Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (2 page)

Andre Christian:
A black native son of Watts and a gang-banging member of the notorious Grape Street Crips.

Daryl Gates:
Chief of the LAPD for fourteen tumultuous years, Gates’s policies precipitated the L.A. riots, during which his leadership proved disastrous.

Alfred Lomas:
A Florencia 13 gangster and hired muscle for Florencia’s drug dealers.

William H. Parker:
Chief of the LAPD from 1950 to 1965. Parker started as a reformer and then built the LAPD culture that sparked both the ’65 Watts riots and the ’92 L.A. riots.

Bernard Parks:
Chief of the LAPD from August 1997 to May 2002. Parks presided over the Rampart scandal.

Rafael “Ray” Perez:
A drug-stealing, drug-dealing LAPD CRASH antigang officer, Perez’s revelations of a nest of dirty, abusive cops broke open what would become known as the Rampart scandal.

Connie Rice:
A civil-rights lawyer, activist, and critic turned supporter of the LAPD.

Willie Williams:
A former police commissioner of Philadelphia and the first African-American chief of the LAPD, Williams was hired after the ’92 riots to reform the department.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I
first became interested in the LAPD when I moved from Manhattan to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. I was then a public school teacher working in a junior high deep in the South Bronx, where the frenzied halls reflected both the chaos of the time and the wild discord of the streets outside. At dusk, on the subway back to Manhattan, the vibe turned edgy as my subway car ground through some of the city’s most violent neighborhoods without a cop ever in sight.

Back then, NYPD officers and their counterparts in the Transit Police seemed never to be around when you wished they were, and when they were, you couldn’t help but notice how the weary slump of their shoulders and their disheveled appearance announced their disillusionment with their jobs.

When I arrived in Los Angeles I was astounded by how different LAPD officers were. First, it was clear that
they
hadn’t given up. The department’s jackbooted, superbly tailored motorcycle officers had the look and bearing of the prototype models they actually were for the film
RoboCop
, and acted the part.

Like the rest of the LAPD, they’d been trained to aggressively seek out crime and to “confront and command” a “suspect” in an aloof, intimidating, and often arrogant manner, even if that “suspect” had committed only a minor infraction, or done nothing wrong at all.

That attitude alone seemed to start more trouble than it stopped. And if you were black, the experience was astonishingly worse, and exponentially more frequent.

Every politician in town, moreover, seemed to kowtow to the LAPD, afraid of getting into a public spat with a succession of chiefs who, paradoxically,
were not afraid of offending anyone. I wanted to understand the source of the department’s extraordinary power, and wrote my first LAPD book, a character-based, historic narrative of the department called
To Protect and To Serve
, as a way to find that understanding.

I discovered that for the first half of the twentieth century a small oligarchy of right-wing business interests, led by the
Los Angeles Times
, had used the LAPD not only to rigidly control the streets but also to serve as a private goon squad, unapologetically maintaining the status quo by breaking the heads of union organizers and left-wing dissidents.

That changed in 1950, when Chief William H. Parker—the godfather of the modern LAPD—wrestled supremacy over the department away from the oligarchs and gave it to himself and his successors. In the process he created a faceless paramilitary police force that would dominate the streets of Los Angeles virtually independent of elected civilian control for the next forty years.

During those years, L.A.’s population dramatically transformed from a white, Protestant, conservative majority to a liberal, increasingly black, Latino, Asian, and Jewish population demanding that the LAPD’s repressive policing change along with the city and the times—a demand the department both scorned and fought every step of the way.

In 1991, the tension finally snapped when four white LAPD officers were caught on videotape beating a black motorist named Rodney King. The grainy footage then found its way to CNN and became a cause célèbre around the world. A year later the four officers were acquitted, sparking the bloody insurrection known as the L.A. Riots. In response, a new chief from outside the department was hired, and City Charter reforms, including limiting the power of LAPD chiefs, were overwhelmingly approved by voters. Nevertheless, for the next decade, little changed on the street.

Wanting to understand why reform was proving so hard to implement, and then how it finally got started, I decided to revisit the LAPD’s history starting with the ’92 riots and, ultimately, to write this book.

