Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (16 page)

That night they would prove highly receptive to Williams’s preacher-like exhortations to begin “
to apply the salve of cooperation, the salve of unity, and the salve of accountability to our wounded souls and spirits” and to no longer “cast aside our brothers and sisters who have not yet met our particular standard of living . . . do not speak the particular language that we speak or [are] of another color of skin.”

Two decades earlier, a black-Jewish coalition inspired by the civil rights movement had made history by electing Tom Bradley as mayor, an event that announced the power of two new players in Los Angeles politics. By the mid-1980s, however, that alliance was in tatters. Black L.A. soon found itself locked in an economic free fall following the deindustrialization of South Los Angeles, a crushing event that plunged
many of its residents into unemployment as its young men turned to gangs, violence, and crack cocaine.

Jewish L.A., meanwhile, prospered. They became accepted in ways they never quite were before: a 500,000-strong group of residents of greater L.A. whose influence penetrated every significant sphere of civic life; a people who by 1990 had become not just part of L.A.’s political and moneyed establishment but in many ways were the establishment itself.

Simultaneously, growing conservatism among working- and middle-class Jews in areas like the suburban San Fernando Valley further tested the coalition. And so too did black L.A.’s growing political assertiveness and unwillingness to continue in an alliance in which they considered themselves treated as junior partners (which, in fact, they had become).

“
There was a whole sense, a kind of a lament in the Jewish community that by the early nineties around the country the Black-Jewish alliance had frayed and didn’t really exist as it once did,” recalls Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, then the director of the AJC’s Western Regional Office. “I personally believed in it. And the people that I was meeting, the people that I was beginning to work with, they really wanted to see the Jewish community engaged too.”

In short, on this evening in 1992, with Mayor Bradley in attendance, Willie Williams was speaking to a liberal, Jewish crowd who appeared to want to rekindle their historic alliance with the African-American community and to be in love again, if only for a last hurrah. Williams, after all, had been introduced to them by one of the Westside’s iconic leaders, Stanley K. Sheinbaum, who also happened to be the president of the Police Commission. As Rabbi Greenebaum later put it: “
There was not another person in the country we would rather have honored [than Williams] because he was the harbinger of change. The whole city seemed convinced that he was going to change the department.
In the midst of all that excitement—and given that the AJC was an organization working in the community, building partnerships with other ethnic groups—you tell me who we would rather have had speak at that dinner? I mean, do you want Willie Williams, the incoming police chief of the LAPD?
Or you want the Dalai Lama? We wanted Willie Williams!”

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

The rapturous response to Willie Williams seemed as inevitable as his selection. The logic of reform demanded it. Demanded an outsider, demanded a dramatic break from Daryl Gates and anyone even remotely tainted by his failed, divisive legacy.

“
We needed somebody from the outside to give the appearance that we were going to clean out whatever problems there were,” police commissioner Ann Reiss Lane would later say, “a person with no ties, and no friendships that he had to honor.” Anthony De Los Reyes felt much the same way: “
There was definitely a preference for going outside. There were all these loyalties and cross-loyalties and these intrigues and the agendas among the [LAPD] command-level staff. We just wanted to cut away from that and start fresh.”

And
, although nobody explicitly said so, it was a big plus that Williams was black. The politics of race, not to mention righteous justice, demanded
that
as well. It was the city’s African-Americans, after all, who’d suffered the most and fought the hardest for reform under Gates. They needed more than a sign—they needed a
guarantee
in the person of a progressive black chief that the LAPD’s institutional racism would finally end. With Williams as chief, there now appeared to be at least a chance of achieving that goal.

In 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer had defined the tribal nature of big-city ethnic politics in their seminal book,
Beyond the Melting Pot
. Almost thirty years later, a tribal divide was still alive and well, as had been made vividly clear in Los Angeles by the recent riots. Willie Williams’s selection by a liberal Police Commission spoke to that reality.

