Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (24 page)

It certainly was accurate that he’d done a great deal to restore community confidence in the department, at least on a PR level, and had developed a plan to deal with another riot. The first was important and necessary, the second pro forma following the ’92 disaster. But there was no mention of planning for—let alone implementing—high-priority tasks like community policing, the Christopher Commission reform recommendations (including changing the department’s training and policing philosophy), or reforming the department’s use-of-force policies and related discipline procedures.

Nevertheless, Willie Williams’s success would be Gary Greenebaum’s, would be the reform movement’s, would be the city’s. Consequently Greenebaum wanted desperately to put his doubts behind him and work hand in glove with Williams. So Greenebaum took it personally, took it hard, when, after six months, it became apparent “that
Williams just didn’t have the capacity to do the job; was never going to succeed; had no real contact with his department and no real interest in what was going on.” The stakes were huge. Opportunity for reform had finally arrived. But instead, Gary Greenebaum found himself watching opportunity’s door slowly slamming shut.

One of his first acts as Police Commission president was to visit Williams in his Parker Center office. “Chief,” he told him, “
this city and this department have a long history of racism. I want you to know that I am here to be your ally in making the necessary changes, and that this
is my main agenda as president of the commission. He looked at me,” recalls Greenebaum, “and then looked down at his papers, and changed the subject. He never responded to me then, and he never referenced it again.”

Later, “at meetings,” says Greenebaum, “
he would stand up and say anything that popped into his head that would sort of answer a question and get him out of the room—basically making it up as he went along. In the morning he would say there’s fifty thousand ‘somethings’ and at the next meeting he would say a different number [about the same subject], like twenty thousand. . . . In all the seventy-five meetings I attended in my two years as a police commissioner,
he never spoke up when a [reform] issue was before us. He’d sit with us on the platform during commission meetings and take notes. But he never
did
anything.”

If Jesse Brewer and his Police Commission had deliberately ignored those same deficiencies, Greenebaum’s commission did not. And if 1992 and 1993 were good years for Williams in terms of his public popularity, that would begin to change dramatically in 1994.

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

The first attack on Willie Williams that drew public blood came in May of ’94, when the Police Commission delivered its official evaluation of Williams following completion of his second year in office. “Consistently,” the commission wrote, “
you seem to lack focus and discernible purpose in managing the Department. It is often unclear throughout the ranks exactly who is in charge and who is making decisions affecting the operations and direction of the LAPD. Often, you seem unable to move the Department, to have your decisions understood and followed in a timely manner, if at all.”

But the ineffectiveness of Williams and the turmoil within the LAPD would continue unabated and still largely unnoticed by the general public. Then one June night in 1994, the brutally butchered bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman were discovered, and Los Angeles and the LAPD would again hold the world spellbound.

O. J. Simpson, June 1994, Brentwood, California

Besides the King beating and the ’92 riots, nothing would demonstrate the depth of black mistrust of the LAPD more than the arrest and trial of African-American former USC Heisman Trophy winner and NFL football superstar O. J. Simpson, and the surreal media circus that followed.

It began with the famous low-speed car chase, a dozen or more LAPD patrol cars following Simpson, who was fleeing in Al Cowlings’s Ford Bronco as a phalanx of media helicopters whirled overhead, beaming his flight into the TV sets of tens of millions of Americans across the nation.

As the chase continued, the LAPD showed remarkable restraint as a friend of Simpson’s drove him around L.A., while Simpson sat beside him holding a handgun to his head and threatening to kill himself. In the end Simpson was peacefully arrested and charged with the stabbing death of his fair-skinned, blond-haired wife and her white friend as they strolled the streets of the wealthy Westside Brentwood section of Los Angeles.

It’s difficult now for those who didn’t live through it to grasp what an extraordinary, racially charged extravaganza the trial of the lithe, handsome O. J. Simpson was. The case had all the requisite elements of an over-the-top
telenovela
script: sexual fervor and crazed carnage, mixed together with what they used to call miscegenation, involving a black man white America had fully accepted as one of its own.

