Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (36 page)

Bratton signaled to the department just how important Chaleff was to his plans by elevating him to the civilian equivalent of a deputy chief. He also gave him an
office on the sixth floor of Parker Center, right next door to
his
office, and raised the compliance unit’s status to that of a bureau, with a staff that would increase from three people under Parks to about one hundred under Bratton.

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

Gerald Chaleff turned out to be like a gift to himself Bill Bratton was able to purchase—one that Willie Williams, to his great misfortunate, never even had the opportunity to shop for. Due to the civil service law at the time, Williams had been unable to hire a civilian like Chaleff, and consequently found himself stuck with the command staff he inherited.

But as result of the 1995 codification of the Christopher Commission reforms into the city charter, Bratton was allowed to hire outside the department and to bring key top staff like Chaleff into it.

Within the LAPD there was a lot of resistance to his second pick, John Miller. He was a reporter, for one.
Barbara Walters’s partner on the TV newsmagazine program
20/20
. And Bratton was bringing him inside the department
and
making him chief of counterterrorism! But Miller came with a lot of advantages for Bratton. He
did
seem to know a lot about counterterrorism from his reporting, although he possessed no other qualifications in the field. But more important, Bratton trusted Miller—a good reporter who’d served as his loyal press guy and party companion during Bratton’s stint as NYPD commissioner.
Miller also possessed exceptionally active eyes and ears and liked to get out on the street. Bratton knew he’d go everywhere, watch everything—Miller, in fact,
liked
going to crime scenes, would go to as many as he could, and report back directly to Bratton. And that was very good for Bratton, who needed the unvarnished truth from someone loyal to him.

His third outside hire was
Mike Berkow, the chief of police from the small Orange County, California, city of Irvine. Bratton brought him in to head Internal Affairs. He
knew Berkow from back when he was a cop in Rochester, New York, had followed his career and saw him as shrewd and ambitious. Naming Berkow deputy chief in charge of Internal Affairs gave Bratton another guy loyal to him who could not be co-opted by anybody else in the department.

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

It’s become almost pro forma for CEOs, managers, and politicians to say that they like smart people around them. But Bill Bratton really did like working with smart people. Ever since his days on the Boston PD, he’d forged and nurtured ties with those whose expertise he could benefit
from and who, like him, were passionate about policing and reform. A number of them
flew into L.A. on their own dimes to participate in his swearing-in celebration and, more importantly, to assist in his transition process. Each had something distinctive to offer Bratton.

Bob Wasserman’s specialty was race and social justice as they related to policing. Bratton had first met Wasserman in the seventies, when he’d been assigned to the Boston police commissioner’s office. Wasserman was a civilian who during a brief reform period had been the Boston PD’s chief of operations. Soon he became Bratton’s colleague, friend, and mentor. In their first meeting together,
Wasserman gave Bratton a copy of Herman Goldstein’s seminal book on American policing,
Policing a Free Society
. He also assigned him as the department’s first
liaison to the gay community. Ever since, Wasserman had been Bratton’s early-action man, going into a city, quietly observing the department, and then compiling transition books that included profiles on members of the new department’s command staff.

Meanwhile, Bratton got
John Linder to prepare a “cultural diagnostic” of the LAPD. Bratton had met Linder when he was chief of the New York Transit Police. Linder was then serving as the marketing director for the Transit Authority, when he decided to have Bratton star in a series of Transit commercials about subways and “bringing back New York.”
Bratton considered Linder “a genius” who’d developed copyrighted cultural analysis of police departments for Bratton and others. The process included a survey of officers within the department, aimed at understanding what they thought the priorities of the department were versus what they thought the priorities
should be
. Bratton and his team would then use the survey as a tool in understanding the values, opinions, gripes, strengths, and weaknesses of the department and utilize the information to move the department in the direction Bratton wanted. Linder’s chief finding about the LAPD, recalled Bratton, was “
how dysfunctional it was.”

