L.A. Noir

by John Buntin

  “Why not?” Fisk asked.

  “You know,” Gates replied, “you people are really amazing. On the one hand, you talk very strongly about affirmative action, about moving blacks and Hispanics and women up in the organization. At the same time you want to cut out all of these top jobs. How are you going to have vacancies to move people into when you’ve slashed all these positions from the top?”

  It was a remarkably insouciant response—and vintage Gates. Instead of offering a concession that would allow the Police Commission to choose him and save face, Gates was in effect daring them to pick someone else. They didn’t have the nerve to. On March 24, 1978, Daryl Gates was named the next chief of police. He was sworn in four days later. The system that Bill Parker had created could not be broken. Chief Gates soon settled in as a chief in the Parker mold. Then came the evening of Saturday, March 2, 1991. As in Watts, it started with the California Highway Patrol.

  TIM AND MELANIE SINGER were a husband-and-wife Highway Patrol team. On the night of March 2, they were patrolling the Foothill Freeway north of Los Angeles. They were headed toward Simi Valley when, in their rearview mirror, they spotted a white Hyundai gaining on them, fast. They pulled over and watched it blow past at upward of a hundred miles per hour. They gave chase, but the car ignored the patrol car’s sirens. Instead, it accelerated. Units from the LAPD joined the chase. The Hyundai exited the freeway on Paxton Street, maintaining speeds of up to eighty-five miles per hour on residential streets, and tore through a red light at Van Nuys and Foothills, nearly causing a collision, before a pickup truck that was partially blocking the road brought the car to a stop just beyond the intersection of Osborne and Foothills, near the darkened entrance to Hansen Dam Park.

  There were three passengers in the car, all black men. Two passengers got out and, following police instructions, lay down prone on the ground. The driver of the car hesitated and then slowly climbed out. Across the street, the sirens and police helicopter awakened a plumbing supply store manager, who’d recently purchased a video camera. He dressed and stumbled out to his balcony with the camcorder. Then he turned it on and captured nine minutes and twenty seconds of footage that showed a large black man charging the police. An officer swung his baton at the man, knocking him down. The officer kept swinging as the man writhed across the ground. A large group of officers stood by, arms folded. The man was then taken into custody. The videographer was disturbed by what seemed to be a brutal and blatant example of “street justice.” The next day, he offered his tape first to the LAPD and then to CNN. Neither was interested. On Monday, the videographer took it to a local television station, KTLA. That evening, KTLA put the tape up on the ten o’clock news. By Tuesday morning, CNN (which had an affiliate agreement with KTLA) had started to put an edited version on the air, one that had cut out the driver’s initial charge at the police. NBC had a tape by later in the day. The beating of Rodney King was now playing endlessly across the country.

  The LAPD hierarchy was shocked by what they saw, although many commanders saw something very different from what the public did. LAPD Sgt. Charles Duke, a martial arts consultant, was distressed by how ineffectively the arresting officer used his baton. Other officers were disturbed by the failure of the supervising sergeant to make use of the large numbers of officers who had arrived at the scene and stood by watching. But the brass had no interest in examining the possibility that poor training had played a role in the beating. Instead, Chief Gates described the beating as an “aberration” and promised a full investigation. Mayor Bradley vowed that “appropriate action” would be taken against the officers involved. County DA Ira Reiner immediately convened a grand jury and within two weeks of the incident, four of the officers involved were indicted.

  Mayor Bradley decided the time was right to assert his authority over the police department—authority that, legally, he did not have. On April 1, he announced the formation of “an independent commission” on the Los Angeles Police Department. Its chairman was attorney Warren Christopher, former vice chairman of the McCone Commission, deputy attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson, deputy secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter, and a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, the city’s most powerful law firm. The day after announcing the appointment, Bradley asked Gates for his resignation. Gates refused.

