Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (19 page)

The problems
were
endemic, and systemic to the city’s criminal justice system as a whole. In addition to the prisoner-release and uniform and equipment fiascos, there was no structure or policy in place to even notify the PPD when a police abuse lawsuit was filed against one of its officers, and no follow-up notification when a judgment was rendered against an officer.
Officer-involved shootings also increased, including many off-duty shootings, and Williams’s new shooting policy, critics charged, remained filled with loopholes.

“
The crime rate is up,” Joan L. Krajewski, the chair of the city council’s Public Safety Committee told the
Inquirer
after Williams’s first full year in office. “We’re in a state of crisis. I’m not saying that [Williams is] not a nice guy, but being a nice guy doesn’t solve the problem.”

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

At the American Jewish Committee dinner Stanley Sheinbaum had precisely pinpointed what Willie Williams was good at. “
Watching him [in Los Angeles] work through some of the problems he sees ahead, and move in different parts of this city’s society, [among] different races, different layers of the society—he does so with a strength,” Sheinbaum told the audience. “It will take you time to understand why I emphasize that part of him. I look upon Willie Williams as a man of hope.”

He’d also pointed out that before choosing Williams, the Police Commission had “
sent two teams of people to Philadelphia to make sure about what we heard, some very good things . . . very positive things about him, and those people came back substantiating [the reports.]”

And indeed, there
were
good things to be said. During Willie Williams’s three and a half years as Philadelphia’s police commissioner he’d
expanded the number of Kevin Tucker’s community-policing mini-stations, required district commanders to meet at least one a month with local community groups, and committed the PPD to
gender and racial diversity. He also increased the number of
officers fired or disciplined for brutality, and assigned more officers from desk jobs to patrol during peak crime hours. By 1990, he’d even managed to get
three hundred new officers added to the department.

Moreover, for reformers not delving too deeply into the weeds, Willie Williams was viewed as a godsend simply because he was who he was: a nice, dignified, measured, noncombative guy without the dimwitted and/or brutal and divisive characteristics of his pre-Tucker predecessors.

These were not small things.

They made Williams a perfectly fine commissioner, dealing with crisis after crisis as they came up, sometimes adequately, sometimes not, while trying to implement the reforms he could. But was that enough?

Ultimately it might not have made a difference if L.A.’s police commissioners could have considered more than just one outside candidate. Willie Williams’s surface sheen may well have sufficed. Nevertheless, the police commissioners would have had a far better understanding of just what they might be getting with Willie Williams had they back-read the
Philadelphia newspapers instead of relying on two part-time, unpaid, elderly police commissioners to vet Williams by talking to fourteen people in two days. They would have found a far more mixed picture of Williams and might have questioned his ability to handle a job where so much was expected and on which so much was riding. But in this, as in so many aspects of
governance
, Los Angeles wasn’t the City of Tomorrow that it always promoted itself as being, but the City of Yesterday.

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

In 1992 Charlie Beck
took the lieutenant’s test, and for the first time in his career came in first. His reward was assignment as
watch commander
in Watts, back to the site of the Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens housing projects that he’d earlier deserted to save his soul and sanity; back to ground zero for the ’65 and ’92 riots, and now the home of the area’s Truce Parties.

The Truce Parties were celebrations of the Bloods’ and Crips’ decision to “tie their rags together” in an act of peace that symbolized their promise to end their gang wars. The truces may have been something that the gangsters and liberals like Connie Rice then believed in. But for Beck
the parties were simply a “sham—more about celebrating the riots than about the truce.” The first stage of each party, recalls Beck, “was the
gathering of Bloods and Crips in huge numbers from all over the city on Friday and Saturday nights at one of the big housing projects in Watts—where they’d come together and drink and smoke weed in huge excess.”

Then, sufficiently lubricated, they’d proceed to stage two: “
driving around in circles in large convoys as they rode or raced in the streets, cordoning off blocks and taking over the street, and shooting their guns in the air. It was total chaos,” says Beck, “like mini riots. There was no looting or burning, but once in a while they’d mob some convenience store or intersection, just to show that they could do it. Just to show that they were free from the constraints of the Los Angeles Police Department.”