Bratton also flew in George Kelling, the Rutgers University criminologist and coauthor of the 1982
Atlantic
magazine article on “broken windows” policing. He wanted Kelling to explain to captains in the field how to best apply the concept in their divisions while avoiding a
backlash from the African-American community. To initiate and train his new command staff in COMPSTAT, he hired former
NYPD chief of department Louis Anemone.

Bratton used other consultants as well, all of whom—along with his three insiders—enabled him to establish authority and quickly take hold of the department. Most of the outsiders’
work was eventually paid for by the Los Angeles Police Foundation—a private fund-raising organization attached to the chief’s office as a kind of booster association. Run independently, it raised money to funnel into projects, studies, and other endeavors the department was interested in pursuing but did not have the budget to finance.

Bratton also moved quickly to foil any attempt by the department to cut him off from the flow of information, as had been done to Willie Williams. He had picked up on such an effort just after he was named chief. Upon flying into L.A. in October, he’d been picked up at the airport in a black Ford driven by a chauffeur/bodyguard in the chief’s official security detail—
a strapping six-foot-three police officer named Manny Gonzalez. Bratton got in, looked around, and was stunned to see there was no communications radio, no red light,
no police equipment of any kind.

“
Hey, Manny,” he asked, “where’s the police radio? Where’s the siren?”

“We don’t have those in this car, Chief, so there are no disturbances.”

“What if there’s some kind of emergency?”

“I don’t know, Chief; we just don’t have any of that.”

It said a lot to Bratton, as he’d later recount, about the department’s previous leadership. If the official car of the chief of police didn’t even have a radio or red lights or a siren, how connected could he be to the world of policing and what was happening on the street?

“Manny,” he told him, “get me a car with a radio, a red light, and a siren.
I want a full police package.”

“
What Manny and the chief’s office staff were trying do, as they’d done with [Williams and] Parks, was corral me and keep me in the chief’s office so I wouldn’t see what was happening within the department,” Bratton would later say. “The idea was the old guard [brass]
would keep me so busy that I wouldn’t leave my office and get out and talk to people that they didn’t like and didn’t want me to listen to. Then, at the end of the day, they would come in and present a document to me, describe the document, get my signature on it, and go about their business. It was just all about them and control. And the one thing I understood about organizations was right from the get-go,
you had to let them know who was in control.” Bill Bratton had no intention of being Willie Williamsed.

William Bratton and Charlie Beck, Fall 2002, Los Angeles Police Academy, Elysian Park

Charlie Beck was only vaguely aware of Bill Bratton when he heard he’d be replacing Bernard Parks as the fifty-third chief of the LAPD. Nevertheless, hiring another outsider seemed highly problematic to him, given Willie Williams’s glaring failure just five years earlier. After reading and liking Bratton’s 1998 autobiography,
Turnaround
, however, he wasn’t really sure what to expect. Then he attended Bratton’s first presentation to the entire LAPD command staff and got his answer.

The event took place within the rustic confines of the old Police Academy in Elysian Park. There, Bratton strode into a small, cramped banquet hall, walked to the podium, and proceeded to read the riot act to about 110 LAPD command officers,
about 60 of whom were captains.

“
He really chewed ass,” recalls Beck, who was then a captain heading downtown L.A.’s Central Division. “He told us he wasn’t happy with the way things had been going; that the department was hidebound and unwilling to take chances, and that as leaders we were overly manipulative and weren’t allowing the organization to perform up to its potential.”

And then Bratton said—and Beck remembered this specifically—“
I want you to get results. I want you to reduce crime. And if you have to pull everybody out of patrol one day and put them in plainclothes to do it, I don’t care. Do it.”

Bratton was talking LAPD heresy with that last sentence, and suddenly his audience began taking notice.

Ever since Bill Parker’s “professionalization” of the LAPD back in the fifties, his successors had insisted on following the department manual’s mind-numbing “uniform set of rules and regulations” word for word. They had since grown so long, rigid, and complex that they were stifling the efforts of commanders—particularly captains in the field—to deal with situations unique to their divisions or to experiment with new ways of approaching old, intractable problems. Instead, problems were dealt with as per the dictates of the manual.

