Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (41 page)

Now, with Bratton’s invitation, she was being offered a chance to influence the LAPD. So, she told Bratton, yes, she’d chair the panel. That was the advantage
she
would get out of the partnership. And her timing couldn’t have been better.

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

In July 2003,
Connie Rice phoned Charlie Beck at the Rampart Division station house. The Police Commission had just approved the formation of the Rampart Review Panel, Rice told Beck, and she wanted to interview him and his officers, a request to which he readily agreed.

For Beck, the timing was also perfect. What he’d just accomplished in Rampart and MacArthur Park was exactly what a thoughtful department critic like Rice would find impressive: he had analyzed a complex problem, suggested a big-picture solution, and followed it up by bringing together his cops with non–law enforcement governmental and private agencies, community groups, and activists to tackle it.

Beck’s achievement was exactly what Rice needed: a model, a piece, at least, of the kind of policing the LAPD should be doing—
had
to be doing if it was ever to both reduce crime and police abuse. And the beauty of it was that it wasn’t her plan, wasn’t some think tank’s plan, but the successfully implemented
blueprint of a veteran LAPD captain whom everyone within the department respected.

So, as they proceeded, Rice and the panel decided to feature Beck in their final written report—
Rampart Reconsidered: The Search for Real Reform Seven Years Later
—as a way to document what Beck had done to restore MacArthur Park and give it back as a gift to the people of Pico-Union while holding it and the Rampart Division up as what was in some key aspects a new, alternative way for the LAPD to do business.

Martin Ludlow, Summer 2003, “The Jungle”

Martin Ludlow was a man on the go. Born in 1964, he was the son of an African-American father and a white mother, but was
given up for adoption to a white Methodist minister and liberal political activist named Willis Ludlow and his wife, Anne.
Raised in Idaho, he moved around the country with his family, attending rallies and walking picket lines with his adoptive parents before arriving in Los Angeles to attend college. Dynamic, articulate, and ambitious, he would rise to become the
political director of a powerful local union, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and
marry the daughter of one of L.A.’s most prominent black clergymen. When he ran for the Los Angeles City Council in 2003, he was backed by both business and labor and won handily. Two years later, pulled in two directions, Ludlow quit the council to head the labor federation. Soon, the push-pull of two careers proved his undoing. In 2006, Ludlow would be convicted of
conspiracy to divert union employee funds to his City Council campaign, ending both his political and union careers.

Before Martin Ludlow resigned from the City Council in 2005, however, he left behind a different kind of legacy, one that was a wake-up slap to L.A.’s political establishment and law enforcement agencies. In 2003, with money left over from his council campaign, Ludlow decided to organize and fund a summer program to keep every kid in his largely black Baldwin Hills council district safe from violence. Known as “
the Jungle,” the district’s street name referred both to the lush vegetation surrounding the area’s hundreds of aging, low-story apartment complexes, and the fact that many of the winding paths, alleyways, and garages within them were the home turf of the Blood gang known as the
Black P. Stones—reportedly involved in twenty-eight murders and fifteen hundred aggravated assaults between 2000 and 2005. In the summer of 2002 alone, the area had experienced seventeen shootings, including four or five fatalities, as well as a series of gang rapes.

Ludlow called the program “
the Summer of Success,” coordinated it through the Advancement Project, and partnered with the LAPD and
L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, parole agents, and local churches and service providers. Local gyms and parks were kept lit and open until late at night for midnight soccer, basketball games, and singing and talent contests. Teachers were recruited for tutoring classes, and churches organized snacks and meals to feed the kids. Ludlow negotiated with the gangs in the area to keep the peace. By the end of the nine-week program there had been no shootings, no murders, no rapes, and
violent crime had dropped 20 percent. The cessation of violence wasn’t permanent, because when the program was over, it was over. But it was a taste of what might be accomplished. Chairing the City Council Ad Hoc Committee for Gang Reduction and Youth Development, Ludlow then convened a series of hearings on gang issues in the spring of 2005 that revealed what had been obvious to gang experts for years: that the gang reduction programs that existed were scattered, uncoordinated, and unaccountable, and were not being influenced or run according to evidence-based best practices, research, and evaluation. It took a year before the City Council finally approved a funding request for further investigation and a status report that would include what needed to be done to move forward. Once it was approved, Connie Rice and the Advancement Project won the $500,000 bid to write it. Suddenly—astoundingly—Rice and her nonprofit advocacy group were now centrally involved in the investigation and writing of two prominent city-sponsored reports crucial to L.A.’s criminal justice policies—one about the city’s police department, the other about its gangs.

