Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (38 page)

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Several years earlier, in late October of 1999,
Kevin Evans, a homeless thirty-three-year-old
schizophrenic with cerebral palsy, had
died of cardiac arrest during a one-sided fight with a swarm of sheriff’s deputies. They quite literally crushed him to death in the
strap-down room in the Twin Towers jail.

The incident had begun when Evans refused to relinquish his sole possession: a standard-issue jailhouse
baloney sandwich on white, wrapped in plastic. It had then escalated from there into the deputies’ pile-on. Kevin Evans’s first mental breakdown had also occurred over the issue of food. When he was eighteen, according to his then sixteen-year-old sister, Anntanaea Lambey, she’d been about to exit their apartment to give a hot dog to her boyfriend waiting downstairs when Evans suddenly hissed, “
Don’t be giving any food away.” Then he hit her in the face. His behavior was unprecedented, and she later complained to their mother and godmother, who responded by grabbing Evans and confronting him. “Let me go! Let me go,” he wailed in reply. The two women,
convinced he was possessed by Satan, lapsed into fervent prayer. “From that day on,” Lambey would later say, “my brother was never the same.”

The five-foot, seven-inch Evans was more than familiar with the Twin Towers jail, in which he died. He’d been
incarcerated there at least four times as a consequence of being
cited or arrested on thirteen different occasions over the previous two years—all essentially for being a disturbing-looking homeless black man. On his previous stays at the Towers, the doors would soon slide open and disgorge him. With nowhere else to go, Evans, like hundreds of others, would then simply return to the nearby netherworld of Skid Row.

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Sometimes Evans would find his way out and back to where his family had moved from South Los Angeles: the movie-set locale where those old John Wayne–John Ford Westerns had been shot in the remote eastern region of L.A. County, near the parched desert cities of
Lancaster and Palmdale. There, Kevin Evans would roam the streets with his shoes off, engrossed in deep conversations with himself, despoiling by his presence the shopping areas of the white, conservative people who’d moved from L.A. precisely to get away from those who looked and acted like Kevin Evans.

In Lancaster, the residents paid the county for a
six-deputy Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department unit whose sole purpose was “
to deal with loitering, prostitution and other quality-of-life issues,” while the captain in charge of the Lancaster sheriff’s station would boast of having “
over 100 volunteers—out on patrol, in Neighborhood Watch—all just looking for that suspicious person and calling it in.”

But Kevin Evans’s story wasn’t just about zealous cops and jailers; it was a tale of an overwhelmed, dysfunctional L.A. criminal justice system that didn’t know what to do with the homeless and mentally ill, and had no interest in figuring it out. Instead, each step of the way, the criminal justice system focused on how to sweep him off the streets and pass him on to the next cog in the machine.

In May of 1998, for example, Evans was
ticketed for loitering in a Lancaster shopping center. Two weeks later he was arrested on an outstanding warrant and brought before a judge. That appearance was
one of at least four in which judges declared him mentally “incompetent to stand trial.” The result of those findings, however, was not to help Evans with his disease. Rather, it was to sufficiently medicate him so he’d be “competent” to stand before the judge, answer a few questions, and be sentenced to the Twin Towers jail for a few days or weeks before being released.

“For me to find out
how he died was just not that surprising,” deputy public defender Marlon Lewis, who defended Evans in one of his proceedings,
would later recount. “Seeing the shocking number of probations he had trailing him, it was clear that the system was not making any attempt to address his problem, and that its only answer was incarceration, which everyone knew was going to do nothing for this man.”

Antelope Municipal Court
judge Richard E. Spann would later say that he could not remember Evans, even though he’d been brought before him on three separate occasions. In fact, Spann declared him incompetent to stand trial and, in September 1998, even ordered a psychiatric evaluation. But it was never administrated. Nevertheless, as Judge Spann later admitted, he had “no idea” who Evans was. By the end of May 2001,
Spann had ruled in three thousand custody cases. “I hate to sound this way,” he said, “but I simply have
no independent recollection of him.”