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

That Police Commission’s five members were
all Democratic stalwarts handpicked by Mayor Bradley after the King beating. Together they constituted an ethnic stew of identity politics that reflected Bradley’s diverse, liberal constituency. Unpaid and severely understaffed, the civilian commissioners officially met just one morning a week, and were
expected to oversee and set policy for a police department overtly antagonistic to the commission’s oversight function.

It was an absurd situation, a throwback to the progressive, early twentieth-century Teddy Roosevelt era of “good government,” when the wealthy elite performed their noblesse oblige civic duty and were assumed to be pure, incorruptible, and above the dirty political fray. When
Bill Parker was named chief in 1950, he’d combined the city charter protections virtually guaranteeing his lifetime tenure as chief with the cunning of a junior-league Machiavelli to make the commission a virtual rubber stamp for him and his successors. Then he laid out the rules of the game. “
The Police Commission doesn’t run this police department,” he once famously announced, “
I
run the police department.” In the 1970s, as was mentioned earlier, LAPD chief Ed Davis would do Parker one better, contemptuously dismissing rumors that he might run for mayor because he “
already
had
more power than the mayor.”

Now this commission, in the wake of the riots and Prop F, had to choose a new police chief as its first order of business at an extraordinarily crucial juncture in the city’s history.

The two moving forces on the commission were its Jewish, Westside president, Stanley Sheinbaum, and its African-American vice president, Jesse Brewer. Both men had led extraordinary but very different lives yet had come to the same conclusion regarding the urgency of thoroughly reforming the LAPD.

At seventy-one, the gray-bearded Sheinbaum put one in mind of a prickly professor who carried in his pocket a growing list of people not living up to his ever more demanding expectations. Stooped and ailing, he looked at least a decade older than his age. His mind, however, remained as sharp as ever, and focused on the two passions that dominated his orbit of interest: liberal politics and policy. Among other things, he was a potent donor to the national Democratic Party, and was considered something of a kingmaker—so much so that the biggest of
Democratic presidential hopefuls would fly three thousand miles across the country to dine with him, to honor him or one of his causes or, most especially, to have their campaign coffers stuffed during his fund-raisers in
their
honor. You name them, they came: Senator George McGovern, Vice President Walter Mondale, Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator Joe Biden, New York governor Mario Cuomo.

But Stanley Sheinbaum was more than just a Democratic moneyman. Far more. He had the courage of his democratic, civil liberty–loving convictions. A plutocrat whose politics were fiercely anti-plutocracy, he was a middle-class
New York City Jewish boy turned dirt poor by the Depression, who’d then kicked around the country until he finally wound up in a graduate program at Stanford. In 1964 he’d
married a Hollywood rich girl he met at a party in Beverly Hills named Betty Warner, and for the rest of his life he tried to do good and salve his restless political soul with her money. She was
a would-be painter, a woman with formerly Communist friends who keenly remembered the Hollywood Blacklist, and the daughter of movie magnate and Warner Bros. cofounder Harry Warner.

Together they’d conduct exclusive
political salons from their Brentwood estate as Sheinbaum became a political center around whom liberals in the entertainment industry and others influential in the Southern California Left orbited. A former decadelong chairman of the
American Civil Liberties Foundation of Southern California, he began
serious
fund-raising for the organization, making it an advocate for social change and helping to turn it into the largest ACLU branch in the country.

He also raised over $900,000 for
Daniel Ellsberg’s legal defense after Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the
New York Times
; battled for California’s
divestment from apartheid South Africa while a regent of the University of California; and led a delegation of American Jews who’d clandestinely negotiated for Middle Eastern peace with Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat.

Stanley Sheinbaum, in short, was a player.

And as a major donor to Tom Bradley’s campaigns, Sheinbaum’s
phone call to Bradley after Rodney King’s beating requesting he be named to the Police Commission soon resulted in his appointment—and to
Sheinbaum being named president of the commission—a shot across the bow aimed directly at Daryl Gates.

