Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (44 page)

Nevertheless, the blowback that Beck and Bratton would receive was minimal, given the massive scope of their stop-question-frisk policies. In contrast, Ray Kelly in New York would be pilloried for his.

There were a number of reasons why.

First, Los Angeles and New York had had two very different experiences with their police departments over the preceding forty years. In the early 1970s the NYPD was both abysmal at preventing crime and deeply corrupt. By the eighties most of the corruption had been cleaned up in the wake of the Serpico scandal, but the department had become even more inept at protecting a city obsessed with race, crime, and violence.

Then, in late 1993, the newly elected, law-and-order Giuliani administration chose Bill Bratton as its police commissioner, and Bratton transformed the NYPD into a forceful, efficient police department that would lead the country’s crime decline for the next two decades.

Many New Yorkers were understandably more than willing to put up with the NYPD’s stricter, more intense enforcement. The city was booming, and previously crime-ridden neighborhoods were blossoming, in part because of that enforcement. And after 9/11, that support only increased. So when Ray Kelly began ratcheting up the number of stop-and-frisks to levels that an entire generation of black and Hispanic young men would find intolerable, most of the rest of the city shrugged, thanked him for keeping the city safe, and gave him the benefit of the doubt.

But questions slowly began to arise in New York as the number and intensity of the stops accelerated.
Between 2004 and June 2012 the NYPD would engage in 4.4 million pedestrian stop-and-frisks—
85 percent of which were of black and Hispanic young men and teenagers.

The rationale given for the stop-and-frisks was to get weapons off the street and stop people from carrying them. But
guns were found in just 0.14 percent of the stops, and other weapons were found in less than 1 percent of the stops. Far more likely, an arrest would come for a fine not paid or for being in possession of an illegal drug—most typically a joint or two of
marijuana. Under New York State law at the time, carrying a small amount of grass in your pocket was a “violation,” not a crime, warranting a ticket, not an arrest. But when stopped, the target would frequently be asked to empty his pockets. And when he did so, the grass he was carrying would then be “out in public”—a misdemeanor
in New York resulting in an arrest and a criminal record. As a result, black New Yorkers were seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession, although they used pot at about the same rate as whites. Abuses such as these struck directly at the heart of the concepts of fairness and legitimacy in policing, and a drumbeat of opposition to the practice began to grow.

Moreover, unlike Bill Bratton—who had courted African-American and other city leaders in Los Angeles—Ray Kelly had settled into an imperious commissionership in New York. Rarely did he engage the media or public about stop-and-frisk. Instead he seemed secure to the point of haughtiness in the knowledge that he had the absolute backing of the only person that ultimately mattered to him—the one who gave him and the only one who could take away his job—multibillionaire New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who defended Kelly’s maximalist stop-and-frisk policies.

Los Angeles, meanwhile, had entered the seventies with a hyperaggressive police department that saw itself as an occupying force in L.A.’s economically destitute black and brown communities. The department believed that they were unaccountable to civilian control. Throughout the eighties the situation had grown ever more tumultuous, with no end in sight until the 1991 beating of Rodney King and the ’92 riots finally provided the political consensus to begin the overthrow of the old LAPD order. Nevertheless, throughout the nineties the LAPD had still managed to both defy reform and continue its hostile confront-and-command policing, of which Ray Perez and Rampart CRASH were only the tip of the iceberg.

Bill Bratton then came along, and in effect said to John Mack and the African-American leadership and to activists like Connie Rice and to the city’s liberal establishment: I’m here to reform the LAPD. I respect you and will listen and try to cooperatively work with you to make that happen. When Charlie Beck arrived in South Bureau, he essentially gave black and Latino leaders and grassroots activists the same message. And when he did what he did—in terms of the heavy numbers of stops—he had the goodwill he’d been busy banking to now cash in.

