Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (46 page)

“Well, check into it,” Bratton told him.

A few minutes later, Paysinger got back to Bratton. “It appears,” he said, “that [Deputy Chief Lee] Carter [who was directly in charge of the operation]
ordered the park cleared, and then less-than-lethal rounds had been fired.”

“Immediately,” Bratton later recalled, “
the hair shot up on the back of my neck.”

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

The gut instinct that had caused Bill Bratton’s surge of alarm would prove more than justified. Not because anybody would die that day, or even be critically, life-threateningly injured, although that was a fortuitous occurrence, given what occurred.

A few plastic bottles and rocks had been hurled at a few cops, and suddenly
150 Los Angeles police officers had been ordered to form a skirmish line in response, after which they’d strutted onto the lawn of MacArthur Park. Simultaneously, a dispersal order to the crowd was blaring from a helicopter hovering above—
in English, not Spanish—but nobody could hear it in any case.

Clad in riot helmets, hard plastic face masks, bulletproof vests, radio headsets, and full military gear, and wielding either
two-foot-long batons or surreal-looking rifles that shot rubber bullets or beanbags, the officers had then descended on the peaceful, festive crowd. In the process they indiscriminately
fired off rubber bullets and other projectiles at close range, into a crowd that included
women wheeling baby strollers and dozens of reporters—most of whom were in a section of the park located away from the area where the bottles had been thrown, and who were utterly unaware that anything was amiss.

It was not a cop riot, like, for example, the beatings administered by enraged Chicago police officers in Grant Park in 1968 during the Democratic National Convention. It was something different. Something surreal. Marching in tight, disciplined formation, the LAPD officers moved in an undulating wave, swinging their batons like machetes in a field of sugarcane to cut shocked reporters and civilians to the ground.

Anyone familiar with the LAPD instantly knew by their arrogant, focused manner that they were members of the department’s “elite” Metro Division. An officer’s road into Metro was well known and well worn: work in the toughest divisions and get promoted by becoming known for being tough, being aggressive, taking no shit, and racking up arrests. That was what the department valued and what Metro symbolized.

Metro was also emblematic of another pillar of the LAPD’s existence, particularly under Daryl Gates: that the department existed for the convenience of its members, not the public good. The division, in fact, was a macho man’s dream. But maybe not a good cop’s. Patrol—the heart of policing—was scorned by many cops under Gates, something to get out of while retreating to a specialized unit like Metro with all its perks and comforts. Metro’s members had take-home city cars. Their typical day, as David Dotson would later relate it, consisted of arriving at 9:30 in the morning, lifting weights for several hours, and then going out to the shooting range for the afternoon, or to train with the air support guys, or to practice rappelling down some cliff.

“The Metropolitan Division,” said Bill Bratton afterward, “was
the heart and soul of the LAPD culture that people had always been complaining about—the insensitivity, the brutality and the use of force, particularly against minorities, and the idea that [Metro] could use force without consequence and not have to explain it, the feeling that they were divorced from the community, and were not part of it. It was also the component of the department that had the least responsibility for interacting with the community—and was normally only sent in to deal with a crime or crowd control.”

In 2000, during the Democratic National Convention, Metro had acted in much the same way it had in MacArthur Park, including
attacking reporters. Afterward media guidelines had been drawn up with the help of the ACLU, describing what the rights of the media were and the responsibility of the media in dealing with those rights.
All
of which were violated by the LAPD during this incident—which was captured on tape and film from twenty-five police cameras and a couple of dozen news cameras that would record hundreds of hours of video.

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

When he finally got Deputy Chief Lee Carter on the phone, Bill Bratton was surprised by how blasé he seemed about the whole event. “Well, we had some incidents [of rock and bottle throwing],” Bratton recalled Carter telling him, “and
we cleared the park.” When Bratton asked if the officers had fired off less-than-lethal rounds, Carter replied that they had,
about thirty or forty. That sounded like a lot to Bratton, who immediately ordered his driver to turn around and head to MacArthur Park.

