Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (9 page)

Bratton gave them their wish. He started out by reforming officer training, forcing the transit police brass out of their city-owned, take-home cars and into the subways to travel to work in uniform, just as he was doing. Then he replaced a broken-down communication system with one that actually worked both inside and outside the subways, and identified and rapidly promoted talented, smart, ambitious people.

He formed teams of officers to lie in wait and arrest fare-beaters. To avoid flooding the jails with fare-beaters for twenty-four to forty-eight hours as they waited to be arraigned, he ordered the immediate release of those who’d been unarmed and had no outstanding arrest warrants. Missing the subsequent court date, however, would trigger rearrest at their homes. Decoy units were also formed to attract and arrest would-be muggers, and gangs of muggers were targeted and broken up. Many were repeat offenders, who started receiving far stiffer sentences than previously. Thirty months later, when Bratton resigned as chief,
felony subway crimes had
decreased by over 20 percent, robberies by 40 percent, and fare evasions by 50 percent.

During this time, Bratton also introduced and championed social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s contentious but highly influential “
Broken Windows” theory of crime. Such crimes as public drunkenness, aggressive panhandling, street prostitution, and loitering, Wilson and Kelling argued in a 1982
Atlantic Monthly
article entitled “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” created an atmosphere of fear and permissiveness that led to more serious crimes. Therefore, cops needed to enforce laws prohibiting those actions as a way to modify behavioral norms in public spaces, in the same way that broken windows must be repaired or they’ll lead to a neighborhood’s gradual physical deterioration. Later, serious problems would emerge as a result of the rigid use of the tactic, and a powerful backlash would discredit the widespread, indiscriminate use of “stop-frisk” policing—another policy Bratton would implement in New York. But for the subways of New York in those pivotal initial years, those strategies were critical first steps in restoring a sense both of safety and of sanity in a crucial public space. At a time when crime was becoming America’s number one domestic obsession, Bratton proved on a national stage that smart, data-based policing could actually play a pivotal role in stemming crime and violence in big-city America. And in New York City circa 1992, that was a revelation.

Charlie Beck and Mike Yamaki, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, LAPD Command Post, South Los Angeles

About forty minutes after leaving home,
Charlie Beck pulled into the same crumbling Parker Center parking lot Daryl Gates had left an hour or so earlier. There, he mounted a bus with forty-nine other sergeants and headed to a makeshift command center in the heart of South Central.

Riding down Western Avenue, Beck looked out, stunned. On both
sides of the wide-laned thoroughfare, apartment buildings; beauty salons; mini-marts; liquor, discount, and clothing shops; and storefront churches were going up in crackling fires. A major Los Angeles thoroughfare was being set ablaze while Beck’s LAPD continued to be locked in an incomprehensible paralysis. Buildings were burning and stores were already trashed and looted along the other multi-mile boulevards and avenues that snaked and crisscrossed South Los Angeles. “For 10 miles between Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and Manchester Boulevard in south Los Angeles,” as the
L.A. Times
reported, a vast section of the city “had become a
holocaust of fire-gutted buildings and shattered glass.”

The command post where Beck and his fellow sergeants arrived was a commandeered Metropolitan Transit Authority bus yard, chaotically overflowing with growing numbers of police and fire trucks and vehicles. Several motor homes had also arrived, presumably to serve as a central dispatch station. But no cops had been dispatched.

Los Angeles police commissioner Mike Yamaki was greeted by the same scene when he arrived. Command-level officers from both the police and the fire departments were present, but no one appeared to be in charge. Moreover, the LAPD’s communication system, as he would soon discover, was unable to transmit to the fire department, the highway patrol, or any other agency.