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

Like Stanley Sheinbaum, Jesse Brewer, the commission’s vice president, had lived a storied life.
A combat infantry captain wounded in the bloody invasion of Italy during World War II, he’d been a Chicago cop before moving to Los Angeles. There he’d joined the LAPD, been voted president of his LAPD recruit class, and become
the department’s first black motorcycle officer and
the department’s first African-American assistant chief. At seventy years of age, he was named to the Police Commission by his close, longtime personal friend Tom Bradley.

Brewer was
one of those men everybody liked, not just Bradley. Daryl Gates liked him; he was popular within the department, among the white political establishment, and with the city’s black leadership.

Educated at Tuskegee, he had earned a
master’s degree in public administration from USC, and was by nature and temperament a natural conciliator. He was light-complexioned, modest, soft-spoken, and hardworking; confrontation wasn’t in his nature. He was, after all, a man who’d spend his entire adult life in uniform and was, by inclination, the consummate gentleman. Quietly, however, Jesse Brewer was seething—scarred by a lifetime of grinding, soul-sapping Jim Crow condescension and by being a constant, often impotent witness to his people being abused by his police department. Even now, as vice president of the Police Commission, old slights still stung.

In 1952 he’d
left the Chicago PD after five years, sickened by its corruption,
after taking and passing the written exam for the LAPD. But then he’d been notified that he’d failed his physical for inadequate muscle development and a case of athlete’s foot. The test, it turned out, had been administered by a
doctor notorious for regularly flunking black applicants for city jobs. Brewer found out that twelve years earlier Tom
Bradley too had been flunked by the same doctor for having a heart murmur. Bradley had then appealed, passed an examination by another physician, and finally been accepted by the LAPD. In response to a suggestion by Bradley, whom Brewer had met through his uncle,
he too appealed, got reexamined by a different doctor, and also passed.

In the years that followed, Brewer worked in a segregated LAPD that relegated black officers to South L.A., did not permit them to work in the then lily-white San Fernando Valley or to join many of the department’s elite special units, and did not integrate its patrol units until 1961.

Yet Brewer kept pushing. Three times he’d scored high on his
written exam for lieutenant (then the glass ceiling for black officers), and three times he’d been
rejected by white oral boards who displayed either outright hostility or a refusal to take his candidacy seriously. Finally he
made it on his fourth attempt, in 1967—
after
Bill Parker had died in office, after the Watts Riots, after the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and almost twenty years after the U.S. armed forces had been integrated.

In 1991, as he was nearing forty years on the LAPD, Jesse Brewer finally retired, just two days before the beating of Rodney King—his dream of becoming the LAPD’s first black chief forever thwarted by Daryl Gates’s lifetime tenure.
But he left with a copy of a report he’d commissioned several years earlier, as the commander of the department’s sprawling South Bureau. Brewer had detected an alarming pattern: Gates was overturning every one of Brewer’s deterrent-driven punishments for excessive use of force by his officers and replacing them with slaps on the wrist. Each of the officers involved, the report found, was then in trouble
again
within a year for similar or identical use-of-force violations. Brewer was outraged. Not only was Gates undermining his efforts to curb brutality, he was allowing the officers to continue their conduct.

Jesse Brewer didn’t release the study right away. He waited for the right opportunity, which came when he was invited to publicly testify before the Christopher Commission following the King beating. Brewer pulled no punches. While sharing the findings of his South Bureau report, he denounced Gates for his lax disciplinary standards, giving him a grade of D. Disrespect for the public among officers was “
out of control,” he told the commission, adding, “
We know who the bad guys are, reputations [are] well known.” When Tom Bradley then named Brewer to the Police Commission, Brewer called on Gates to resign. Daryl Gates never spoke to Jesse Brewer again.

Brewer became the commission’s essential member—the old friend and confidant of the mayor, the guy with institutional knowledge who knew all the players, and where the bodies were buried.