  The Police Commission, whose members were Bradley loyalists, met secretly (in violation of state law) and then informed the chief that they were voting to put him on unpaid leave to investigate “serious allegations of mismanagement.” This angered the chief. It was Mayor Bradley, not he, who had recently been dogged by a series of allegations about improper entanglements with businessmen seeking favors from the city. Gates said he’d see them in court. The city council, led by John Ferraro, pressured the Police Commission to reinstate Gates. Finally, after a judge issued a restraining order against the commission’s attempted action, Ferraro managed to persuade Bradley and Gates to agree to a truce. Privately, though, Gates had come to believe that Bradley “had brought to Los Angeles a rat’s nest of impropriety not seen since the days of the Shaw regime of the 1930s.” Meanwhile, the prosecutors’ case against the officers involved in the beating moved forward.

  Three months later, on July 9, the Christopher Commission issued its report—and called for Chief Gates’s resignation. Its conclusions were damning. The report described a department with a small number of “problem officers,” who employed deadly force yet who never seemed to receive serious punishment. The commission criticized the department’s retreat from community policing and spoke directly to the culture Daryl Gates had inherited and intensified:

  L.A.P.D. officers are trained to command and to confront, not to communicate. Regardless of their training, officers who are expected to produce high citation and arrest statistics and low response times do not also have time to explain their actions, to apologize when they make a mistake, or even to ask about problems in a neighborhood.

  The historian Lou Cannon would later characterize the Christopher Commission report as “an impressive and penetrating indictment of the Los Angeles Police Department and its ‘siege mentality.’” But Cannon noted that it was also seriously flawed.

  One of the commission’s most troubling findings was that the LAPD harbored a number of officers with racist sentiments. The evidence for this proposition came primarily from the text messages officers had sent to each other from their patrol cars’ MDT units. Over the course of six months, the commission had reviewed six million text messages. Most had been about routine police matters, but a small yet “disturbing” subset suggested a culture of excessive force and racism. Examples cited included references to “kicking” witnesses, “queen cars,” and—worst of all—“monkey-slapping time.” It looked bad—Christopher would describe these texts as “abhorrent”—but only to someone who knew nothing at all about police lingo. “Kicking” a suspect meant releasing him. “Monkey-slapping time” was slang for goofing off. A “queen car” was not an automobile driven by homosexuals but rather a unit from a station assigned to a special duty. When the police department reviewed the texts in question (and eliminated phrases such as “Praise the lord and pass the ammunition” from the list of objectionable statements), it found 277 references to incidents that appeared to involve misconduct and 12 racial slurs—out of 6 million text messages. It is hard to imagine any big-city police department (or, for that matter, any institution at all) doing better. Not surprisingly, Gates responded by calling the group’s report “a travesty.”

  Inaccurate though it was in many of its details, the Christopher Commission nonetheless identified what was in many ways the deepest source of tension between Bradley and Gates—namely, the police chief’s extraordinary lack of accountability to the city’s elected officials. That more than anything was Parker’s legacy. Warren Christopher proposed to end it. Under a ballot proposition endorsed by his commission, the Police Commission would select three candidates, rank their preferences,
and then send the list to the mayor to make the final choice, subject to the city council’s approval. The Police Commission would be able to fire the chief at any point, with the mayor’s concurrence. (The city council would also be able to overturn the Police Commission and mayor’s decision with a two-thirds vote.)

  Gates immediately recognized that the true goal of the commission was “controlling the police.” Protege of Bill Parker that he was, he vowed to fight it. Otherwise, “the chief would be silenced by the politicians and subject to the mayor’s every whim…. The L.A.P.D. would become politicized for the first time since the corrupt 1930s.”

  That it might simply become accountable to the people’s chosen representatives apparently never occurred to him. But Gates did understand that pressure to oust him was mounting. Fed up with being under assault, he was more than ready to leave—but he wanted to leave on his own terms. In late July, Gates announced that he would step down as chief the following year, in the spring of 1992. Until then, however, Gates resolved that he would do everything he could to preserve the chief’s prerogatives for his successor. Capping the police chief’s tenure and changing lines of authority in the department would require a change to the city charter. That would require a citywide referendum, one that would most likely be scheduled for the next round of municipal elections in June 1992. Chief Gates vowed to fight it.