I knew from the start I had to tell the tale through the lives of the people who’d lived through the crack-filled, violence-laden nineties, and then through the reforms that finally began taking hold in the first decade
of the twenty-first century. Four such people immediately came to mind. Each illuminated an essential piece of the story.

Two were cops—one a police reformer and stranger to L.A., the other a chief-in-training with LAPD roots stretching back half a century. The others were L.A. gangsters who embodied the fraught relations between the LAPD and the beleaguered communities they policed.

The stranger in town was William J. Bratton, who in 2004 was hired to spearhead the reformation of the LAPD, as he’d done in the early and mid-1990s with both the New York City Transit Police and the 35,000-strong New York City Police Department. Before his tenure in those departments, New Yorkers had been obsessed with a crime wave that saw 2,245 murders in the city in 1990 and 700,000 serious crimes committed in 1989. Bratton changed that trajectory while building the launchpad for New York’s currently unbroken string of more than twenty years of continuous crime drops (although not without some of the policies he pioneered also setting the stage for the NYPD’s present conflicts with a new generation of black and liberal New Yorkers, as we shall see).

As in New York, once Bratton became L.A.’s police chief, he did what no one else had been able to do: put the LAPD on the long, still unfinished road to transformation. Before leaving L.A., Bratton pushed hard and successfully for his replacement—Charlie Beck, a street-toughened former gang cop who, under Bratton, rapidly became one of the department’s foremost reformers.

The experiences of Alfred Lomas and Andre “Low Down” Christian demonstrate the impact of L.A.’s gangs on the city. Lomas was once a hard-core member the massive Mexican-American gang Florencia 13; Christian belonged to the fearsome black, Watts-based Grape Street Crips. Both are now gang intervention workers. Their stories illustrate both what it was like to be at the mercy of the LAPD, and the extraordinary violence with which the LAPD had to contend.

Other players also take center stage in
Blue
. One is Daryl Gates, Chief Parker’s protégé, who headed the LAPD from 1978 to 1992. During those years Gates was a racial lightning rod, a white man implacably condoning the violent, humiliating excesses of his troops, who roamed L.A.’s
poor black and brown neighborhoods as though they were an army of occupation, accountable to no one.

Gates’s adversary should have been Tom Bradley. Elected in 1972 as the first black mayor of Los Angeles, Bradley was an early champion of the city’s liberals and minorities. For the next twenty years he presided over Los Angeles as it matured into a major American metropolis. But Bradley also wanted to be California’s first black governor, and consequently refused to alienate white voters by confronting Gates’s LAPD in a high-crime era—a failure that directly contributed to the ’92 riots and the tarnishing of his legacy.

Following Daryl Gates’s resignation in 1992, Philadelphia police commissioner Willie Williams stepped in as L.A.’s first black police chief. The city had high hopes, but his tenure demonstrated the difficult reality of transforming a big-city police department, especially when the forces aligned against reform are so deeply entrenched and the determination and skills needed to overcome them are so immense and multidimensional. Williams possessed almost none of those skills, and was dismissed five years after being hired, having changed almost nothing.

Bernard Parks succeeded Williams. Tall and handsome, the African-American Parks was known within the department as a smart, knowledgeable, efficient technocrat. Like William Parker and Daryl Gates, however, he thought he could run the LAPD as his own private fiefdom. But by 1997, when he took office, times had changed, and so had the city. And Parks, like Gates, was the last to see it.

He fought bitterly with the mayor, the press, two LAPD inspector generals, the DA, and, most especially, his own troops, who were in open revolt when Parks was dismissed at the end of his five-year term.

There is one other character to mention: LAPD officer Ray Perez. Both con man and sometime truth teller, Perez was at the heart of the 1999 “Rampart scandal,” which involved drug-dealing cops and regular police frame-ups, beatings, and shootings on the watch of both Williams and Parks. The actions of Perez and the accusations he made about his gang-suppression unit, Rampart CRASH, would launch investigations by the
Los Angeles Times
, the LAPD, and the FBI. As a result, the U.S. Justice Department sent a team of lawyers to L.A. and forced the city and the department into a federal consent decree for violating the civil rights of residents. It was Perez’s accusations, ultimately, that made the sins of the LAPD once again a national concern; as a result, Parks was driven out of office, and Bratton was hired as the department’s new chief.

