Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (43 page)

Much of Bratton’s plan for South Los Angeles and other high-crime areas was what he had depended on in New York—a combination of hot-spot policing based on continuously updated, computerized, detailed mapping of where crimes were occurring, and then flooding those hot-spot areas with more cops; officers aggressively pursuing stop-and-frisk policing; and holding supervisors accountable through COMPSTAT for bringing down crime numbers.

In New York City under police commissioner Raymond Kelly, those strategies had morphed over the years from tight enforcement to stopping and checking out those who looked or acted suspicious, to finally a very wide definition of who was suspicious to include almost any young black or brown adolescent or young man. Unlike under Daryl Gates and the old LAPD, the goal was not arrests but stopping crimes before they occurred, and changing public culture by changing public behavior—just as
Malcolm Gladwell theorized had happened with New York’s great nineties crime drop under Bratton in his classic book
The Tipping Point
.

At the heart of the strategy, however, lay a crucial question: how do you gain the support, or at least the quiet acquiescence, of a liberal Los
Angeles political establishment, and of African-American leaders and grassroots black and Latino community organizations, while increasing the stop-question-frisk policies these very people had fought so hard against?

Charlie Beck, South Bureau, South Los Angeles, 2006

There had been a lot of discussion about placing a new black deputy chief in charge of South Bureau. While it was true that the area was no longer predominantly African-American, it still remained the cultural center of black L.A., and still had a strong African-American influence with a long tradition of black political representation.

A black deputy chief, it was thought, could tap into a reservoir of racial solidarity. Consequently, Charlie Beck—who was not black, and who also carried the burden of having been a ground soldier in Daryl Gates’s Operation Hammer wars—was not a natural fit for the job.

But Beck himself had never bought into that notion. Instead, he was sure that what was most valued in communities like South Los Angeles, particularly when it came to cops, was the idea of fairness. Not weakness. Not tolerance. But
fairness
, and “people not feeling they’re being treated,” as he put it, “
like creatures in the zoo.”

And that was exactly the approach Beck intended to bring to South Bureau.
Had
to bring, in fact, if, he was going to aggressively execute Bratton’s intrusive policing strategies while at the same time avoiding once again pitting the department against the community.

From day one Beck knew that accomplishing the latter meant depositing a lot of time and resources into the community trust and bank of goodwill.

“Community partnerships” had been a catchphrase bandied about by the LAPD for years, mostly as a public-relations palliative that almost always meant the same thing: Partner, if you must, with businesspeople, with the neighborhood watch folks, with the older, dwindling, button-down middle class who would listen and nod in assent when the department told them the way it would be. Members of grassroots
organizations, on the other hand, or those living in the housing projects, or existing on poverty’s edge, or who were both the victims of and the mother or uncle or sister of a gang member, were rarely sought out or included. They were complainers, voices with opinions who asked hard questions considered hostile to law enforcement, and not part of any community policing strategy as it had been traditionally understood within the LAPD.

But they were also the very people who ached to be listened to by the police. Not just to vent, but to be recognized as human beings who also yearned for the cessation of their world’s unrelenting violence, but needed to be legitimately and fairly responded to when they’d been physically or verbally abused, disrespected, or otherwise unjustly treated by police officers. In short, to be successful in his bottom-line goals, Charlie Beck and his officers had, at the very least, to be respectful and, like Pat Gannon, build unlikely alliances and be seen in the eyes of long-ignored constituents as “legitimate.”

This was not an approach forged by Beck just because he was a good guy. The necessity of cops encouraging such a buy-in from the people they’re policing was an evolving, increasingly accepted concept in police and social science circles called “procedural fairness.”

The studies of then Yale law professor Tom Tyler, and of Tracey Meares and later David L. Weisburd and Anthony A. Braga, showed that how people were treated in their interaction with the police, and whether or not they were being treated
fairly
, was, in many cases, more important to them than how their police encounter was finally adjudicated.

Deeply intertwined with “fairness” was the concept of “police legitimacy” and the notion, as Tyler puts it, that “
people obey the law and cooperate with legal authorities if and when they view legal authorities as legitimate.” The fairness of police behavior—not the fear of police force and the threat of punishment—writes Taylor, “creates legitimacy, and through it drives public actions, and has dramatic implications for a range of policing policies such as racial profiling and zero tolerance policing.”

The concept resonated with Charlie Beck, who as soon as he got to South Bureau began talking to a lot of people, jotting down names and making a list of where to go and who to speak with. When he stopped at
Bo Taylor’s name, he did what Pat Gannon had done: called Taylor and told him he’d like to get together. Taylor replied that he was at his house with a group of his homeboys, and asked him to stop by. Beck agreed. It was a good day for him to do it: he was
wearing a suit, rather than his uniform, and could go there without making a big production out of it.

Exiting his car in a neighborhood heavy with gangsters, Beck walked to the back of Taylor’s house and into a converted garage where Taylor and some other interventionists were gathered. Beck could tell they were amazed that he’d actually shown up. And that he’d come alone, wasn’t wearing a uniform, and wasn’t carrying a gun that they could see. Grabbing a chair, Beck “sat down,” he later recalled, “and
talked to them like they were regular people—which they were.”

After listening intently for several hours, Beck started discussing how they might work together. Soon they were meeting regularly, with Pat Gannon often joining in. Eventually their discussions started to focus on how to strengthen the interventionists’ legitimacy through some kind of certification process, which subsequently led to conversations with Connie Rice about establishing a gang interventionist school.

