Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (15 page)

Her second epiphany would come out of the same case. During the settlement negotiation, the attorneys would go through a litany of facts aimed at establishing the monetary amount in damages that would be awarded to the complainant. Usually the facts would not be good for him: gang member, drug addict, no high school diploma,
no job history, no career, no prospects of higher education, no large punitive damages settlement. “There was no value set for the posttraumatic stress that these kids had suffered from a young age,” says Rice. “It was the
underclass discount. You are from the underclass, your lives not only do not really count, they are discounted.” Together, these two insights would profoundly shape the course of Connie Rice’s career.

Anthony De Los Reyes, May 1992, Los Angeles

Three weeks after the riots, police commissioner Anthony De Los Reyes had a quiet, private conversation with Daryl Gates during a break in a Police Commission meeting. De Los Reyes had always gotten along with Gates, taking him, he says, for what he was politically—a “
very, very powerful” player “who had a lot of troops lined up behind him.” So he proceeded gingerly.

“ ‘Tell me Daryl,’ ” he asked. “ ‘What exactly happened? Why weren’t [the riots initially] contained?’ ‘Well, Commissioner,’ Gates replied, ‘we had a lieutenant down there [at Florence and Normandie] who just didn’t seem to know what to do, and he let us down.’ He said it with a straight face,” De Los Reyes later recalled. “
It was unbelievable.”

And it
was
unbelievable—not the fact that a public official so central to causing a disaster would lie, but that a police leader so beloved by his troops would punch downward and blame a mere lieutenant for failing to contain such a cataclysmic event.

The facts were quite the opposite. And De Los Reyes’s fellow police commissioner Mike Yamaki had witnessed them. He had stood right there in South Central when the decision was made to pull all the officers out of Florence and Normandie instead of reinforcing them and trying to quell the riot at its start. “
I was there,” Yamaki would later recount, “with a deputy chief, two commanders and a captain [on-site]. I was standing right there with them in the street when they were conferring about what to do. They could have made that decision. But they didn’t.”

Meanwhile, the riots’ staggering costs began to be tabulated: over 45 dead—most the result of civilian gunfire, not beatings or burnings or at the hands of the police, soldiers, or the National Guard—and
2,300 injured.
Insured losses totaled $1 billion, making the ’92 Los Angeles riots the
deadliest and costliest U.S. insurrection of the twentieth century. Now L.A. would have to rebuild not just its burned-out structures but its sense of self, its future, its sunny, glamorous image.

Those riots may have taken place in Los Angeles, but their impact was nationwide. During three days in April and May of 1992, crowds rioted in downtown San Francisco and demonstrators shut down the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The city was placed under a state of emergency. In Las Vegas, Nevada, the National Guard was activated. In Madison, Wisconsin, the windows of police cars were smashed in. Large protest demonstrations occurred in Harlem. And in Atlanta, stores windows were shattered and whites were assaulted on the streets by roving bands of young African-Americans.

As a result of the beating of Rodney King, a new federal law was passed. It empowered the U.S. Justice Department to force local police agencies into a
federal consent decree mandating fundamental reforms by threatening to sue them if they refused. The factor triggering such a decree would be a determination that a city’s police had engaged in a “pattern and practice” of civil rights violations.

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

There was a lot of blame to go around for the ’92 Los Angeles riots. And while Gates tried to pin it on the lieutenant at Florence and Normandie, the truth was he shared responsibility for the events that began at that intersection.

Ever since Bill Parker’s advent as chief, the LAPD had been an organization amazingly responsive to its leadership. Gates’s two long-term predecessors, Bill Parker and Ed Davis—as well Gates himself—had been extraordinarily successful at forging an identity for the LAPD as an independent, omnipresent city agency entitled to stand above and outside the normal political checks and balances of city government. So successful, in fact, that after fourteen years under Gates’s embattled
command, the LAPD had become just like him: blindly stubborn, narcissistic, and deeply resistant to change. Gates had taught the department that being a responsive public agency meant acting only as
it
saw fit, while never questioning the policing philosophy that made it simultaneously so hated
and
ineffective. Consequently, in the weeks leading up to the riots the LAPD’s leadership had misread the situation and failed to grasp the pulse, tenor, and mood of the city it policed.

