Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (26 page)

The failure to notify the coroner on time was a violation of both state
law and department policy. It wasn’t the first time. In 1992, the coroner’s office had written two letters to Willie Williams urging him to ensure that his officers promptly notify them in murder cases. And again, Willie Williams had done nothing to effectively change the situation.

Four detectives, including Vannatter, then left an active murder scene and went to O. J. Simpson’s house on the pretext of making a death notification. They also claimed that they hoped to ensure that Simpson and anyone else in his compound were safe. That would be their story, one they’d stick to because upon their arrival they failed to obtain a telephonic search warrant. Then Detective Mark
Fuhrman jumped over a wall adjacent to the house looking for evidence and found a leather glove that would become a key piece of evidence—even though his actions constituted an illegal search. According to the trial judge, Lance Ito, Vannatter, in “
reckless disregard for the truth,” made it appear in the search warrant as if Simpson were running away.

And then there was the murder scene. “
Contaminated, compromised, and corrupted,” as the defense would describe it while showing the jury videos of investigators and criminologists traipsing through the evidence.

The defense also showed how some of that evidence was badly maintained and poorly tested. Former LAPD detective
Bill Pavelic helped the defense compile loose-leaf notebooks filled with mistakes that had been in the LAPD’s crime book, such as violations of procedures and breaks in the chain of custody of the evidence.

Detective Vannatter, after having Simpson’s blood drawn at Parker Center, put the evidence vial in his pocket and went back out to O. J. Simpson’s house. He then handed it to criminologist Dennis Fung, who didn’t book it until the following day. Simpson’s defense team used this delay to discredit the blood evidence. They then attacked the LAPD lab as “
a cesspool of contamination,” with bad equipment, underpaid and overworked staff, and frequent job turnover. They accused
Dennis Fung of using a broken blood storage refrigerator in his van that stopped working “after [being on for] several hours.” Barry Scheck so thoroughly decimated Fung on the stand that a new verb sprung up in legal circles to describe crushing a witness:
he got “Schecked.”

DNA expert and defense witness John Gerdes, moreover, would testify that the LAPD’s DNA lab was “
by far” the worst of the twenty-three he had inspected around the country.

There was also the failure to adequately secure O. J. Simpson’s Bronco. It was left at an
impound yard, where many unauthorized people had access to it. Here again was a break in the chain of custody. As a result, the defense was able to demonstrate that evidence in the Bronco, like that in the crime lab, might well have been contaminated or planted.

Finally, there was Detective Mark Fuhrman, that “
genocidal racist,” who, under oath in the courtroom, had sworn he
hadn’t used the “N” word over the past ten years, contradicting previous defense testimony and allegations that Fuhrman was an old-school, walking, talking LAPD bigot. After Fuhrman’s denial, an audiotape was then played before the jury on which Fuhrman casually used the word “nigger” several times. Cochran, in the person of Mark Fuhrman, had thus found his racist cop. And in Phil Vannatter he had found his cop who was smart but not really smart, and used to doing things his own, casual way, unchallenged.

And in Willie Williams he had found a chief of police who seemed unable to respond, who had nothing to say as his police department was being ripped apart for past bad deeds and sloppy police work. His silence was deafening. But perhaps that was preferable to Daryl Gates’s landing on the cover of some weekly news magazine, combatively defending
his
detectives and further embarrassing the department.

When Simpson’s not-guilty verdicts were announced just before 10 a.m. on the morning of October 3, 1995, most of white America could not believe that Johnnie Cochran had done exactly what he said he was going to, and that O. J. Simpson was about to walk away scot-free.

But at black colleges like
Howard University and from black students in university lounges at UCLA and all across America, the cheers couldn’t have been louder. They weren’t about O. J. He was no black hero. It was that
they
—black Americans—had finally won one, had finally beaten a criminal justice system that had been grossly stacked against them since African slaves had set foot in America.
That
was what
their reaction was all about—an instinctually tribal sort of vindication, sort of like the ’92 riots played out differently but with underlying emotions remaining the same.