On the way, he
called Mark Perez, who was the head of professional standards in the Bureau of Internal Affairs, and ordered him to the scene at the park and to notify the LAPD’s inspector general, André
B
irotte, about what had occurred and that he should come to the park as well.

Bratton wanted Internal Affairs to immediately begin the investigation, and wanted Birotte, in turn, to monitor the Internal Affairs investigation. There had been a lot of officer use of force, Bratton understood, and they were going to have to deal with it.

Unlike his predecessor, Bernard Parks, who’d tried to cut off the civilian watchdog inspector general at the knees, Bratton had wisely embraced him and was now using the IG to ensure that there would be no confusion, no cover-up, and no accusations of a cover-up.

Throughout much of the twentieth century the tradition in the LAPD and other police organizations was that when an obvious screwup like this occurred, the best way to proceed—the only way to proceed—was to close ranks, back the troops, and restrict access to information. Bratton’s instincts and managerial philosophy led him to precisely the opposite conclusion. “I’ve always told my cops,” he’d later explain, “you give
me a good story and nobody will tell it better than me. You give me a bad story, and I’m going to tell that bad story. This old thing that’s been policy for years, that you need to ‘protect the department’ and sweep it under the rug—well, I grew up in an era when it was all about [that attitude]. But I’ve never been part of that school.”

But Bratton also understood this: in this day and age, there are no secrets—none. He’d been around long enough to know that this was going to be a
big
story, no matter what he did. The mayor of Los Angeles had, after all, called him from a foreign country, telling him that an overwhelmingly peaceful crowd was being peppered with hard rubber bullets, and that the media—the very entity that was
reporting
the story—was being assaulted, and on tape.

Covering up such incidents by making them the fault of the victims had been standard operating procedure for the LAPD for decades. But that was before the beating of Rodney King. Los Angeles simply wasn’t ready for another such don’t-believe-your-lying-eyes incident. And to his credit, Bill Bratton understood that as well.

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

By the time Bratton arrived back at MacArthur Park, his press rep, Mary Grady, was already there, as was the IG, Deputy Chief Carter, a lot of reporters, and a substantial number of community activists being interviewed by the media. But the officers who’d been on the attack line were nowhere to be found.
Carter, clueless as he was, had sent them home, and so they couldn’t be immediately interviewed.

In fact, when Bratton started asking them how many rounds they’d fired off, Carter had a hard time making a determination, because there was no requirement at the time that an officer account for rounds that were fired. So they didn’t know how many rounds had been expended in total. When Bratton first posed the question, he was told thirty or forty—but it was one of those “How many? ” questions where each time he asked, the number grew higher. (
The final tally was 166.)

The spark igniting the chain of events that culminated with the police taking large-scale action, Bratton began to learn, occurred at about 4 p.m. that afternoon, when some motorcycle officers tried to disperse
a section of the crowd, a tactic Bratton disapproved of—
a “procedural mistake,” he called it—and the bottles were thrown. “
You don’t use a fifteen-hundred-pound machine to try to maneuver through a crowd and push people around. People will push back, officers will get knocked off bikes—it just increases the tension level.”

After speaking with Carter, Bratton approached a group of demonstration leaders talking to the media and found them to be a very “
legitimate, very rational group thoroughly concerned, confused, shocked, and angry.” He promised them a comprehensive investigation and left the scene.

That evening he went back to Parker Center and met with all of his senior staff to map a strategy moving forward.

He had a lot of people to deal with, and all at the same time: his rank-and-file cops and their union, the media, the immigrant community, the Police Commission and inspector general, civil liberties and other police watchdog groups, and all the people in the general public who were angry. It was like, thought Bratton, “trying to
change a flat tire while racing down a highway at sixty miles an hour.”

Over the next days and weeks he expanded the investigation, ordering Internal Affairs to gather all video of the event and conduct interviews with the participants, the victims, and the department’s senior leadership. Meanwhile, he was meeting with community groups, the ACLU, the Police Commission, the City Council, newspaper editors, and broadcast news directors, and appearing on local television and radio stations—particularly Spanish-language stations—talking with anybody he felt could help “
calm the waters.”