For decades the LAPD had been unable to stem gang violence, even
as the department implacably refused to reform its brutal ways. Bratton and Beck were offering a new, improved version of the LAPD’s old stop-control-command-and-humiliate policy, with the humiliation part reduced as part of the equation. And the fact that it was aimed at a more discrete, although still far-ranging, target—the city’s
forty thousand alleged gang members, the very group many people felt it
should
be aimed at—was also important.

Stop-and-frisk in L.A., moreover, was being done by experienced cops and not by rookies straight out of the Police Academy, as was the case in New York.

“
Twice a year the New York Police Department was graduating fifteen hundred officers [from its academy],” Bratton would later explain. “
They were being surged into areas showing growing crime patterns and trends. The flaw was that they were putting their most recently trained and least experienced officers in some of the highest crime areas in the city. Unlike Los Angeles, where every new police officer has to be assigned to a field training officer for one year, in New York ten or twelve of these recruits were being supervised by just one sergeant. So they had six pairs of officers walking in high crime, minority neighborhoods engaging in stop-and-frisks, with, in most instances, no supervision over what they were doing.”

By contrast, says Charlie Beck, “
we didn’t use new recruits to stop people. In the Los Angeles Police Department, people just out of the academy don’t get to do anything by themselves. They certainly don’t go out and pick people to stop, because they don’t have the skill set; that’s important, because it’s the right stops that are effective. Random stops are not effective. Random stops or stops that are done to meet some kind of quota are of no value, or actually detrimental to the mission, because they break down public confidence and they increase this sense of unfairness rather than developing a sense of fairness.”

Moreover, Bratton seemed to have learned from his calamitous political experience with Giuliani and developed an excellent political antenna. One that made him appalled when he heard about the NYPD’s “
open-display” marijuana arrests. “I could not believe it,” he’d
later say. “A lot of people unnecessarily ended up being arrested.
It was abhorrent.”

Nevertheless, Bratton and Beck were also using legal tactics that reeked of dubious constitutionality—even though the courts had ruled them constitutional. Chief among them was the gang injunction, which had a long and vigorous enforcement history in Los Angeles.

One such
injunction ran 276 pages, targeted six gangs (including Alfred Lomas’s Florencia 13), and covered
13.7 square miles of South Los Angeles. As reporter Scott Gold pointed out in the
Los Angeles Times
, the
injunction made arrestable crimes out of gang members simply being together in public—hanging out in a park, for instance, or standing together on a street corner. Moreover, as part of the injunction, officers in the field were authorized to serve gang
suspects
with the injunction—even though their names weren’t on it, thereby making the suspects
part of the injunction
—without having to prove any gang affiliation at all in court.

“
What’s lost in discussion about this method of enforcement,” says the ACLU’s Peter Bibring, “is that people are targeted who are only tangentially connected to gangs, or not connected at all. The California attorney general uses ten factors for determining if somebody is a gang member and should be put into the state gang database. Someone has to meet just two of the ten criteria. They include ‘associating’ with a gang member, who could be a cousin, an uncle, or a next-door neighbor with whom you’re walking to school, or someone who can be identified as a gang member by an informant—‘reliable’ or ‘unreliable.’ ” The result, said Bibring, was that once you were identified, and for the length of the injunction, you had
no
right to peacefully assemble with even one other person who had also been so identified and named on the injunction. According to the LAPD, “There are more than 450 active gangs in the city of Los Angeles. Many of these gangs have been in existence for over fifty years. These gangs have a combined membership of over 45,000 individuals.” But since some are small offshoots formed to protect their members and not to gangbang, the number of people under injunction at any one time can vary from five to ten thousand.

Charlie Beck, however, saw the injunction as a vital tool in stopping gangsters from congregating in places “where they become targets of drive-by shootings, or stand around developing the enthusiasm to go out and do a drive-by themselves. So you have to move them on so they’re
not scaring the little old lady across the street or waiting for some guys in a black car to come by and light ’em up. That’s what injunctions represent.”