  Meanwhile, the lawyers for the officers indicted in the Rodney King beating were preparing motions that would transfer the trial to a location outside of L.A. County. But prosecutors weren’t particularly worried. No trial had been moved outside of Los Angeles since 1978. On November 26, 1991, however, Judge Stanley Weisberg agreed to do just that. He transferred the case to Simi Valley, a bedroom community of 100,000 people northwest of Los Angeles in Ventura County. Simi Valley was conservative, 80 percent white (and just 1.5 percent black), and popular with LAPD retirees. A more favorable venue for the police officers was hard to imagine.

  JURY SELECTION BEGAN in February 1992. At the end of the month, prosecutors faced an all-white jury. On March 2, 1992, one day short of the first anniversary of the Rodney King incident, the trial got under way. In the mind of the public, the Rodney King beating was a straightforward case of police brutality. But in the courtroom, matters weren’t so clear-cut. Rodney King had led the police on a high-speed car chase. As the arresting officers feared, he was an intoxicated ex-con. Tests for PCP proved inconclusive, but officers’ fears were understandable in light of what had occurred before the famous videotape started running. King had thrown off four officers who attempted to “swarm” him and had then shaken off two attempts to subdue him with a Taser, before charging the police. All of these factors lent credence to the claims made by officers on the scene that they believed they were dealing with someone high on PCP, whom they were endeavoring to subdue without shooting him. On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, the jury acquitted the four police officers on all but one of the charges.

  The jury in Simi Valley had been out for deliberation for almost a week. As the days passed, anxiety in South-Central Los Angeles had steadily grown. Watts had come as a horrible surprise, a massive riot whose precipitating incident had been a random California Highway Patrol stop. But by 1992, most residents of Los Angeles understood the possibility of urban violence. When the jury told the presiding judge it had reached a verdict, the court immediately informed the LAPD—and delayed the courtroom opening of the verdict for two hours, a decision that gave the LAPD time to prepare. But with a handful of exceptions, no preparations were made.

  For a department that had long been obsessed with its failure to contain the Watts riots, the apparent lack of concern about what might ensue in the event of an acquittal was curious. But even if no operational preparations for trouble had commenced, it would have been reasonable to expect that the LAPD now had the tactics, training, and materiel to respond to a Watts-style insurrection. After all, Chief Gates himself had seen the inadequacies of the department’s earlier preparations. He had also seen the danger of withdrawing from a riot area in the hope that an outbreak of violence would burn itself out. LAPD policy was clear: The department would respond with overwhelming force (which included two armored personnel carriers) to any outbreak of civil unrest, arresting and prosecuting everyone involved and cordoning off the area so that the violence would not spread.

  At least, that was the theory. But as angry crowds gathered at the intersection of 55th and Normandie, the LAPD once again seemed utterly unprepared. Worse, it seemed complacent. Requests to deploy the elite Metro unit in riot gear had been rebuffed on the theory that “riots don’t happen during the daytime.” No tear gas had been distributed; requests to deploy rubber bullets had been rejected; and no instructions had been provided to officers at the 77th Street station, which was located in the heart of South-Central. By 5:30 p.m., rioting had begun. Its epicenter was the intersection of Florence and Normandie. As in Watts, a crowd had assembled near the scene where police were making an arrest—and the crowd was quickly turning ugly. The LAPD now faced its post-Watts moment of truth. But instead of clearing the mob and seizing control of the intersection, as post-Watts operating procedure called for, LAPD personnel on the scene pulled back. By 5:45, the rioters had the streets to themselves.