White
America, on the other hand, was stunned. Not just by the verdict, but by that inexplicable reaction of so many African-Americans. On talk-radio’s KFI-AM—L.A.’s most popular English-language station—“
John and Ken,” the hosts of a highly rated conservative, white-male talk show, almost choked on their rage.

Meanwhile, on the blighted eastern end of Sunset Boulevard,
Brien Chapman, a wild-eyed former detective and retired twenty-six-year veteran of the LAPD, was slipping into a bar seat at the Saratoga restaurant, ordering a Bloody Mary with a salted rim as soon as he was greeted by bartender Mike Lambert, who’d worked LAPD homicide for twenty years.

“Some shit,” said Chapman.

“
Everybody here is
so
pissed,” replied Lambert. “But I’m not surprised with
that
jury. I’ve had less evidence than that and sent guys to the chair—all circumstantial evidence, and that was before DNA. It’s just unbelievable . . . I wouldn’t have called the coroner,” he continued. “I mean, I’d have called him as a
courtesy
, but I wouldn’t have wanted him messing around with
my
crime scene. Hell, we used to pick up our own stuff [evidence], throw it in a bag, and book it later.”

“Yeah,” replied Chapman, “and maybe stop and have a couple of pops along the way.”

Katherine Mader and Willie Williams, May 1996, Parker Center

Meanwhile, back at Parker Center, Willie Williams’s problems were continuing unabated, even as forty-nine-year-old Katherine Mader reported in to her new job as the first inspector general in the history of the LAPD. Like Gary Greenebaum she’d arrived expecting to be a Williams ally. After all, he was an LAPD outsider just like herself; someone
who possessed the same progressive ideas as she. Together, she thought, they would work to reform the department.

Appointed IG in May of 1996, Mader was a smart, ambitious Jewish liberal who lived on Los Angeles’s moneyed Westside. After graduating from
UCLA and UC Davis Law School, she lost her most famous case in 1980 when she was appointed as
co–defense counsel for Angelo Buono, the notorious Hillside Strangler, who was found guilty of pretending to be a cop and stopping young women under cover of law to rape and strangle them to death. It was a famous L.A. case, later made into a TV movie. But Mader considered it a win. Buono had killed nine women. It was a foregone conclusion that he was guilty. The win was that he wasn’t sentenced to the death penalty.

After that she worked with the
Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, and among other things became part of a unit investigating public officials and police officers.

The Office of Inspector General was another recommendation of the Christopher Commission, and had been approved by voters in 1995. Its mission was to be both an LAPD watchdog, to which the public could go with complaints, and the eyes and ears for a strengthened Police Commission that needed an IG reporting to them who could cut through the fog that for decades had shrouded the LAPD’s inner workings from the commission.

Despite her initial assumptions, it wasn’t long before Mader become one of Williams’s most caustic critics. Armed with the moral indignation of a loyal subject who finds the emperor has no clothes, Mader began—both in public reports and to individual reporters—to set the record straight.

“The problem,” said Mader at the time, “wasn’t that any of the [negative] things that Williams was doing were new to the LAPD chief. The problem’s that
Williams is a reform chief. You expect a reform chief, a progressive chief, to be at the top of the spectrum in terms of integrity. . . . But he isn’t. Not in his verbal pronouncements, not in his written reports—which don’t have integrity, because he’s not honestly dealing with issues and saying we have a problem.”

Once, talking to a reporter, she let lose a
string of complaints almost in a single breath: he’d say he was cracking down on sexual harassment and then transfer the complaining officer out of the unit and do nothing to the harasser. He’d testify under oath that the department was investigating and punishing code-of-silence-related offenses and Mader would find that code-of-silence investigations weren’t going up but instead were plummeting.

“Have you seen any police officers prosecuted for a bad shooting?” she once asked the reporter. “There have been
bad
shootings. I know, I review the shootings every week. . . . But there’s just no sense of what’s permissible and what’s not.”

