Read Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing Online

Authors: Joe Domanick

Tags: #West (AK, #MT, #HI, #True Crime, #Law Enforcement, #General, #WY), #NV, #Corruption & Misconduct, #United States, #ID, #Criminology, #History, #Social Science, #State & Local, #CA, #UT, #CO, #Political Science

Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (4 page)

Parker’s theory of a small group of outside agitators propelling the riots was simply wrong, Bradley told him, causing an enraged Parker to fire back, “I think you are trying to pin this [uprising] on the police, [and] I’ll go to my grave thinking this was your intention. . . . This is not any inquiry,” he added. “It’s an inquisition!”

That day Tom Bradley earned the undying enmity of the LAPD while ennobling himself to black and liberal Los Angeles for years to come, not just for his courage, but for speaking the truth: a
UCLA study would later reveal that at least fifty thousand people had participated in the Watts Riots.

But all of that was back in 1965. Now, twenty-seven years later,
Bradley was addressing a throng of overwhelmingly black Angelenos at the
First AME. Below the raised platform where Bradley was leaning his long body into the podium, small
TV monitors were flashing shots of Reginald Denny still lying semiconscious at Florence and Normandie Avenues.


I was shocked, I was stunned, I had my breath taken away by the verdict . . . ,” he told them.

Soon, however, it became embarrassingly apparent that it didn’t matter what he was saying; the fidgeting and whispering audience was utterly uninterested in what he had to say.

Once L.A.’s great symbol of racial harmony, Bradley was now watching his shining legacy becoming forever stained by a rapidly metastasizing racial insurrection.

“I don’t know where they were,” Bradley continued on, speaking of the Simi Valley jury while eliciting more catcalls and pointed indifference from the First AME audience. “They
certainly weren’t watching that videotape. . . .”

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

Defeated in his first run for mayor in
1969, Bradley had endured a classic
campaign of race- and red-baiting laughably linked to the Black Panthers and other “radicals,” and had been
labeled an enemy of the LAPD by his incumbent opponent, “Mayor Sam” Yorty. Mayor Sam was a small, wavy-haired native Nebraskan with a pleasing smile and the gauche salesman’s sheen of a mid-century, small-town, middle-American rube. He represented the city’s rapidly fading, frightened, pre-Watts old guard: white Protestant conservatives who constituted a middle and ruling class born of a transplanted, corn-fed Midwestern bourgeoisie and a blue-collar working class of Dust Bowl Okies.

Running against Yorty again in ’73, Bradley emerged the victorious leader of a new
liberal political majority of African-Americans, Jews, Chicanos, Asian-Americans, organized labor, and voters of all stripes inspired by the idealism of John and Robert Kennedy, the righteous passion of Martin Luther King, and the promise of a leader like
Tom Bradley.

Despite the
American Nazi Party picketing his inauguration in uniform and carrying signs reading “No Nigger Mayors,” the voice of the city’s wealthy elite, the
Los Angeles Times
, welcomed his victory. Under the new, moderately liberal leadership of the scion of the family-owned newspaper, Otis Chandler, the once ultraconservative
Times
happily got behind Tom Bradley, a politician with whom they could do business, and who made an excellent front man for their dollar-sign dreams of Los Angeles as a powerful international port city and Pacific Rim center of communications and finance.

Bill Parker would die in office in 1966, but his legacy, and the department’s deeply reactionary paramilitary culture, would continue on unquestioned by his two long-term successors, Edward M. “Crazy Ed” Davis and Daryl Gates. Both simply refused to accept Bradley’s—or anybody’s—right to exercise civilian control over the LAPD or to dare criticize the department.

It was Parker, in fact, who’d been the first to use the city’s new,
ironclad civil-service statutes—statutes that amounted to lifetime tenure—for Los Angeles police chiefs. It was Parker who’d acted as if the LAPD was an
operationally independent
city agency. And it was Parker who had declared that he and he alone would be the sole arbiter of his and his troops’ actions. Soon that notion would become gospel within the LAPD and accepted as reality by Tom Bradley’s predecessors, and then by Bradley himself once he became mayor.