  The mood at police headquarters (known since 1969 as Parker Center) was oddly unconcerned. In recent months, the once-defiant Gates had become disengaged. Everyone expected that he would resign soon but no one knew when. As for Mayor Bradley, who had not spoken to his police chief in thirteen months, he seemed more concerned about the possibility that the LAPD might spark violence by overreacting than about the violence that was already unfolding. Neither man seemed able to grasp the reality of what was happening. When a reporter stopped Chief Gates at half past six that evening and asked how the LAPD was responding to the growing unrest, he paused and then placidly replied that the department was responding “calmly, maturely, and professionally.” Then he left for a fund-raiser in Mandeville Canyon in distant Brentwood. Its purpose was to raise money to oppose Amendment F, the amendment to the city charter proposed by the Christopher Commission that would give the mayor authority to select the police chief and limit future police chiefs to two five-year terms.

  BACK IN SOUTH-CENTRAL, the Watts riots seemed to be replaying themselves. Once again, the rioters broke into the liquor stores first, then the pawnshops, where they found an ample supply of guns. Once again, confusion reigned at 77th Street station. No effort was made to regain control of the street. No perimeter was established to contain the violence. The major routes into South-Central were not sealed off. Meanwhile, the area’s gangs took control of the streets, much as they had back in 1965. White motorists who ventured into the riot zone were dragged out of their cars and beaten. The most horrifying episode involved a white big-rig truck driver, Reginald Denny, who was pulled out of his cab by a handful of black youths, kicked, beaten with a claw hammer, and then nearly killed by a youth, Damian Williams, who struck Denny on the head with a block of concrete. As Chief Gates drove toward Brentwood—and Mayor Bradley drove toward the launch of his “Operation Cool Response”—Angelenos watched in horror as news helicopters hovering overhead televised Williams doing a touchdown-style dance and flashing the symbol of the Eight Tray Gangster Crips.* Not until 8:15 p.m. did Gates return to Parker Center.

  In 1965, Parker had pushed early and hard for the National Guard while Lt. Gov. Glenn Anderson hesitated. In 1992, it was Gov. Pete Wilson who pushed hardest for the Guard. At 9 p.m. that night, Wilson finally prevailed upon Mayor Bradley and Chief Gates to allow him to summon the National Guard. Not until later that night when he went out into the field did Gates grasp the magnitude of the disaster that was unfolding—and the extent of the LAPD’s failure. The staging area at 77th Street station was complete chaos. The most basic tenets of riot control, such as cordoning off the area where violence was occurring, had not been observed. Gates had trusted his commanders, and they had
failed him. The chief, who treated his senior commanders much more kindly than Chief Parker had, erupted in rage. Then, like a ghost, he disappeared into the night with his driver and a security aide.

  In the early hours of the morning, two officers guarding a church at the corner of Arlington and Vernon were startled to see the chief pull up. Gates asked if they needed anything. One of the officers requested a Diet Coke from a nearby convenience store. “No problem,” said the chief. A few minutes later, Gates’s driver returned—without the soda. Gates wanted them to light their safety flares so that no one would run into their car by accident.

  “There’s a riot going on, and the chief is micromanaging how our car was parked,” one of the officers later marveled. He laughed at this advice. The other officer was more upset. She’d really wanted a Diet Coke.

  Gates did not return to the command post until 6 a.m. that morning. Only then, on Thursday morning, did the LAPD request assistance from the sheriff’s department, which was prepared to lend the department up to five hundred officers. That night, the National Guard at last began to deploy. Not until Monday morning, May 4, was the violence finally stopped. By then, fifty-four people had died, more than two thousand had been injured and treated in hospital emergency rooms, and more than eight hundred buildings had burned—four times the number destroyed during the Watts riots. Because of the LAPD’s failure to cordon off the area where the violence started, the looting and violence spread much farther than it had in 1965. Venice and Hollywood saw outbreaks of violence. Homeowners in posh Hancock Park and elsewhere hired mercenaries to protect their neighborhoods. Ultimately, property damages exceeded $900 million.

  As the historian Lou Cannon has noted, there was a terrible irony to what had transpired:

  Ironically, the L.A.P.D. was unprepared for the riots largely because Gates had not demonstrated the independence he feared would be stripped from future chiefs. Instead of standing up to Mayor Bradley and the black leaders who feared that aggressive police deployment might cause a provocation, Gates had attempted to appease politicians by ordering the department to keep a low profile during jury deliberations.