The stories of these men led me to ask essential questions about what constitutes good and bad policing, and how best to prevent crime, control police abuse, ease tensions between the police and the powerless, and partner with communities of color to enhance public safety. In that respect,
Blue
tells the much larger saga of big-city American policing over the past quarter century, and identifies the challenges we still face today.

Blue
begins on Wednesday, April 29, 1992, at 6:30 p.m., as Alfred Lomas is watching on TV as history unfolds in the South L.A. intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues. Watching as his city goes up in flames.

—Joe Domanick

West Hollywood, California

May 2015

PART ONE

SOMETHING OLD

Alfred Lomas, Wednesday, April 29, 1992

It all started for Alfred Lomas as he was
sitting in a Florencia 13 crack house and across the TV screen flashed an image. That of blond-haired, white-skinned
Reginald Denny lying on his back, arms outstretched, on the black-tar South L.A. intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues.

A big-rig truck driver, Denny had just been dragged from the red cab of his sand-hauling eighteen-wheeler and thrown to the street by a group of raging young black men. One had then placed a foot on the back of Denny’s neck as others took turns slamming an oxygenator into his back, pounding his head in with a hammer, and smashing a concrete block into his face.

High above,
TV news helicopters circled, broadcasting the real-time scenes into half a dozen local stations and on to CNN, announcing to the world just after 6:30 p.m. on April 29 that the 1992 Los Angeles Riots had begun.

Before that moment, the Wednesday afternoon air had been warm and sweet, L.A. bucolic. Then the “not guilty” verdicts hit Los Angeles’s airways with all the kinetic energy of one of those old 1930s movies with
Extra!
editions rolling rapid-fire off the presses.

The events of the day had been set in motion fourteen months earlier, shortly after midnight on March 3, 1991, when four white Los Angeles police officers had beaten a black motorist named Rodney King
fifty-six times in eighty-one seconds with their two-pound, twenty-four-inch, solid-aluminum
Monadnock PR-24 batons.

By chance, that beating too had been caught live on a grainy, smoking-gun video that CNN had then likewise broadcast worldwide, making Rodney King a household name, and the
LAPD the shame of a nation. Now those officers had been acquitted of all ten counts against them but one—which had been quickly dismissed by the judge.

The four officers had been zealous in their work, using their batons to break
Rodney King’s cheekbone and ankle and eleven bones at the base of his skull, damaging his facial nerves and knocking the fillings out of his teeth. Each blow, said Rodney King, felt like “when you get up in the middle of the night and
jam your toe on a piece of metal.”

But the four cops were nonetheless now walking free. Freed by a jury in Ventura County, about an hour’s drive north of Florence and Normandie. Freed in Ventura’s
Simi Valley, a then semirural, overwhelmingly white community, with a black population of 2 percent. Known as Cop Heaven by the cops themselves,
Simi Valley, along with its sister city Thousand Oaks, had a population of about 4,000 active police officers, many of whom were part of the
LAPD’s 7,900-member force.

The new trial venue had been selected by a genius of a judge named
Stanley Weisberg to ensure, he declared, that the trial would be fair and impartial and not influenced by local press coverage. But the new Simi Valley trial location was just twenty-five miles from the scene of King’s beating, and thus part of Los Angeles’s vast media market. By changing the venue, Weisberg had placed the trial into exactly the kind of community where Rodney King’s actions—not those of the four LAPD officers who’d assaulted him—would be scrutinized. And that’s the way it had played out.

In the courtroom, the defense team for the four officers collectively totaled about one hundred years of expertise in representing officers accused of abuse of force. They were the A-Team. In comparison, the District Attorney’s Office had sent in a team from its Class-C farm club. Before long the A-Team was using the video of King’s beating to deemphasize the vicious nature of the crime. They played the video over and over in slow-mo, frame by frame, making the cops’ baton blows
look like caresses and King look like he was resisting, when in fact his body was simply reacting to the blows that he was trying to ward off. Ultimately the jury not only acquitted the officers, it effectively
endorsed
their behavior.