Connie Rice, July 2006, Rampart Division

The first of Connie Rice’s city-funded criminal justice reports—the Blue Ribbon Panel’s Rampart investigation—took nearly three years to complete. When it was finally released in July 2006, it contained a detailed analysis of what had caused the Rampart scandal; recommendations for reforms; and what the panel called the “New Rampart Leadership and Crime Fighting Model”—a model based on exactly what Charlie Beck
had done at Rampart and in MacArthur Park. “This community-savvy model,” read the report, “demanded accountability for both supervisors and officers, but above all, it demanded leadership. At the revamped Rampart, supervisors did not evade standards but enforced them. Officers knew that disrespect to the public would be reprimanded, misconduct punished, corruption rooted out and prosecuted. As importantly, leaders made clear that creative problem solving and community work that reduced crime and generated trust would be rewarded as much or more than high arrest tallies.”

Bill Bratton immediately embraced the report he commissioned. It represented a big win-win: the acquisition of Rice, a rising liberal activist star on the L.A. political stage, as a new ally; and the presentation of a successful, decentralized community police and crime reduction strategy in a high-profile division, engineered by another handpicked rising star. Plus—
plus
a laudatory report announced to the world by a panel headed by not just an outsider but an outspoken, media-savvy civil rights lawyer.

Included within the report, however, was also a warning for Bratton. “Most rank and file officers interviewed by the Panel did not analyze department progress or continuing problems through the rearview lens of the CRASH crisis,” the panel said, “and few saw any connection between the corruption in Rampart CRASH and the department’s systems and culture that gave rise to and shielded the misconduct.” Instead, the report concluded, the officers “believed the scandal was about
a few bad apples and not about systemic failure.”

The latter assessment was not only a warning to Bratton, it was also a confirmation of another opinion rendered just two months earlier, in May 2006. At the time Bill Bratton was in the midst of his fourth year in office, and the LAPD’s five-year consent decree was about to expire. That earlier warning had come from U.S. district judge Gary A. Feess, who had weighed in on the lack of progress being made by the department. Bratton, the department, and the city were growing increasingly impatient with the burdensome requirements of the decree and wanted it ended.

But if Bratton and the city were impatient, so was Feess, who was unhappy
with the LAPD and its inability to meet some important requirements of the decree having to do with officer accountability. So instead of ending the decree, he extended it by another three years. “
There have been forty-plus years of debate in this community about how it is policed,” he said. “Time after time . . . reports were nodded to and nothing was done. This consent decree is going to effect real reform, and it’s not going to be extinguished until that happens.” Which meant that Bill Bratton wasn’t going to leave the LAPD anytime soon.

Charlie Beck, 2006, South Bureau Headquarters

Stepping into the grim, battered lobby of the South Los Angeles headquarters of the LAPD, Charlie Beck was feeling good. And understandably so. Attached to each of his blue shirt collars were two new silver stars announcing not only his remarkably rapid rise from captain to deputy chief but also his assignment to the pivotal post of commander of the
sixteen hundred officers assigned to the
57.6-square-mile area of South Los Angeles that the LAPD called South Bureau.

It was a big job—one of the biggest in the LAPD—and by this day in August 2006, Beck was ready for it; had, in fact, been working toward such a challenge for a long time. As a young police officer in South Bureau, he’d been profoundly affected by the violence he saw there, which he had quickly learned to view through the hard, jaded eyes of the Vietnam vets who were doing his street mentoring and who saw themselves as still at war.