Charlie Beck and Andre Christian, 1993, South Los Angeles

It was a bad, bloody time, not just for Beck and the LAPD but for black and brown Los Angeles. While 1992 had been calamitous, 1993 would actually prove
worse
in terms of
homicides, which topped out at 1,100—more murders than Los Angeles had ever experienced before.

Crack wars and street dealing were in full swing: young guys on the corners and in the parks dealing drugs, carrying guns, and killing each other over dope-dealing territorial rights, just as the gangs of Chicago and New York fought over liquor distribution rights during Prohibition—except now it was on a far bloodier scale.

To Charlie Beck, the post-riot LAPD had become something the department had never been before—a “
cowed organization.” “
We tried to stop illegal behavior,” says Beck, “but the department was so pol
itically battered and thinly staffed that stopping the parties in Watts [or the murders in much of black and brown L.A.] wasn’t really an option. Mostly we just tried to keep things under control.”

Gradually, indignation mixed with frustration had started to produce in Beck a strong sense that the department was letting him and his fellow street cops down. “It’s like your family,” Beck would later explain. “All of a sudden your parents are getting divorced, and people are coming and repossessing the family car. You don’t really understand what’s going on but it’s making you feel hugely anxious about the future. That’s how I started feeling about the organization—like, is this ever going to stop?”

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

It took getting
shot thirteen times for Andre Christian to reevaluate his life, as he was doing when the Truce Parties started to bloom in the projects. He was still dealing, trying to make a living as he moved back and forth from Riverside County to Jordan Downs, where he’d check in, see friends, and keep himself updated. But he was no longer directly involved in the Grape. Thirteen bullets and being declared a medical miracle will do that to you. He was “
glad that [he’d] got shot, glad that it changed [his] way of thinking.” A lot of the gang stuff, the banging and the young man’s thirst for glory, had left him. All he was trying to do now was get some money and a job that paid the bills so he could turn the page.

The Truce Parties continued for about six months, fading each week until they petered out as the novelty wore off. Nevertheless, Christian viewed the parties differently than Beck. For him and a lot of people he knew, the parties were “
sighs of relief.” No longer did he feel as if he was under arrest, with invisible lines delineating his hood as his jail bars, and surrounding Blood gangs as the jailers who’d ensure that if he stepped over the line, he would pay. Thanks to the Truce Parties, he no longer had to constantly look over his shoulder. Instead, “
it was a relaxed situation where you could just sit back and put your feet up.”

At the Truce Parties, he recalls, “you’d see Crips like the Bounty Hunters from Nickerson right there with the Grape, getting high, riding around together, going into a store together to stock up.” “
And
,” Christian emphasized, “they’d be
showin’
their rags, not hiding them—that was a good feeling.”

But despite their different perspectives on the potential value of the Truce Parties, in many of the particulars there wasn’t a lot of daylight between how Christian and Beck remembered them. “
There just wasn’t enough nurturing of the peace part of the parties,” says Christian. “There was just too much partying. Between the liquor, the weed, the gambling, the girls, and the jealousy, the situation just basically sprang right back to the way it always was.”

Even then, it was crazy to think that it could have ended any other way. Los Angeles would learn that the same was true of the LAPD.

Willie Williams, June 1992, Parker Center

No one expressed that truth better than LAPD officer Bryan Eynon when discussing his new chief from out of town. “
My first impression of Willie Williams started at the [police] academy,” Eynon would later point out. “I was standing at attention in formation, waiting for [him] to arrive. . . . Then all of a sudden I smelled the aroma of cologne . . . and out of nowhere comes this really big guy weighing about 320 pounds, dressed in a double-breasted suit and draped in gold. . . . He had a gold watch, rings, bracelet and huge gold cufflinks. . . . So my first impressions—along with a number of other officers—were that his cologne was loud, he was fat and out of shape . . . and there was no way he could fit into a uniform.”