The reason was simple. Fear was in the air. The ’65 Watts Riots were still a searing memory in a still predominantly white Los Angeles now led by a liberal black mayor.
In six days of rioting thirty-four people had been killed, over one thousand injured, almost four thousand arrested and over $40 million in damages done—a huge sum in 1965 dollars that would amount to several hundred million dollars today. Moreover, in 1967, just two years after Watts, racial
riots had broken out in 150 American cities, followed in ’68 by the assassination of Martin Luther King and
rioting in over a hundred American cities.

Then the 1980s had brought the city the crack-fueled gang wars of the Bloods and the Crips, marking the beginning of another era when no politician wanted to engage in a fierce protracted battle with a combative
LAPD chief—particularly a politician like Bradley with aspirations not just to lead California but to secure the honor of becoming America’s first elected black governor.

It wasn’t until he’d
lost both his bids for governor in the 1980s, and the King beating had become a worldwide cause célèbre in early 1991, that Bradley had finally had enough and took action by impaneling a
blue ribbon commission to investigate the LAPD’s use of force and abuse of power.

It was chaired by Warren Christopher—President Bill Clinton’s future secretary of state and then the chairman of L.A.’s most powerful and prestigious law firm, O’Melveny & Meyers. The Christopher Commission issued a unanimous 228-page report four months after King’s beating, documenting a pervasive pattern of excessive use of force by LAPD officers.

Calling the results of its investigation “astonishing,” the commission declared that there existed “
a significant group of officers who repetitively misuse force” and that the top leadership of the department and the Police Commission “had failed to . . . monitor [or to] control the use of excessive force.”

Stingingly, they also indicted Tom Bradley for failing to “exert leadership” or to use “the inherent powers of his office” to appoint police commissioners willing to challenge chiefs like Davis and Gates, and to insist that the department halt its brutality and abuse of the public—thus “contributing to the Police Commission’s ineffectiveness.”

Nor was that all. The commission also noted that while the LAPD’s civilian complaint system was “unfairly skewed against complaints” from the public, the same officers who “repeatedly used excessive force were often [being] rewarded with positive evaluations and promotions,” and “patrol officers [were being] rewarded for hard-nosed” policing. “It is apparent,” the report summed up, “that too many LAPD patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility; [and] too many treat the public with rudeness and disrespect.”

Tom Bradley had had a choice during his almost twenty years in office: tack to the right, refrain from engaging in battle with the LAPD,
and run for governor—or become a truly transformational mayor and fight the battles that needed to be fought, especially with the LAPD. His decision was to twice run and lose bids for governor in the eighties—the very decade in which the animosity toward the LAPD was again building to a boiling point.

By appointing the
Christopher Commission, Bradley had finally acted. But it was too late for him. And too little too late for the folks at the First AME. They didn’t require some report to tell them that Bradley, the Police Commission, and the city council had failed to do their oversight of the LAPD for decades. Like Alfred Lomas and the crack-house boys, they too had lived it.

“We have come,” Bradley gamely continued, “to say tonight that we’ve had enough, and to encourage you to express your outrage verbally.”

Meanwhile, the television cameras rolled on, showing
live footage of an LAPD guard shack outside the department’s Parker Center Downtown headquarters going up in flames.

Finally finished with his weary speech, Tom Bradley exited the stage, bent and almost shuffling. Huddling with his aides in an anteroom, he received word that
the riot was spreading. Huge swatches of South Los Angeles were now up in flames. Darting past demonstrators, Bradley and his entourage were soon hustled into his limo. As his car was pulling out of the lot, protesters screamed at him as they pounded their fists on the vehicle’s roof, hood, and fenders.

Charlie Beck, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, Parker Center


Where are all your patrol units? Can’t you call somebody to help this poor guy?” Cindy Beck asked her husband, LAPD sergeant Charlie Beck, as he walked through the door of their home early Wednesday evening. She was referring to Reginald Denny, whose terrible fate she’d been watching on television.

