Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (40 page)

It’s also hard to overestimate just how important the park was to the surrounding community. Pico-Union was an extraordinary area of L.A. in terms of its population density. People lived in decaying apartment buildings from a long bygone era, most without yards. There were a couple of other small parks in the area, but not many. Without MacArthur Park, it was difficult for kids and families to find somewhere to go for some recreation and relief from the blighted urban landscape that was their daily reality.

No official plan for revitalizing the park existed, or at least none that Beck could find. Nor had anybody officially conceptualized how the park might be utilized for the community. Instead the city had, in effect,
just abandoned it, and refused to put any of the people’s tax money into it.

And no one seemed willing to step up, pick up the ball, and provide the organizational commitment to get the game started. Why should they? Pico-Union was a poor, politically and economically powerless community, a place where it was simply easier—far easier—to write off the local, disenfranchised people and their situation and declare it hopeless than to do anything about it.

In some respects the situation wasn’t dissimilar to what Beck had faced on Skid Row. But there, in the end—after establishing some necessary rule and order by using quality-of-life policing to force as many of the homeless out of the area as possible—there was only so much that could be done by the police to alter the situation. But MacArthur Park—MacArthur Park was doable for a division captain like Charlie Beck, doable as a stand-alone project with the potential for permanent impact.

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

Among the many realities of MacArthur Park that Beck had to consider was that the park’s run-down physical condition in and of itself was a public safety hazard. The trees and bushes were all overgrown because the Parks and Recreation Department refused to go in and trim them—which, in turn, bred more crime as people hid or lay in wait within the foliage. By convincing Parks and Recreation and the
National Forest Service that what he intended was not just another sweep of the park but a genuine, long-term commitment to its transformation, Beck got them to agree to trim the shrubbery and trees.

“One of the things we’d always done in the past,” says Beck, “was go in there with a bunch of cops, knock them dead for two or three months, then leave.
The criminals would just hunker down and then come back. So I said, ‘No, I’m not gonna do that. This is our problem, nobody else’s problem.
You own it,’ ” he told his officers, “ ‘I own it.’ ”

In addition to the wild overgrowth,
none
of the park lights worked.
The Department of Water and Power would put up lights and they’d be broken by dealers, pimps, and others who preferred darkness, while the electrical wiring would be dug up, torn out, hauled away, and sold
for scrap. Again using the promise of permanent change, Beck got the DWP to put in both exterior lights that helped illuminate the street and streetlights that also reflected back into park.

He also convinced General Electric and others to pay for the
mounting of surveillance cameras around the park, and had his officers monitor them. Then he had DVDs made of the footage and gave them to prosecutors
and
suspects. “Look,” he had his cops announce to everyone they apprehended, “you got arrested because
we have cameras all over the park. If you come back here again, you’re going to get arrested again.”

In addition, his officers began enforcing
the city’s new shopping cart ordinance, prohibiting the taking of shopping carts out of supermarket areas by outlawing them within the park. As Beck later put it: “
Shopping carts were vehicles that enabled homeless people to transport their belongings into the park and set up transient encampments. So the banning of the shopping carts was big for our efforts.”

Beck and his officers also did something quite amazing, for LAPD officers.
They got the City Council to commit $2 million to redo the park’s soccer field and erected stadium lighting; to renovate a once-beautiful band shell; to restock the artificial lake with fish; and to install artificial turf for a soccer field. Their goal was for the park to be open until at least midnight so that people, especially in the summer, could play soccer in a well-lit, safe place. “
If you remove crime from a location,” says Beck, “you’ve got to fill it with legitimate activities; if you don’t, then crime will return.”