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By 2015 there were still
fifteen hundred chronically homeless people on the sidewalks of a Skid Row that was losing a critical number of permanent housing units for the homeless to redevelopment. Meanwhile, tensions between the people living in boxes on the sidewalk and the LAPD remained as high as they had ever been. Countywide, over half of L.A.’s
fifty-eight thousand homeless had drug and/or alcohol addictions, and a quarter, like Kevin Evans in the nineties, were mentally ill. “In the summer of 2014,” as the
Los Angeles Times
reported, the situation had grown so bad that the LAPD would feel compelled to “
issue an anguished call for help, declaring Skid Row was in a mental health crisis.”

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Dressed in a black suit and white collar, Father David O’Connell looked as if he’d just stepped off the set of
The Bells of St. Mary’s
for a quick smoke with Bing Crosby. Ruddy-faced, with gray hair, a full beard, and a lilting Irish brogue,
O’Connell has been a Los Angeles priest for twenty-three years and was in 2002 the
pastor of two Catholic churches in South Los Angeles.

It was Christmas season—a Monday afternoon—and O’Connell and
twenty-four other members of a community federation known as L.A. Metro IAF were seated in a conference room at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. Priests, rabbis, union and neighborhood organizers—all of them had trekked downtown to meet Bill Bratton, their new police chief. They wanted to tell him—they
needed
to tell him—about their embattled neighborhoods. “
A week and a half ago, a member of our parish who owns a store across the street from our church was robbed and killed at six fifteen at night,” said O’Connell. “Shot dead. In front of his family. Then, about a month ago, a fifteen-year-old was walking down the street—walking home from an event at church—and he got killed.”

Another man told of a
bridge by a school in East L.A.’s Lincoln Heights, a place where would-be gang members had been harassing children and women, and how one little girl was raped, murdered, and dumped over the side of the walkway.

The stories tumbled out, one by one. Many were devoid of emotion, as if the tellers had grown numb from the violence, but all were built around a single theme—a question, really, a plea: “Where are the police? Can you give us some protection?”

“
People live like cockroaches around here,” Barbara Franklin, a public school teacher in Pico-Union, told Bratton. “We don’t see the parents. They’re the ones working in sweatshops. If the police became involved at the community level, it would encourage the people to come out of their holes.”

Franklin was talking about Ray Perez’s old stomping ground, but she was not complaining about the Rampart CRASH’s actions, which were now no actions at all since the department’s
eighteen CRASH units had been disbanded by Bernard Parks in 2000 during the height of the Rampart scandal. “Since Rampart CRASH left,
there are so many wounds to heal,” Franklin would later elaborate. “The parents come around the corner to get their kids from school and walk right by a shooting victim, or witness a shooting. The parents don’t want to go to the cops, and don’t go to the cops, because
they don’t trust the police.”

Seated in front of the group, one leg of his blue business suit draped
over the other, Bratton soon raised his hands, palms out, and took over the gathering. “The most devastating thing this city has experienced in years was the
horrendous activities of the officers in Rampart CRASH,” he began. “The haunting and the devastating effect of that, however, was that for months, our gang units were not on the street, and the gangbangers were just doing what they wanted. And when the gang units were reconstituted, in greatly weakened form, they had all new people who had to make all new relationships. Why didn’t you ask Parks: ‘What were you thinking, disbanding all the gang units?’ ”

Bratton then reminded the group that Parks also stopped the “
Senior Lead Officer” community policing program, under which ranking officers in each police division met regularly with local neighborhood groups. Together, Bratton argued, those two decisions by his predecessor dissolved the glue that bonded the community to the police, however tenuously.

Then he used those two decisions by Parks to announce the dawning of a new day. “Under Chief Parks, there was one big stop sign outside his office, and as a result, the division captains at the local level who should have been responding to you became incredibly risk-averse, because nobody could do anything
without getting his signature on a piece of paper.” He then told the audience exactly what they wanted to hear. “
You’ll have access to me on a scheduled basis,” he said, “so I can get feedback from you and you get feedback from me. But it’s really important that you interact with your division captains. They’ll be authorized to act, instead of having to go to the chief’s office to get permission.”