Sharing the blame was an indifferent white establishment and a Police Commission, city council, and black mayor who ignored the decades-long poverty and deterioration of South Los Angeles and Pico-Union and the bitter, metastasizing rage at the LAPD, and failed to
demand
a police department that would do a better, smarter job of reducing crime in consort with the people from neighborhoods that were suffering from that crime the most.

They had stood by as Daryl Gates led the city toward a calamitous reckoning. Los Angeles had become a place where a huge cross-section of the city’s residents felt they had no way of stopping a police department whose modus operandi was to abuse and humiliate them. And as a result, a police force once the Hollywood exemplar of all that was smart, good, and effective in American law enforcement became instead the poster boys for all that was bad, bigoted, brutal, and ineffectual in American policing.

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

It would turn out that Daryl Gates’s self-serving dash to Brentwood on the eve of the riots was pointless. That June,
by a two-thirds majority, L.A. voters approved the charter amendment Gates had campaigned against, just in time to coincide with his forced resignation.

By mid-1992 many of the city’s reformers thought that with a new LAPD chief on the way, the problems within the department—and the animosity between the department and the citizens that it had sworn “to protect and to serve”—would leave with him. But of course they didn’t go away. Gates’s departure was just the opening salvo in a battle that had only just begun.

PART TWO

SOMETHING BORROWED

Daryl Gates and Willie Williams, June 1992, Los Angeles

For a brief time following the riots, it appeared
that the bitter police politics that characterized Los Angeles during the dawn of the 1990s had eased. That month,
Daryl Gates was forced to resign by the near total collapse of support from both the electorate and from L.A.’s corporate titans and their elite attorneys on the Christopher Commission. It was those attorneys who had written
Charter Amendment F, and it was the city’s voters who had then approved by an overwhelming 2–1 margin, thereby codifying and limiting the chief’s tenure, independence, and power. That month
Willie L. Williams, the first black police commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department, also stepped forward to be sworn in as the
first black police chief of Los Angeles, and to bask in his moment in the sun.

The city’s liberal establishment, the media, and much of the population of Los Angeles greeted him
not just as another cop, but as a hero who would simultaneously transform the culture of the LAPD, institute community policing and the Christopher Commission reforms, reduce crime, slash gang violence, and lower the temperature of the blistering racial tension permeating the city. Nobody at the time seemed to realize the enormity of such a mission. But as he traversed Los Angeles in those first days and months, listening intently to questions and making notes on a little pad he kept in his pocket, Willie Williams had such extraordinary headwinds behind him that no one seemed ready to raise a note of caution. Spotting him as he strolled into
Campanile, a chic, upscale eatery
adjacent to the mansions of Hancock Park, the restaurant’s patrons rose spontaneously and greeted him with a standing ovation. At the popular
Velvet Turtle restaurant he and his wife hosted a luncheon for a contingent of female LAPD officers. During the meal, he charmed the group while simultaneously signaling his support for their equal treatment in a department that under Daryl Gates had grown infamous for
sexual harassment and discrimination.

Juggling over two hundred requests for meetings, Willie Williams went to Chinatown, had dinner in Koreatown, received
two standing ovations at the Black Women’s Forum, and met with the mayor, the press corps, city council members, the Police Protective League, cops at Parker Center, cops in the San Fernando Valley, and the ranking LAPD officers he’d beaten out for the job. At the
First Methodist Episcopal Church in South Los Angeles, the crème de la crème of L.A.’s black leadership all laid hands on Williams’s broad shoulders as the church’s pastor said a prayer for the Lord’s “
servant and son.” At the
Hollenbeck Youth Center in Mexican East L.A. as well as at the First AME, his warmth toward the brown and black people who’d turned out to see him—and theirs toward him—was palpable.
The media coverage reflected their enthusiasm, led by the
Los Angeles Times
, which seemed just as relieved, dazzled, and eager to believe as the general public.