For Beck, his new partnership with Taylor was—like Connie Rice’s Rampart report was for Bratton—all win-win. One, the interventions actually did help reduce violence—especially retaliatory shootings and killings—broker gang truces, and sometimes get kids out of gangs, just as intended. Second, the very fact that the LAPD was partnering with an on-the-edge organization previously considered a pariah by the police was immensely important for the department in terms of starting to establish street legitimacy and neighborhood credibility. At the same time, it balanced out Beck’s gang suppression tactics by giving committed gang members a viable exit strategy and important work supported by the other side, by their former enemies, by the cops.

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

About a year later, Charlie Beck, dressed in his LAPD blues, walked into a packed dayroom in Jordan Downs where three or four large-sized, middle-aged resident black women rushed up to greet him with a hug
and a peck on the cheek—a display that wasn’t just remarkable, given Jordan Downs’s history with the LAPD, but positively amazing.

Less amazing, given his goals, was Beck’s accepting, comfortable reaction, which, he says, “was really important, because they have to know it’s okay.
That there’s nothing to be afraid of. A lot of police work gets really wrapped around fear and distrust of others. So you can’t model that. You can’t shun people when they run up and want to talk and shake hands and hug you. It’s all part of the job of building faith in the community, of going to the meetings, talking to people, not talking
at
people, listening to what they say, being honest with them, and telling the truth—‘I can’t do anything about something,’ ‘I can’t fix that for you,’ or ‘This is what we can do to make it better’—and then following up and asking them for help in return when I need it. I think a lot of it is just normal human interaction. And if you treat people decently, and use all your skills to build relationships instead of force relationships, it makes all the difference. It takes a lot of work because you’re not only trying to build community goodwill, you’re trying to win your cops over too—modeling for them—‘Hey, this is how we do things here.’ ”

Charlie Beck wasn’t the only one trying to build goodwill around the issues of crime and cops in South L.A. And he knew it, and embraced the others, one of whom was Janice Hahn, the sister of James Hahn and then a council member whose district included Watts. She had founded a brilliantly conceived new community organization to reduce gang violence called the Watts Gang Task Force. Beck immediately recognized the group’s utility and gave it his and the department’s unswerving support.

Among the bedrock participants were the parents and family members of current and former gang members from places like Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts as well as Jordan Downs. Packed into a room in Hahn’s City Council office in Watts, the parents and relatives were meeting every Monday with LAPD officers and a diverse coalition of grassroots community organization representatives and resident staff and employees of the housing developments. The purpose, says Beck, was to discuss outbreaks of violence and what to do about them, as well as “
building community cohesion and strength around the issue.”

To do just that,
Beck organized a barbecue soon after he was appointed deputy chief in South Bureau. He invited activist groups and organizations and local public officials from the black community and the Latino community, and they all sat down and ate together with Beck and his cops in an open-air patio behind the South Bureau headquarters. “
We fed them and we talked about what we wanted to do,” explained Beck. “The usual suspects
were
there,” he continued, “but there were also a lot of people who’d previously been left out of the decision-making process, because they weren’t seen as mainstream.
We were really inclusive in that way.”

The other thing Beck did was to have LAPD representatives on the scene “when things went wrong” and his cops were involved. Most of the time that meant him and/or a division captain responding to a shooting or other officer-involved incident directly at the scene. “That way,” says Beck, “they knew their side of the story would be listened to and that we’d do the right thing about whatever happened.”

NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly, New York City; LAPD Chief Bill Bratton, Los Angeles; Stop-Question-Frisk

While Charlie Beck was intent on winning support for, or at least minimizing opposition to, his and Bratton’s stop-question-frisk strategies, plenty of action was also taking place across the country in New York City. There, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly was deeply enmeshed in pursuing his own version of the strategy.

By some measures, Kelly’s and Bratton’s approaches were remarkably similar, but in others they proved crucially different in terms of public perception, although both chiefs focused on the key metric of crime reduction. New York continued its long-standing, double-the-nation’s downward crime trend, while in Los Angeles the crime rate would first stabilize and then also continue, as the LAPD would report, on a steady downward path.

Both Kelly and Bratton emphasized the importance of stop-question-frisk in their policing strategy. Scaled to size, in fact, the number of
pedestrian stops weren’t much different in Los Angeles than in New York—275,000 to the NYPD’s 660,000 in 2005. But Los Angeles’s population was half that of New York, and L.A. had less than a third the number of police officers. And, as everybody knows, people don’t walk much in L.A.—although they do congregate on street corners in black and Latino communities.

Like New York’s,
L.A.’s pedestrian stops were disproportionally of African-Americans—about 35 to 40 percent, with a
black population within the city of a dwindling 10 percent. Not as large as the discrepancy ratio in
New York—where 85 percent of the stops were of blacks and Latinos—but highly significant nonetheless.

The
LAPD was also making about 700,000 vehicle stops a year. In 2003 and 2004,
blacks were ordered out of their vehicles over 2.5 times more than were whites, and
Latinos 2.3 times more. And
black motorists were twice as likely to be frisked as whites.

The
frisked African-Americans, however, were more than
40 percent less likely
to have a weapon than whites. “A lot of the LAPD’s initial defense for frisking so many African-Americans,” points out Peter Bibring, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, “was that when they stopped African-Americans they were in high-crime areas, and therefore more likely to have weapons on them. But the data showed that wasn’t true. If they are searching [blacks proportionally more than whites] they should find weapons on them more often, or at least at the same rate as whites. But the data showed that was
over 40 percent less likely to happen.”

When Bratton took office in
late 2002, the LAPD had made just over 585,000 pedestrian
and
vehicle stops under Chief Bernard Parks.
Six years later, under Bratton, that number had risen by a third, to 875,000 total stops. So the LAPD stops on Bratton’s watch were constant and steady, not a one-year aberration. Later in the decade a yearly number indicated that just under one-quarter of the stops resulted in a citation and/or a search or arrest.