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Following the meeting, Bratton wound his way through the worn-out basement corridor of Parker Center, emerged in the dingy parking lot behind the building, and slid into the passenger seat of the chief’s gleaming black LAPD Ford sedan. He was
heading to a private home in Brentwood where he would be speaking to the ACLU of Southern California, a vocal, decades-long critic and adversary of the LAPD’s policing, and perhaps the organization most despised within the department.

As the car pulled out, his driver/bodyguard hung up his cell phone and said out of the side of his mouth: “So the wife is living with two daughters away from the father. The father finds out where she lives, shoots her three times—one right in the eye. She’s dead at the scene. He turns the gun and shoots himself in the head, but does not die. He’s Code Green at the hospital. The nine-year-old witnessed the homicide/suicide. The four-year-old’s in the apartment, but did not. And
today’s the wife’s birthday.”

Bratton had ordered his staff to brief him on every homicide that occurred in the city, so that, in his words, he could “
feel the pain of the family, of the city.”

Grabbing his phone, he began punching in numbers. It was now evening rush hour. As the vehicle inched toward Brentwood, his driver again laid down his cell phone. “
Chief,” he said. “We got another one. A man is parked, arguing with his wife. [A] suspect walks up to him, shoots him in the head. Suspect flees, the gun is recovered, but the suspect is not in custody. And on top of that, the victim was sitting there with a gun in his lap.”

“
You need a scorecard to keep track of it all,” Bratton said. Finally they arrived at an enormous wrought-iron gate barring the way to a Brentwood enclave surrounded by massive walls, with a guardhouse the size of a bungalow. “
Looks l
ike the ACLU’s doing all right for itself,” Bratton said. Inside a neoclassical mansion, he stood before about forty people seated on metal folding chairs.

“I’m being asked to try to reinvigorate the organization [the LAPD] to get it back into the game, back into policing the city in a way that is constitutional, is lawful, is respectable, and is done under the framework of the consent decree,” he said. “I work to change organizations in trouble and turmoil,” Bratton continued. “Re-engineer them. So in me, you have somebody who is committed to the idea of reform, but, most importantly, believes strongly that it can be done.

“The consent decree’s intent is to reform the culture of this organization,” he continued. Its culture can be reformed. Quite frankly, what I’m looking for at the end of this five-year period of time is to have the federal government and, by extension, hopefully you—the ACLU—saying that the LAPD is no longer corrupt.”

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Earlier in the day, when he’d met with the L.A. Metro IAF, Bratton had told them that “one of the great things about this city is that there’s
no shortage of people who want to get involved. It’s a strength that’s really not recognized in this city—[just] how many people . . . want to get involved.”

Later, on his way back to Parker Center, he told a reporter: “What you see [at these meetings] is
a commonality of concern about this department. This trust issue—I’m seizing on that word ‘trust’ because it’s just one that I hear over and over again.
That L.A. Metro group had a very realistic understanding of the department—that it has its flaws, but it’s an organization that has a lot going for it, and that it’s the entity that they have to work with. The group tonight, absent their involvement in the ACLU, would probably never have an interaction with a police officer. Two totally different strata in society. But in some respects they both want the same thing—a police department that they can trust and respect and an awareness that they also need the police.”

Bill Bratton was a smart guy, but it didn’t take a genius to have figured that out. It was therefore one of the great mysteries of the LAPD that Daryl Gates, Willie Williams, and Bernard Parks never did.

William Bratton, James Hahn, and Clive Jackson, December 2002, South Los Angeles

As two black men in suits held out a large sign reading, “
Stop the Killing. Choose Life, Not Death,” Bill Bratton stood with Mayor James Hahn in the courtyard of a
South Central community center named after Jesse Brewer. Surrounding them were about 120 people, local community organizers, uniformed cops, and a couple of dozen members of the media.

Bratton and Hahn had called a news conference on a grim December morning in 2002 to announce some get-tough anti-gang initiatives they planned on pursing following the death of a fourteen-year-old student
named
Clive Jackson, Jr., who was standing in front of a doughnut shop when he was shot dead by a member of the Rollin’ 40s Crips.