to severely limit pretrial detention—a resolution that resulted in thousands of criminals being repeatedly arrested and immediately released because of lack of jail space to legally detain them.

Consequently, Williams and his department quickly became overwhelmed. With just
5,900 officers in 1988, compared to 8,400 in 1977, the PPD was already understaffed. Immediately releasing criminal suspects who normally would have been jailed—but instead were now out on the street committing new crimes—drastically exacerbated the city’s crime problem, causing
response time for “low-priority” crimes (such as stolen cars, burglarized homes, snatched purses and drug dealing) to rise to as long as two hours.

Moreover, many
police facilities were operating without heat in the winter or air-conditioning in the summer, and without even basic supplies like, incredibly enough, uniforms and hats. As for the department’s 854 vehicles, about
165 were out of service at any one time.
Forty of the department’s 400 unmarked cars had broken sirens. And even though the department did its own maintenance repairs, a vehicle with a flat could be out of service for a week.

Willie Williams hadn’t caused these troubles, but he wasn’t exactly on top of them either. During the same 1990 Public Safety Committee hearing in which the PPD had been compared to a “Mutt and Jeff” act, Williams seemed at a loss to solve what amounted to some extraordinarily straightforward supply problems with vendors and dysfunctional city agencies. “Are there problems with the
bidding on [police] hats?” Williams asked during his testimony. “Absolutely, and we’re trying to address it. Are there problems with the delivery of equipment for vehicles? Absolutely. . . .
We have screamed and hollered and burned up the telephone making sure we get the equipment. We’re fighting for that.”

The crack-war years of the late 1980s to mid-1990s were also exacerbating the situation in terrible ways, as black and brown kids with automatic weapons were warring over drug distribution and crack corners. As a result, scores of cities like New York, Boston, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles were all experiencing explosive increases in their homicide rates. In
1989—Willie Williams’s first full year in office—murders in Philadelphia rose as well, by 21 percent to 489, and they rose again by 19 percent over the first six months of 1990.

Like most big-city police chiefs and commissioners at the time, Williams had no new, innovative answers to Philadelphia’s soaring murder rate (although in New York City crimes and homicides would soon begin to dip dramatically in part as the direct result of specific police policies introduced by its new police commissioner, William J. Bratton). And like the LAPD, the PPD under Williams had no answers to the crack wars, though they were staging high-profile drug-suppression raids in targeted areas and pointing to increasing arrest numbers as a gauge of success, even though such strategies were clearly having little impact.

In March of 1992, at the very time Williams was being interviewed by the Los Angeles Police Commission, a highly critical report on the PPD was released by an independent investigative panel convened at Williams’s request. The panel confirmed allegations that about fifty officers had brutally attacked
nonv
iolent demonstrators protesting President George H. W. Bush’s AIDS policies, calling them “faggots,” clubbing them down, and then refusing their requests for medical assistance.

In an interview following the report’s release, Williams acknowledged the stubborn persistence of brutality within the department. “I’m trying to change a mentality that’s been in police departments for one hundred years,” Williams said. “Officers who want to do wrong or who think about doing wrong are going to change when they see what happens to others. . . . [The department’s discipline is] not quite as hit and miss as it used to be. What we’re about is nothing less than trying to change the culture.”

Yet despite Williams’s efforts, few people in Philadelphia thought
that change in the department’s culture was being reflected on the streets by the rank and file. Changing police culture required more than just firing some low-ranking bad actors. “
Williams has paid lip service to many of the right ideals,” Stefan Presser, legal director of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
following the report’s release. “Where he as an individual can have some influence, he has moved the department the right way. But there are so many endemic problems in the department. I don’t think he has put sufficient energy into making those ideals a reality.”