At forty-eight, Williams’s ample girth made him seem taller than his height of six-foot-one, and the grace with which he moved caused him to appear less a fat man than a big man who exuded confidence and solidity. “I want you, the
citizens, to hold me accountable,” he told the crowd of about one hundred community leaders, cops from the Hollenbeck station, and kids at the youth center. Then, cranking up his easy charm, he asked some girls sitting in a row of bleachers, “
So who’s gonna be the first female police chief in this city?”

Like Tom Bradley, he appealed to black people and was utterly nonthreatening to white people. But perhaps Willie Williams’s biggest attraction was that he was not his predecessor. Instead, he came across as someone with nothing to prove, a man who held his place as a city department head in the right perspective—a characteristic that would normally be taken for granted in a high-ranking public servant. But
Williams was replacing Daryl Gates, who wore his chief’s star like an imperial crown and had publicly compared himself to two of his
World War II heroes: the mythopathic General Douglas MacArthur and the pearl-handled-pistol-packin’ General George S. Patton.

Williams, on the other hand, favored
double-breasted business suits and power ties, and spoke about the LAPD as a “service organization” and
the public as his “customer base.” There was no talk from him of “enemies,” as there was from
Gates, who loved to lash out at his critics. True to form, in fact, at a press conference on his last day in office on June 1, 1992, Daryl Gates had underscored that he forgave nothing. Mayor Bradley? A washed up has-been with “
no future . . . [ who] hasn’t got a chance in the world of ever [again] being elected in this city to anything.” Willie Williams?
A weak “disciplinarian” without a college degree. Amnesty International, which had just issued a report critical of the LAPD? A “
bunch of knuckleheaded liberals [with] a lousy record.”

Williams’s instincts, by comparison, were to rise above criticism and to welcome outside input. “If there was
one thing that sold [the] Los Angeles [Police Commission] on Williams,” said Ian H. Lennox, the president of the Citizens Crime Commission, a business-funded Philadelphia police oversight group, “it might have been his willingness to permit a private agency like ours to come in and help set policy and procedures. That is Williams’ strength,” Lennox told the
New York Times
, “his willingness to look at new ideas.”

He seemed also to
say
all the things reformers like Lennox wanted to hear. He’d been “
shocked” and “embarrassed as a police officer” by the beating of Rodney King, Williams told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, adding that he’d never “
seen pictures of Vietnam or Korea where I saw one human being try to kill another human being the same way some of those officers tried to do that man.”

During his tour of the Hollenbeck Youth Center he turned to the reporters accompanying him and, referring to a young girl recently killed by gang bullets in the neighborhood, said: “
Our whole existence is to make sure these kids don’t get shot and killed like the young child yesterday. That’s a terrible way to be introduced to your city—to see the [L.A. Roman Catholic] Cardinal talking at a 3-year-old’s funeral.”

And he had soothing words too for his new troops. “
Too many members of [this] Police Department have been painted with the broad brush of accusation because of the actions of a very, very few,” he said. “Our collective goal must be to take an already great Police Department and strive to shine even brighter.” In a city built on illusion, Willie Williams had said and done all the right things, and proved himself a master of the art. Now all he had to do was make it happen.

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

On an evening later that month at the Regent Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, deep in the heart of wealthy, powerful west Los Angeles, Willie Williams also spoke at the annual dinner of the American Jewish Committee. An international advocacy organization, the AJC’s Western Regional Office was then concerned about police abuse and race issues in L.A.

So too were many in the audience, including the AJC’s interracial, interfaith, and international partners in the city: civil rights and other leaders from L.A.’s African-American, Latino, and Asian-American communities, as well as a bevy of politicians and other local leaders. But perhaps most important of all in terms of power and influence were the moneyed, socially conscious liberals and Jewish community leaders in attendance. They were precisely the people among the city’s white voters most strongly inclined to support a black, progressive, reform chief.