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

One day Beck decided to organize
a take-back-the-park candlelight vigil and invited gang intervention organizations like
Homies Unidos—which were made up primarily of ex–gang members—to participate. “
They had some scary-looking guys in these organizations,” says Beck. “Most of them had one foot in and one foot out, but were looking for some way out.” Getting out was no easy proposition, especially if it was someone who was typically living back in the old neighborhood where he’d grown up and come of age, where his gang was tight-knit and multigenerational and where all the things he’d known—his entire
identity—was linked to the gang. Breaking all that—or at least trying to live inside the law—was a very tough proposition.

“But despite that,” says Beck, “many of them became involved in the
rallies around the park. If I could find somebody who claimed they represented an organization, I’d talk to them, I wouldn’t ignore them. We went to their houses or garages—wherever they met—and talked to them on a human level—like ‘Hey, this is the change I’m trying to effect, and I’d like to get your input on how best to do that. Forget whatever’s gone on in the past, I’m trying to move forward here.”

Beck had learned over the years that gangs were stratified, and he tailored his approach to reach members of the community who would be more likely to support his efforts. “Everybody isn’t the same,” he says. “You have
the ones who shoot, pillage, rape. I knew I wasn’t going to get them. But I tried like hell to get the ones at the other end.” At the same time, Beck was trying to eliminate drug-trade violence in the park, and to put a stop to gang wars on the periphery, about who would control sales in the park. Beck officers continued to arrest “
hundreds and hundreds of people for dealing, and hundreds more coming into the area to purchase drugs.” Then he courted the press so they’d put out the word “that
you can’t come to MacArthur Park to buy narcotics.” He continued to do that until his undercover officers had no more dealers or customers to arrest.

The result, much of which has lasted until the present day, says Beck, “is that
you don’t see drug dealing in Mac Park anymore; crime in the park is very limited,” and every year there are over fifty concerts in the
renovated band shell.

In the old LAPD, a lot of what Charlie Beck and his officers engaged in at MacArthur Park would have been considered soft, off-the-reservation, social-work mumbo-jumbo far outside the scope of a real cop’s job of arresting “bad guys.”

But because Bratton had freed Beck to think and act for himself, he had come to a different conclusion: “There’s an old homicide saying that
the answer’s always outside of the [crime scene] tape. Inside the tape, there’s nothing there, everything is outside the tape. That’s kind of the way I began thinking about the answers to our problems. That it’s always outside the tape.”

Connie Rice, December 2003, Advancement Project Offices, Los Angeles

Connie Rice was on the phone when her secretary handed her a scribbled note: “
LAPD Chief Bill Bratton is on the other line.” Rice had met Bratton only twice before and they had no personal relationship. Nevertheless, as she would later tell it, “
his greeting was breezy and familiar, as if it were our hundredth call.” Then Bratton mentioned a comment she’d made about a week earlier when he and Rice had participated in a
December 2003 symposium entitled “The Gangs of L.A.,” sponsored by the Institute for Justice and Journalism at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism.

The panelists seated with them that day included Los Angeles County sheriff Lee Baca, while to their left stood a moderator at a podium, staring out at an audience of three or four hundred people packed together on folding chairs in a large, gym-like room. Near the panel’s end, the moderator had turned to Rice and asked if there were any significant stories about L.A.’s criminal justice system she thought the local media had failed to cover. Two immediately come to mind, Rice replied. The first was about how the LAPD limited the Rampart investigation, and how detectives had not been permitted “
to go where the evidence led.” Instead, the investigation had been a limited one, shut down by Bernard Parks. As a consequence, she continued, the department had never produced a promised comprehensive “
after-action” report examining the full extent of the scandal, as opposed to just the tiny slice of it that Parks had allowed to be scrutinized. The second involved journalists’ failure to report on the limiting and shutting down of that investigation.

Now, on the phone with Rice, Bratton told her that he’d asked the Police Commission to appoint a panel of outside experts and investigators to finally produce the report, and that
he wanted her to lead the effort.