Eleven thousand gang-related homicides in Los Angeles County is a terrible number, and the LAPD is right to focus on it. But its solution—using injunctions to ensnare active gangbangers—also ensnares thousands of others who might not be gang members at all; at worst they are peripheral players living in impoverished, multigenerational Latino gang neighborhoods. Injunctions have mostly proven ineffectual in wiping out gang violence. At best they’re a quick-fix, Band-Aid solution that changes little in the long term, and may or may not have an effect. To the extent that gang violence has gone down, it’s been in large part because of demographic shifts, such as the disassembling of the city’s black gangs and their movement into Riverside and other counties east of Los Angeles, and because of the alliance between L.A.’s Latino gangs and Mexican drug cartels—big moneymaking organizations that don’t want to see stupid, petty gang wars drawing attention to them and their business in the U.S.

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

Meanwhile, in New York, Ray Kelly was defending his massive use of stop-and-frisk by stressing the undeniably powerful correlation between young, impoverished (black) men and boys and high homicide rates.

“
African-American men between the ages of sixteen and thirty-seven, who are just four percent of [New York] city’s population, comprise forty percent of those murdered citywide,” Kelly would point out in a speech in April 2013. “Eighty-two percent of those young men were killed with a firearm. As a city, as a society, we cannot stand idly by in the face of facts. I believe that this tactic [stop-and-frisk] is lifesaving.” At about the same time, Kelly put it another way, writing in an opinion piece in the
Wall Street Journal
: “In the eleven years before Mayor
Bloomberg took office, there were
13,212 murders in New York City. During the eleven years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That’s 7,383 lives saved—and if history is a guide, they are largely lives of
young men of color.”

These numbers too, like L.A.’s gang homicides, were striking in their persistent awfulness, and, like with L.A. gangs, had not yet begun to be addressed except by police repression. So Kelly was right to call attention to them in 2013. But it was impossible to know in 2013 if the massive use of stop-and-frisk had been a key, essential element in New York City’s steep and consistent decline in homicides. It may have been. But nobody knew for sure, because there was no real data that proved it one way or the other. And one big reason why was that Ray Kelly had long refused to allow the NYPD to take part in studies that could lead to an answer.

One thing that was certain, however, was that by 2013 stop-and-frisk as practiced in New York had been alienating tens of thousands of young men who’d done nothing wrong and knew it, but were nevertheless being singled out and treated differently by the cops. Often based solely on their race, age, and economic status, these young men had been forced to suffer the constant indignity of a baseless stop and a baseless search in a country where their constitutional rights were being violated by the police and a conservative United States Supreme Court that was largely upholding the searches. Bratton and Beck had worked hard to mute opposition in Los Angeles, and to a large extent had been successful.

But Bratton, like Kelly, saw stop-and-frisk as an essential part of protecting these victims by establishing new behavioral norms and preventing crimes before they occur. “You’ve got to have it,” he would say of stop-and-frisk in 2013. “Many politicians and community activists are thinking of doing away with it. I’m sorry; you do away with it, you might as well move out of [New York] City. The crime will come back faster than the blink of an eye. It is the most frequent, effective and useful tool we have in policing.”

And therein lay the essential conundrum faced by Bratton, Beck, and Ray Kelly as they aggressively pursued a policing strategy that on its
face, if not in the letter of the law, was antithetical to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, but which they believed was effective and necessary.

Connie Rice, January 2007, Los Angeles City Council Meeting

“Gang Interventionists,” said Connie Rice to the Los Angeles City Council during a 2007 hearing packed with reporters, “are the people who keep kids safe. . . . We [the city] just spent $7 million for a reptile enclosure.
I’m happy for Reggie [the alligator], but we need to save our kids first.”

Rice was speaking to the City Council as part of her campaign to get a gang interventionist academy established, a key component of a second report that Rice and the Advancement Project had written following the Rampart report. This one too had a long gestation period, having been commissioned by the City Council in 2005—about a year after City Councilman Martin Ludlow’s “Summer of Success” program.