But his point wasn’t really
that
—it was rather that Willie Williams was wasn’t one of them, wasn’t a real member of the
elite
LAPD, wasn’t looking dapper in a Johnny Carson sport coat, and, most importantly, would look appalling in the department’s world-famous, classically tailored LAPD blues. Physical fitness, strength, and athletic ability were,
after all, among the department’s most revered tenets; being overweight was a direct assault on the LAPD’s image, as well as on many officers’ personal sense of self.

Rabbi Gary Greenebaum—who would soon find occasion to be around Willie Williams and the LAPD with great frequency—certainly thought so. “People would say to me, ‘Oh, the department hates Willie Williams because he is black,’ ” recalls Greenebaum. “And I would say, ‘Well, they don’t particularly like Willie Williams because he is black. But the main reason they don’t like him is
because he is fat, which doesn’t comport with their vision of the LAPD. The LAPD is not the NYPD. Those guys in New York, with their big bellies, are not going to get over the six-foot wall that LAPD [trainees] have to get over.’ And they really did hate him for that.”

It was a measure of the LAPD’s priorities that looking good superseded far more important attributes in a new police leader, such as the ability to develop new concepts and strategies to lower crime and reduce friction between the department and black and brown communities.

But it was still early in Williams’s tenure, and the significance of him being labeled “His Corpulence” by the troops might have faded—if, in their eyes, that had been his only problem. But it wasn’t.

On the job, for example, Willie Williams was always missing the one thing—other than the department’s oversized badge—that said to an L.A. cop, “I am an LAPD officer”: his gun. He was
missing his fuckin’
gun
. Didn’t wear one, never carried one—in fact,
couldn’t
carry one—because of a California law that required all peace officers to first pass a test in order to pack a gun on duty. That extended to out-of-state police officers as well. To qualify, Williams chose to take the “Basic Course Waiver Exam”—which David Dotson describes as consisting of a “
bunch of basic police-academy information.” Reportedly, Williams took and
failed the waiver three different times. (
The state legislature later changed the test requirement to exempt police chiefs as a result of Williams’s dilemma.)
Daryl Gates, on the other hand, always had a gun strapped to his ankle in addition to his sidearm and the Uzis he kept in his staff cars.

Moreover, although scorners of social science and social workers, the LAPD paradoxically had a tradition of valuing higher education—particularly master’s degrees from
USC’s School of Public Administration. And here too Williams fell short. When he decided to take some graduate courses at the school, he was denied entrance because he possessed only a two-year associate’s degree from the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. Bill Parker, after all, had earned a
law degree
. Tom Bradley had been working toward his law degree when he was an LAPD
lieutenant
. And now here was Willie Williams with an associate’s degree from an institution with a trade-school name.

Soon, the command staff at Parker Center began gleefully leaking reams of biting
gossip to the
L.A. Times
and anybody else who was interested.

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

Willie Williams’s failure to anticipate that level of resentment—and consequently prepare for it—was, as Charlie Beck later told it, a major misstep. “
Willie made a big mistake when he came into the department,” says Beck —who witnessed the drama up close after being appointed the Police Commission’s new adjutant at Parker Center. “He didn’t scare [the command staff or troops]. He didn’t have a plan. He just kind of sidled in, sat down, and said, ‘What do you do around here?’ He didn’t demote anybody, didn’t demand résumés, didn’t come in with a team of people [he was barred by civil service law from hiring any], didn’t do any of that stuff, and then he relied on the wrong people because he didn’t know any better.”

Williams had also neglected a second cardinal rule for any newly appointed big-city reform chief: if you want to change the behavior of officers on the street, then you’d better make the new rules of the game absolutely clear to the people
really
in charge of them—division sergeants and most especially division captains. What Williams needed to brand on their brains was about as basic and obvious as could be, something like “Henceforth, your promotions are going to be directly tied to how well you emphasize and implement real, two-way community-involved policing; how seriously you rein in, appropriately discipline
and never recommend for promotion your Clint Eastwoods playing “Dirty Harry”; and how significantly you lower crime without acting like Israeli paratroops during an intifada.”