Rice was astounded, given her background and her well-known antipathy toward the LAPD. But the request had its own logic. The “Blue Ribbon Rampart Review Panel” that Bratton had in mind would be operating under the proviso that nothing it discovered could serve as the basis for any further criminal prosecutions or internal discipline—thus
dampening serious opposition to the idea within the LAPD while enabling the cooperation of the department’s rank-and-file union, the Police Protective League. Bratton told Rice that he wanted the investigation to be a “
lessons learned” exercise, with recommended reforms moving forward.

For Bratton, the report would provide him with the opportunity to claim that the investigation had finally been done, that the department had finally put it behind them, and that it was now all about the future.

There were also advantages for Rice in chairing the panel, although they were less obvious. On the downside, four dense, little-noted Rampart reports were already sitting in history’s dustbin, containing little that the LAPD and the
Los Angeles Times
hadn’t already made public, and accomplishing little or nothing. What good would a fifth do?

Nevertheless, Rice was intrigued by Bratton’s offer, seeing it as an opportunity to write and shape a report that told Bratton not simply why things had gone so wrong with Rampart CRASH but how policing a different way might lead to different outcomes—something she’d been thinking about ever since her experience a decade earlier with the department’s K-9 unit.

No longer the lawyer
–
cum
–
fledgling activist she’d been a decade earlier, Rice had been busy reaching out and trying to figure out what she could do—other than suing the LAPD—to pressure the department to change some of its rules and regulations. She had grown to care deeply about fundamental police reform and police-community relations, and wanted to introduce a more comprehensive vision of public safety focused on reducing youth and gang violence through a multifaceted, holistic approach. To do so, she’d come to understand, she needed to find some way to get the LAPD to change its tactics and policing philosophy.

She’d forged relationships with forward-looking former gang members like
Darren “Bo” Taylor, a Crip turned peacemaker who’d founded Unity One, a grassroots organization committed to ending gang warfare; and with young black establishment figures like
Blair Taylor, who’d replaced John Mack as president of the Los Angeles Urban League.

As a result, by the time of Bratton’s call, Rice had come to some
basic understandings. One was that
white cops—just like her a decade earlier—“weren’t fluent in the culture of black, underclass males”: didn’t know how to read them, and couldn’t tell who was a real threat and who wasn’t. The result was that they were treating them all the same—that is, badly.

A second was that although the LAPD had contributed to the problems of South Los Angeles—so much so that they’d caused a momentous riot just a decade earlier—the situation nevertheless wasn’t principally of its making. And that was because in a race-and-class, stacked-deck society, one of their traditional,
primary
missions was ghetto and barrio containment and suppression. You could not give police officers such a mission and expect them to act significantly differently than the LAPD had, Rice concluded. It was necessary, therefore, to
completely
change the definition of what an LAPD cop did and who a LAPD cop worked for, and worked with.

Rice’s third realization was that straightforward litigation—suing the department to make a change—was a “
battering ram” that couldn’t do the delicate work of solving issues like bad schools, bad policing, and bad public transportation. Suing the cops could change a tactic, like search-and-bite, but except under extraordinary circumstances it couldn’t change their cultural and political mind-set.

So, in 1999 Rice left the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which she felt was resting on its laurels and not addressing the fact that a civil rights organization circa 2003 had very different fights than the integration battles of the past, and had to operate in multiple arenas and deal with unlikely allies. What Rice was after was change—culture change, mind-set change. Policy change at a minimum. Ideally she wanted “full-spectrum” transformation of how a public service organization such as the LAPD saw its mission and treated its clients.

So with two longtime colleagues, Rice joined a team of veteran civil rights lawyers and founded the Advancement Project. Over the decade of the nineties she and her L.A. colleagues would partner with the Bus Riders Union—a grassroots coalition of low-income bus riders—to sue the Metropolitan Transit Authority in a landmark case that produced a settlement requiring that $2 billion be spent on a notoriously underfunded,
dysfunctional
Los Angeles bus system. In 1999, Rice would also play a significant role in a coalition that
helped win $1 billion for the construction of schools in poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles and L.A. County.