A taut, streetwise forty-three-year-old Japanese-American, Yamaki had recently become
L.A.’s first Asian-American police commissioner. His
parents had spent the Second World War in an internment camp, easy targets for rounding up and imprisonment because they were members of just another unwelcome, politically powerless minority race subject to legal abuse in the white America of 1941. Yamaki’s father emerged from the camp determined to change what he could by becoming integrated into the American mainstream both in his job in the
insurance industry and in his active participation in Los Angeles’s Democratic Party politics. He passed on the lessons he took away from the camp to his son, who, in turn, became a well-known, highly respected defense attorney. For many years Yamaki had worked to get a
stubbornly resistant LAPD to hire more Asian-American officers to join the handful of ten already on the force. As Yamaki saw it,
hiring more Asians was not only a matter of fairness, it was also a part of smart basic policing. A lot of Asian immigrants, especially in Chinatown, were being exploited by their own communities, and failed to report shakedowns and other crimes because they mistrusted the police.

For all of these reasons, Mike Yamaki took his job as one of just five civilian police commissioners very seriously. And as he stepped out of his police vehicle and onto the grounds of the makeshift command center, he, like Charlie Beck, was immediately struck by the chaos of shouting men and idling vehicle engines around him.

One conversation in particular caught his attention: a discussion among ranking LAPD officers about whether they should call the Los Angeles County sheriff for help. They wanted to ask the sheriff—who, in L.A. County, was the only law enforcement agent who could officially request outside assistance—to call in the California National Guard. In the end they decided not to. Because, as Yamaki later put it, “
nobody in the LAPD wanted to have to kiss ass to anyone in the Sheriff’s Department.”

Finally, officers from other local police agencies
did
start arriving, but nobody knew what to do with them, and
they
didn’t know where to go or even where they’d be housed. So, astoundingly, Yamaki—a defense attorney by trade, and a part-time, unpaid, civilian police commissioner working at Parker Center just one morning a week—agreed to make on-the-spot
phone calls to local hotels requesting they house and feed the out-of-town cops.

Meanwhile, Charlie Beck and his fellow sergeants continued standing around, leaders without troops, while lieutenants without personnel lists were trying to get some names down on paper. Beck had expected to see four-man squad cars going out with designated missions. Instead, nobody appeared to have a clue about how to even get officers out on the streets. Beck, a second-generation son of the LAPD, had never thought he’d be
ashamed of being a Los Angeles police officer. But that night he was.

Andre Christian, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, Riverside County; Jordan Downs Housing Project, Watts

Switching on his television, Andre “Low Down” Christian
sat down to catch some news of the acquittals. But his phone began ringing so incessantly that he found it impossible to focus.

For Christian and his friends from back in Watts, the announcement of the acquittals was “the biggest let-down ever.” A veteran member of the Grape Street Crips, Christian, like Alfred Lomas, had firsthand experience of how the cops operated in Los Angeles. He had seen police beatings—and not just from the LAPD. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was bad too. Once he’d even gotten choked out just because he’d called a deputy “man” instead of “sir.” But the Rodney King beating—he’d never seen any police beating as bad as that. So when he received calls asking him to come into the city to do something about the injustice of those cops going free, he agreed.

Hopping into his ’82 rust-colored Cadillac Coupe de Ville, Andre Christian took just over an hour to drive from his Riverside County home east of Los Angeles straight into Watts and the Jordan Downs housing project where he’d grown up.

Christian had moved from Jordan Downs to Riverside County two years earlier, in 1990, when he was twenty-two. He’d always liked watching the local news, and one day he’d seen those big San Bernardino Mountains out east and thought them the perfect place to get away from the violence he’d been involved in since junior high school. His intent, Christian would later recall, was to get a job good enough to pay for rent, gas, food, and taking care of his baby-mama, who wasn’t working. But that didn’t happen, so he’d quickly fallen back on his second option.

By 1990, the drug market in Watts and Jordan Downs was oversaturated with small and midlevel dealers fighting over too little business. But outside Watts, as Andre Christian saw it, lay opportunity, “
all that open land that
nobody
was fighting over,”
and
the chance to expand the Grape Street Crips brand into new, virgin territory, “just like when America went to the moon and set down its flag.”