A street-hardened veteran gang cop, Charlie Beck too was appalled.
Hoping to get some cops down to Florence and Normandie, he quickly phoned the watch commander at the adjacent 77th Division, where he’d once worked. But he couldn’t even get his call through.

So he sat with his wife to watch the cavalry arrive in the person of his fellow LAPD officers. But they never came. Not one. Finally, Beck had had enough and decided to drive back to the LAPD’s downtown Parker Center headquarters, where he’d been working in Internal Affairs for the past several years.

The Internal Affairs detective who’d been assigned to investigate the King beating had been on Beck’s squad. Back then Beck was a self-described “type-A personality whose attitude had been: ‘Hey, give me the biggest piece of meat on the plate and I’ll finish it.’ ” The King case was certainly the biggest chunk of beef thrown at any LAPD IA investigator for decades, and Beck wanted it badly.

But he hadn’t gotten it—a random twist of fate for which he would later be eternally grateful. The case was so politically charged within and outside the department—and so fraught with career-damaging cognitive-dissonance possibilities—that Beck later realized how “
it would have consumed and squeezed the life out of [him].”

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

Tall and swarthy, with jet-black hair and a full mustache, Beck made his bones as a
charter member of a group of LAPD gang-suppression units with a name and acronym that both advertised and preordained its tactics: Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, or CRASH. That alone made him one of the department’s cultural hotshots.

But he was also a member of a budding LAPD dynasty:
His father was a retired LAPD deputy chief,
his sister an LAPD officer on her way to becoming a detective, and
his wife a Los Angeles County sheriff. In time his then young
son and daughter would both also join the LAPD. But it wasn’t in his nature to play that card.

Instead he was very much one of the troops, one of the boys bound together by that sardonic camaraderie so common among street cops experiencing terrible things while nothing appears to ever change. He also possessed the ability to think both strategically and analytically; a
charismatic warmth that could put people at ease; and a self-discipline that enabled him to mask a tough-as-nails cop’s competitive determination to never be played for a chump.

Beck had first set out to be a professional close-track, off-road motocross racer, wrestling crude, 250-pound machines over roads pockmarked with high moguls and deep, treacherous holes. That fact didn’t tell you everything needed to know about him, but it did tell you a lot about the fire in his belly.

He’d spent much of the eighties being one of the cops that N.W.A so blisteringly rapped about in “
Fuck Tha Police.” In the harsh, unforgiving confines of the
Southeast Division, Beck had been part of a narcotics task force that roamed black South L.A., busting open crack houses, three or four a day, arresting thousands of sellers and customers. Four sergeants and their squads—about forty cops in all—would burst through a door and capture some hapless fourteen-year-old who’d been given fifty or a hundred vials of crack to sell, some cash to make change, and a gun to defend the stash.

Once, responding to a raid on a drug house, Beck arrived to find that his fellow gang officers had handcuffed and sprawled out a group of children on the street. It caught Beck up short, like a new line was being crossed. “
They weren’t evil people,” he’d later tell the
L.A. Times
, referring to his fellow officers, “they were just doing what they were taught. There was [just] no room for independent thought in the department.”

Sometimes after a raid, when they were cleaning up, customers would knock on the door to buy dope, and the undercover guys would make the sale and then the arrest. Having recovered thousands of dollars in small bills, they’d then go back to the station house, book the money, the kid, and the customers, and go out again the next day to repeat the same drill. “
That,” says Beck “was the LAPD’s crack-war strategy”—a reminder that while the official motto of the LAPD might be “To Protect and To Serve,” the unofficial motto was always “Hook ’Em and Book ’Em.”

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

As dusk was settling in,
Charlie Beck
drove his Ford Bronco west, back to Parker Center. Along the route, he could see plumes of smoke spiraling up from South Central as he listened to the staccato beat of riot news on his car radio. He couldn’t understand why the LAPD wasn’t flooding officers into the riot’s hot zones to nip the violence in the bud. He could readily fathom the reality of the riot. What he’d
never
imagined was that his department would fail to respond. If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of
overreaction
, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous
1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue.

There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the
Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end,
the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a
poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.”

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