The early and mid-nineties were a nasty time characterized by sizzling racial tension in America, fueled by soaring crime rates, white fear and prejudice, and an astounding ratcheting up of America’s already heavy “wars” on crime and drugs. In many cities like L.A.,
one in three black men were caught in the web of the criminal justice system at any one time, either in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole. There was no black president, interracial marriage was not yet commonplace, there were still a relatively small number of African-Americans working in the professions and the media, and just a handful of black actors working in movies or commercials. O. J. Simpson was one of them.

So it would be ironic that Orenthal James Simpson would become a
symbol of black mistrust of a justice system that was landing them in prisons in unprecedented numbers while police departments throughout the country were proving incapable of keeping them safe in their own neighborhoods. For Simpson surely had enjoyed the finest treatment from the LAPD of any black man in Los Angeles. Through his friend, former LAPD officer Ronald Shipp,
Simpson had been introduced to about forty police officers, many of whom would swim in his pool, soothe their aches in his Jacuzzi, and play on his tennis court. Every year
he would appear at a Christmas party thrown by the officers of the LAPD’s West Los Angeles Division.
Even the gun Simpson so tightly clasped as he threatened suicide during that low-speed chase was registered to an LAPD lieutenant.

There were, in addition, all those
frantic calls from Nicole Brown Simpson to the LAPD that failed to result in an arrest until the department’s
ninth
response in 1989. But even on that occasion, after Simpson was finally placed in custody
after horribly beating Nicole, he had temporarily evaded arrest by fleeing in his Bentley—an act no police agency, particularly the LAPD, would normally tolerate, as Rodney King had brutally discovered.

Ironically, however, King’s beating, along with the Simi Valley acquittals, would hover over the Simpson courtroom like the ghosts of bad deeds past.

O. J. Simpson and Johnnie Cochran, Superior Court, Downtown Los Angeles

Those ghosts did not make their appearance in the pretrial coverage. Based on the evidence, there appeared an extremely high probability Simpson would be found guilty, and that was what had been focused on. But guilt is in the eye of the beholder, and Simpson, with the rest of his life on the line, secured a “Dream Team” of high-priced, powerhouse defense attorneys to change that focus. On the team was sixty-year-old
F. Lee Bailey, famed for representing, among others, Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” and Patty Hearst, the wealthy kidnapping victim
turned Symbionese Liberation Army brainwashed warrior-dupe. And so was forty-seven-year-old
Barry Scheck, a forensic-evidence expert and professor at New York’s Cardozo Law School who, with cocounsel Peter Neufeld, founded the legendary
Innocence Project, reopening the cases and freeing over three dozen wrongly convicted men and giving them back their lives. But most crucially, Simpson had hired Johnnie Cochran, the brilliant African-American police-abuse trial attorney who had long been an icon in black Los Angeles. Short, wiry, and dark-skinned, Cochran was one of those people who had that special flash when he was onstage, and his stage was the courtroom.

Back in the seventies, he’d been one of the only people in Los Angeles who’d had the courage to stand up to the LAPD, speaking out publicly as he represented scores of victims of police abuse who’d been shot or choked to death under highly questionable circumstances. In the process, he became the most effective of the city’s police-abuse attorneys—a subspecies of Los Angeles lawyer that, thanks to the abusive policing of the LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, had become a thriving industry. His success, along with his audacity, gave him enormous authority in the black community and with black jurors.

So it wasn’t coincidental that Johnnie Cochran understood, better than any of the other members of Simpson’s “Dream Team,” that while the prosecution was in possession of extremely strong evidence of Simpson’s guilt, the best defense would be to put not Simpson but the LAPD and its history of abusing and framing the city’s African-Americans on trial.
Give me one black juror, Cochran had allegedly told his former mistress, and I’ll get an acquittal. It was hardly a far-fetched idea. He knew what black jurors knew deep in their bones—that racism, planting evidence, shading the truth, and lying in court had been part of the Los Angeles Police Department’s modus operandi throughout its history.