The history of LAPD malfeasance had been the subject of special “blue-ribbon” outside investigations like the Christopher Commission. Bratton didn’t want that. He was a make-a-positive-out-of-a-negative guy, both by temperament and managerial philosophy, and in the May Day debacle he saw two opportunities to do exactly that.

The first was to show that the department had advanced far enough under his leadership that it was now capable of investigating itself and coming to an objective, truthful conclusion.

The second was to “
break the back of the culture of the department
that existed in the Metropolitan Division,” an opportunity that was important and, to Bratton’s discredit, long overdue. He’d already begun chipping away at “the
insensitivity that the whole department was accused of,” and felt that “the officers on the street were interacting much better with the community” and
looked like
the community:
45 percent Latino, 15 percent black, over 20 percent female. But Metro was still the last remnant of the old LAPD, and had badly embarrassed him and the department.

Once Bratton had assessed the situation, he made all the right moves. He started by having the department do a follow-up investigation that was accepted by the press, civil liberties organizations, and the public as being honest, fair, and accurate in its criticism of itself. Then he met with everybody he could and ordered the transformative retraining of Metro. The latter move was late in coming, and could have been tragic had there been deaths or life-threatening injuries that day. Nevertheless,
the city wound up paying nearly $13 million to settle lawsuits resulting from the incident.

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

Six weeks later, Bill
Bratton moved through a ballroom of the San Jose Marriott Hotel as a scrum of reporters and camera crews circled around and moved as one with him. Dressed in a well-tailored navy blue suit, crisp white shirt, and red tie, Bratton was nothing if not cool and collected as he was peppered with questions, so much so that occasionally he allowed a slight smile of amusement to cross his face.

He’d come to San Jose, California, on a sunny June morning to participate in a panel discussion sponsored by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists at their annual convention. Entitled “MacArthur Park and Beyond: Can the LAPD, Immigrant Groups, and the Media Trust Each Other Again?” the panel began with Bratton and three co-panelist reporters taking their seats behind a long rectangular table on the stage. Packed in front of them were about three hundred journalists and editors seated on folding chairs, and scores more hugging the walls in a long, cramped line.

Suddenly the lights dimmed, and everyone turned to a large white
screen behind the panelists as a compilation of television footage of the Metro officers attacking demonstrators and reporters unwound before them. As the tape ended and the lights flashed on, Bratton squared his narrow shoulders and allowed a noncommittal expression to float across his face, ready for what was to come.

But remarkably, given an audience that included many from a Spanish-language media passionately committed to its immigrant constituency, and the presence of a contingent of the very journalists who’d been knocked down and roughed up at MacArthur Park, there was little animosity directed at Bratton.

And for a number of reasons. For one, he’d accumulated a wellspring of goodwill among Latinos by steadfastly supporting a long-standing department directive ordering officers not to arrest anyone because of their immigration status. He had also lobbied for undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, and publicly dismissed the notion of terrorists streaming across the Mexican border to harm Americans. (“
Go to a Home Depot and what to do you see?” he once asked. “Hundreds of guys standing there, looking for work, not raping and pillaging.”)

But more to the point, Bratton had also defused the uproar over the department’s actions by shrewdly and swiftly becoming its most outspoken critic. Declaring the rampage “the worst incident of this type I have ever encountered
in my thirty-seven years of policing,”
he demoted and reassigned Lee Carter, the highest-ranking officer at the scene, reassigned the second-ranking officer, and ordered retraining in crowd control and rules for dealing with the media.

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

In the subways and streets of New York, Bill Bratton had shown what a remarkable, strategically gifted cop he was while overlooking the wider game and the fact that Rudolph Giuliani considered himself, not Bratton, the unquestioned star of the stage. It was a mistake of hubris, a young man’s mistake, even though Bratton had been middle-aged.