Christian was more than up to that job. Tall, dark, and powerfully muscular at 265 pounds, he possessed the self-assurance of a young man who not only liked to fight but was very, very good at it. He’d never been a gun man—that wasn’t for him. But being able to seriously hurt someone without compunction and never reveal himself to be a punk was the basis of his self-esteem, and a key determinant of his respect in the projects and the gang pecking order. He was also someone who’d learned the hard way to await opportunity. This was true whether he was dealing drugs, recruiting new members for the Grape, or quietly, strategically conducting the serious business of maintaining his street credibility. He was known for lying low and waiting for just the proper time to avenge an insult or violence committed against him or those close to him—hence the genesis of his “Low Down” street name.

In any case, the Grape Street Crips had a famous, fearsome reputation in their own right, and there were plenty of potential young black recruits in Moreno Valley, the area of Riverside County where Christian now lived. A large number of African-Americans had settled there in the past decade, seeking cheaper housing and refuge from the crime and violence of South Los Angeles. And many of their sons were eager to wear Grape Street’s colors—to wear its purple rag around their necks like a cowboy, or wrap it around their foreheads like the Lone Ranger’s faithful Indian companion, Tonto.

Christian had no problem “
getting young cats to start playin’ it on the Grape Street side” and getting them to work as low-level dealers, subcontracted to him as their supplier. It wasn’t like he had to
actively
recruit. Within seconds, it seemed, people would click on something he’d said, or key in on his wardrobe, and ask, “Where you from?” It just happened. Exposure to wider experiences was limited out there in Moreno Valley, along with aspirations and options. And an identity like that of the Grape had enormous appeal for young black men in the hip-hop culture of Southern California in the eighties and nineties.

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

The Jordan Downs housing project had been a flashpoint of the Watts Riots twenty-seven years earlier. It was a tough, violent place in which
to grow up. And Andre Christian, who lived about two minutes away, hung out there with his cousins until he finally moved in with them when he was twelve.
Twenty-five hundred people resided in the projects’ low-slung, seven-hundred-unit apartment buildings, which, almost fifty years after their construction as temporary worker-housing during World War II, had acquired the weary patina of an old, mothballed army barracks. In the early nineties, the residents were almost entirely African-American, mostly single mothers raising kids who often had little supervision outside their homes. It was a place not just of broken families but of broken people, where alcoholism and drug addiction were a lifestyle, stability was a pipe dream, and every situation had the potential for violence. It wasn’t surprising that it was also the incubator of one of L.A.’s most violent gangs.

Out in the projects’ playgrounds and streets, a kid was essentially on his own. If he went to play on the swings, he had to establish his right, through physical force, to play on the swings. If someone tried to take his bike, it was up to him to keep it. Reputations were defined in the sandbox that would follow boys into manhood. There was absolutely no going to the cops or any other authority figure for protection. And if a boy dared bring his mama into any situation, he would be labeled a punk, derided, challenged, and beaten by his peers. That was just the law, the culture of Jordan Downs. If you weren’t tough, weren’t ready to fight at a moment’s notice, you’d either have to stay inside or your mama would have to move the family out.

The other law of Jordan Downs was that the Grape was the bottom line. If you lived there you were destined to be a Grape Street Crip, just like if you lived in Watts’s other huge housing project, the
1,054-unit Nickerson Gardens, you were destined to be a Bounty Hunter Blood. Even if you didn’t actually join the gang, you’d have to answer the questions “Where you from?” or “Where you stay at?” from gang members across the city. If you answered “Jordan Downs,” you’d have to be prepared to take a beating if they had a beef with the Grape.

Christian was fourteen years old and still in junior high school when his cousins Anthony and DeShawn vouched for his acceptance into the Grape Street Crips. The criteria was simple. “
You could show no inferiority,
no fear, no backing down. If you ever did, you failed the test,” says Christian. That same year, 1982, DeShawn was shot in the head and killed after a fight. He was sixteen. In 1983, Christian was shot three times in the back with a .22 over a dispute with a guy who owed his cousin, Gloria, $80. He was fifteen.