But he was now in his early fifties, and had come to understand how circumstances dictated the behavior of many of the people he’d policed in South Bureau. And the same went for his cops, who in the face of difficult circumstances often felt the pressure to do the wrong thing.

For Beck, such insights hadn’t come easily. He’d never learned much from criminology or sociological theory. His intellect tended to be more practical. He’d always been
the kind of kid who had to grab the plate ten times while it was hot before he learned not to. What he liked—really liked—was analyzing and then fixing a problem, whether mechanical or
organizational. He got the same charge from both, the same igniting of the kind of stream of consciousness that kept him awake at night, rolling ideas around in his head, trying to fit the pieces into the puzzle. And now, with command of South Bureau, Bill Bratton had given him the supreme challenge of both reducing crime and changing the historic, notoriously poisonous dynamic between his cops and the area’s black community.

Bratton had been preparing Beck for a big job, including him in meetings with the mayor and sending him, along with other departmental up-and-comers, to
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, to the Boston Senior Management Institute for Police, and to view gang intervention programs in Chicago.

The learning opportunities had come at exactly the right time for Beck. He hadn’t been a captain or a commander long enough to have an absolute belief in the infallibility of his actions, and thus was open to new concepts and operational approaches. And he’d never been risk averse. As long as the risk didn’t conflict with the one absolute he had in mind as he took command of South Bureau, the home of the two biggest disasters in the LAPD’s history.

“I am not,” he swore to himself, “
going to be the [South Bureau] chief that oversees the next riot. That’s not going to happen. I am going to do whatever it takes to make sure that never happens again.”

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

For decades L.A.’s politicians had delivered little in the way of jobs or anything else to the
640,000 residents of South Bureau, who collectively comprised 16 percent of the city’s population. Because of its negative gang and crime connotations, the City Council
had
eliminated the name “South Central” from the city’s nomenclature and maps in 2003, folding the
sixteen-square-mile area into the wider designation of “South Los Angeles.” But when it came to the heart of the matter—those good, union, living-wage jobs that had been lost in the sixties, seventies, and eighties—
nothing
had ever been done to replace them.

While
Los Angeles’s population had risen by one million residents since the mid-1980s and now stood at almost four million, the number
of available jobs outside of the underground economy had actually dipped
below
the 1990 level. In fact, in 2006, South L.A. had just
0.5 percent jobs per worker,
versus 1.1 jobs in the rest of the county, and the area’s
30 percent poverty rate remained the same as it had been in 1969 and 1986—about twice that of the rest of Los Angeles County.

Meanwhile, the promised revitalization of the area after the ’92 riots had never materialized. In the neighborhoods where gang violence remained most frightening, much of what had been burned down during the ’92 riots had never been rebuilt in any meaningful manner, and now stood forlorn alongside the rusted factories, auto body shops, junk yards, liquor stores, and fast-food joints that daily symbolized South L.A.’s agonizing history since the Watts riots.

There was one thing that had changed, however, and that was the area’s racial makeup. Once 90 percent African-American,
by 2006 its black population had dropped dramatically to just 31 percent, while the number of desperately poor, mostly immigrant
Mexican and Central American residents had risen to a stunning 62 percent. Beck had noticed it right away. He’d walk outside South Bureau headquarters, look at the kids walking to and from school, and see this “melting pot,
this amazing melting pot. It wasn’t that way when I was a police officer,” Beck would later recall. “
All of Watts was black, and there were some small amount of Hispanics. But [by 2006] the younger the age, the more Hispanic it was, until the grade schools were almost entirely Hispanic.”

Nevertheless, three times as many blacks still lived in South Los Angeles as in the rest of L.A. County combined; black gangs were waning but still remained a potent force; violent crime in South L.A. was still twice as high as the rest of the county; and of the city’s
515 murders in 2006, over
290 were gang-related, many of which had taken place in South L.A.