When Willie Williams’s popularity was pointed out to her in response to her criticism, she said this: “Yes,
you can pick out [positive] qualities like how well he relates to the black community. . . . But the momentary absence of the potential for a riot isn’t reform, certainly not long-term structural, cultural or procedural reform.”

Mader would land her strongest blow, however, in January of 1997 when Willie Williams declared he would be seeking reappointment to a second five-year term as chief while announcing that civilian complaints against the department had “
declined by 43 percent” over the course of his first five-year tenure. Almost immediately
Mader very publicly disputed Williams’s claim by pointing out the various ways in which complaints were being hidden and how Williams’s stats were, therefore, meaningless.

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

In fact, after two and a half years in office, Willie Williams had done little to alter the legacy that Daryl Gates had left behind. The unsupervised and non-rigorous robbery-homicide investigations revealed in the O. J. Simpson trial were one example. The highly controversial officer-involved-shooting team was another. It remained headed by Daryl Gates’s handpicked man, whose mission upon arriving at the scene, so the joke went, was to announce what the unarmed civilian had done wrong to get himself shot.

Meanwhile, natural, reform-minded allies of Williams were becoming
increasingly critical. “
Glacial,” said Joe Hicks of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of the pace of implementation of the Christopher Commission reforms. “
Inexcusably slow,” spokesman Alan Parachini of the ACLU told the
L.A. Times
. Meanwhile, in New York, Bill Bratton was dealing with his own escalating problem.

Bill Bratton and Rudolph Giuliani, Monday, April 15, 1996, New York City

While William
Bratton was being celebrated by
Time
magazine as New York’s savior, Rudolph Giuliani and his administration were
seething
over the attention their police chief was receiving. Giuliani was obsessed with controlling information from city departments to the media, particularly major stories, such as the
Time
magazine article.

Early in his tenure, Bratton had been put on notice when he was quoted on the front page of the
New York Daily News
with a headline proclaiming: “Top Cop Bratton—‘I’ll End the Fear.’ ” He’d really gone off the reservation with that one. Everyone knew that in Giuliani World only
Rudy
would end the fear. As Giuliani once said, correcting a radio talk show host who’d referred to the NYPD as Bratton’s police department, “It isn’t his police department, it’s the mayor’s police department.”

Soon, Bratton, John Miller, and others from Bratton’s staff found themselves dressed down by
Giuliani’s enforcer, Deputy Mayor Peter Powers, for violating the talking-without-authorization media gag rule. The issue became so extraordinarily contentious that John Miller resigned, and the Mayor’s Office let it be known that they were also willing to accept the resignations of Bratton and his top deputies if it came to that. And with the publication of the
Time
magazine cover story, it
had
come to that.
Time
was an extremely powerful and far-reaching national publication back in 1996, and Bratton had outshone Giuliani just one time too many.

Forced to resign after just two and a half years at the center of the
policing capital of the world,
Bill Bratton was now on the outside looking in, trying to make the best of an inglorious situation by forming his own security firm and advising police departments in South America and elsewhere abroad.
When the 9/11 planes hit, he sat watching the biggest calamity in New York and modern American history unfold on a television screen in his Manhattan apartment, helpless in the face of what could have been—
should
have been—the defining moment of his professional life.

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

Bill Bratton may not have been rebelling against anything as a young cop in the sixties, but as journalist and author
James Lardner would later correctly point out, during his tenure in New York, he’d emerged “as leader and archetype of a generation of police managers who, when they got the chance, mounted a rebellion from within that mirrored the intense criticism that the profession was getting from the outside.”

But that was only part of the story. Major felonies were going down throughout big-city America, with and without Bratton’s innovations—a point his detractors were quick to make. But nowhere did they drop as quickly and last as long as they have New York City, and under an NYPD utilizing the innovative policing strategies that Bratton pioneered.

By July of 1995, for example, crime had decreased nationally by 1 percent from the preceding year,
but by 16 percent in New York City. And
over the next twenty years, crime in New York City would fall by over 75 percent—nearly twice the rate of the rest of the nation.