Simpson and his Dream Team’s big break came when a judge ruled that
the trial would take place
not
in the white, affluent Westside, where the murders had been committed, but in L.A.’s downtown Superior Court, where the jury pool was drawn from south of downtown, from the very African-American community that had exploded with rage at the LAPD just three years earlier. From that jury pool Johnnie Cochran
did much better than getting just one black juror. He got eight African-American women and one black man. Los Angeles hadn’t seen such a stacked deck since that predominantly white Simi Valley jury had acquitted those guilty-as-sin officers who’d beaten Rodney King.

Rafael “Ray” Perez, August 1995, Rampart Division

Meanwhile,
Ray Perez had left the West Bureau [drug] Buy Team and transferred to Rampart CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums). CRASH had been created in the 1970s in South Central and later expanded and decentralized into twelve units as gang violence proliferated during the eighties. CRASH’s mission, as its acronym indicated, was to crush L.A. gangs by being tougher than they were. Period.

Rampart CRASH, however, as Ray would later tell it, had carried the mission to its logical extreme. On the right shoulders of their blue uniforms the Rampart officers wore their CRASH unit patch, which was identical to the image some had tattooed on their right arms:
an elongated, wickedly grinning white skull with deep-set, demonic-looking eyes. Atop the skull sat a black cowboy hat with a large silver LAPD badge prominently displayed above the brim. Fanning out in the background were four playing cards—
the dead man’s hand of aces and eights.

Often Rampart CRASH officers wore street clothes, not uniforms. They worked by themselves, did all their arrests and searches by themselves, and, as Ray would later testify to investigators, rarely spoke to other Rampart Division cops while on patrol. They worked out of a small substation to which only they had the entrance code. Located about two miles from the Rampart Division’s station house, the substation had only sergeants as supervisors,
most of whom, according to Ray, were “in the loop.” Being in the loop meant you were willing to lay a case on a suspect because you wanted him off the street, or simply to get your arrest numbers up, and would actively help cover up a bad shooting, or a brutal beating, or whatever else went down.

One of Rampart CRASH’s unofficial rules was that to get into the unit, you had to be sponsored by someone who was in or had been in Rampart CRASH. Ray was sponsored by an LAPD officer named
Sammy Martin. Sammy’s and Ray’s wives were good friends, and Sammy, like Ray, was a player, the type of guy, as Ray would later tell it, “who, when he’d come to work, had a girl to go visit.”

The area that Rampart CRASH policed was known as Pico-Union, a poor, hard place of
7.8 square miles just west of L.A.’s downtown skyscrapers, with the unhappy distinction of being
the most densely inhabited area west of the Mississippi.

An immigrant, first generation, port-of-entry community,
Pico-Union’s slum housing was overstuffed with 267,000 acutely impoverished, often illegal Central American immigrants. Many barely spoke English and had brought almost nothing with them when they’d fled the U.S.-backed right-wing death squads and vicious civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Their new home was bloody too. The area policed by the Rampart
Division was experiencing about 150 homicides a year back then, and violence was a rite of passage and way of life.

In rich-and-sunny L.A. they lived
thirty-six thousand people per square mile and did the grunt and mule work that made Los Angeles run or, barring that, floated down to the lowest spot on the totem pole:
paletero
men. These were the guys who sold ice cream from a crate and struggled to make $5 or $10 a day so they could eat—while living, like the rest of Pico-Union, in fear of local gangs composed of their own sons.

Within this island of misery up to twenty-four Rampart CRASH officers raged war on some thirty to sixty local street gangs—Aztlan, Temple Street, 18th Street, the Crazy Riders. Many of the gangsters were too enmeshed in gang culture to contemplate any other future, and found both security and status in their
mia familia
gangs.

Most took their commitment to their adopted family with extraordinary seriousness, and viewed the world first and foremost through its prism and code of loyalty and behavior. Often that dictated warring with other gangs over the merest slight, or for control of a few blocks of turf where they could extort drug dealers or deal themselves. Every action was about the powerless having power over another group of young men that was also powerless outside of their neighborhood, and a cause for violent counteraction, refined over the decades into a special gang theology with its own adaptive, self-destructive logic.