This gospel had been taken to the penultimate level under Bernard Parks, who, even if he actually said that you could deviate from procedure in a particular situation, was rarely believed. And now here was Bratton standing there and saying to his entire command staff: “Why aren’t you guys being creative and thinking about crime reduction, and why isn’t that number one on your to-do list?”

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

Long before Pat Gannon started meeting with Bratton, he too had attended Bratton’s big initial command staff meeting up at the Police Academy. As a captain and chief investigator for Internal Affairs, Gannon had led the (Parks-limited) investigation into Rampart CRASH. And like Beck, Gannon was smart, curious, and open to change.

White-haired, congenial, and self-assured, Gannon had the look and bearing of a corporate CEO from Utah. But in reality he was an Irish cop from
San Pedro, an old, working-class L.A. fishing village turned major port filled with unionized Croatian, Slovenian, Italian, and Mexican workers. Like Beck’s,
Gannon’s family had a history with the LAPD—one that was even deeper and longer: Sergeant Gerald F. Gannon, 1927–1952; Police Officer III Gerald F. Gannon, Jr., 1948–1973; Pat Gannon himself, 1978–2012; and his son Michael P. Gannon, 2005 to the present.

Pat Gannon had gone to the meeting ready for Bratton, or rather ready for
a
Bratton. “
I didn’t know what to expect,” says Gannon. “I just knew I was begging for leadership. There had been such a long leadership void. Parks was smart but he wasn’t a good leader. So I was looking
for somebody to lead us back, get us out of this situation where we were getting beat up every day.”

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

The messages that Pat Gannon would take away from that initial encounter with Bill Bratton were few and simple: One, reduce crime. We are not worried about arrest numbers or other metrics. We are concerned about
crime
numbers.

Message two was that “
Bratton wanted to take the shackles off and let us reduce crime in legal ways
we thought would work. . . . In the old LAPD,” says Gannon, “we were the stenographers recording and reacting to the deeds of the rest of society. So another message I took from the meeting was that the police matter. What you do can make a long-lasting difference, and that the police can change things. Going in and temporarily flooding areas [as was done during Operation Hammer] isn’t what reduces crime; we’re not just a suppression force.”

“
Conversely, if things are going bad, you better look at what you’re doing, because something isn’t right. You might even be contributing to it. I think,” Gannon would later sum up, “that this police department was partially responsible for the ’92 riots. We treated people very callously and really embraced the philosophy of ‘we know best’ and that ‘the way you solve crime is by making arrests.’ I think we should make arrests. But you know there are other things too. We worked really, really hard in the past in ways that just weren’t productive.”

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

At the Police Academy that day, Bratton introduced the LAPD’s command staff to a way of running an organization that wasn’t particularly new and certainly wasn’t radical. But for a police force that had modeled itself on a military command structure that actively discouraged individual creative thought, it was a whole new way of thinking. And Bratton, always a man in a hurry, didn’t bother to persuade his officers of the benefits of this shift. Instead, he let those present know that this was the way it
would
now be.

Everyone, he told them, would have to
submit a résumé and a photo
and answer a list of questions about himself and his current job. He intended to go through each and every one of them to learn as much as he could. He had a large command staff and wanted a “
face with a biography in a book” that he could turn to when hearing about “
who was good and who was bad.”

The self-evaluative résumés also offered Bratton other advantages. By demanding that all members of the old LAPD hierarchy justify their existence, he could judge them rather than the other way around, as had been done to Willie Williams. Above all, as Beck and Gannon both understood it, he was letting them know that they were
applying for their own jobs again, and for promotion or assignment to the boondocks.

Shortly afterward, Bratton did in fact begin his one-sided chess game, demoting and forcing retirements and promoting officers who’d impressed him over candidates next in line for a position. “
Hey, we understand force in the LAPD,” Charlie Beck would later say. “He used the demotions and forced retirements, and demonstrated his authority, knowing that
if you want to keep crows away, you kill one and leave it on the fence.”