Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (45 page)

Released in January 2007, this second report on Los Angeles’s criminal justice system was more, far more, than the council or really anybody else had anticipated.
At one thousand pages, it weighed in at twelve pounds and was exactly what its title declared it to be:
A Call to Action: The Case for a Comprehensive Solution to L.A.’s Gang Violence Epidemic
.

A devastating critique of the status quo, the report excoriated the city and the county’s historically siloed criminal justice and social service systems for working independently and often self-servingly in failed attempts to stem gang violence.

“Right now
there’s $1
billion
in [city and county] programs for kids, but it’s all wasted, because it’s not being used to reduce the violence [directed at them],” Rice would say following the report’s release. “When a kid comes home from juvenile lockup, there’s no reentry team. All these government agencies don’t cooperate. Parole doesn’t talk to child services. So the kid’s gang ends up being his reentry team.
That $1 billion has to be reallocated and placed into one comprehensive program.”

Over twenty subject-matter experts—including cops, gang interventionists, sociologists, educators, demographers, and epidemiologists who study violence as a disease—had contributed their expertise to the report. One of them was
Wes McBride, a veteran L.A. County Sheriff’s Department detective who was among the county’s top experts on street gangs. According to Rice, McBride told her that the week before he retired he’d arrested the grandson of the first man he’d arrested when he was just out of the Sheriff’s Academy. And that ten years earlier he had also arrested the man’s father. His career, concluded McBride, had helped destroy three generations of one family, and hadn’t changed a thing. If this could help change that situation, he informed Rice, he was willing to work with her.

Among the report’s central critiques was that the gang “suppression” tactics upon which Los Angeles had focused for the past quarter century had failed. Suppression was necessary, the report pointed out, but only as part of the mix, a slice of the pie. By itself, it only strengthened gangs, because they were intergenerational and existed for identity purposes. Attacking them only increased their cohesion. “
Twenty-five years of containment-suppression,” as Rice would later say, had only “produced twice as many gang members and six times as many gangs, with no end in sight.”

Instead, the report recommended, Los Angeles’s gang neighborhoods should be viewed as ecosystems—with businesses, NGOs, churches, community organizations, and city and county agencies all joining with law enforcement to treat both the symptoms
and the causes
of gang violence while developing new integrated programs like a gang interventionist academy.

In a perfect world Rice’s unified commonsense approach might well have been adopted. But large, self-serving bureaucracies are not the stuff of perfect worlds, and even getting the L.A. City Council to act was going to be a heavy lift. Los Angeles’s weak mayoral structure and dithering City Council had historically ensured that citywide public policy moved slowly. It had taken a decade of turmoil prior to the
beating of Rodney King and the ’92 riots before a consensus had finally been reached on the drastic need to transform the LAPD, and a decade more of floundering and scandal capped off by a federal consent decree before the reform process finally geared up in earnest.

Beyond that, and unbeknownst to Rice or anyone else at the time, the Great Recession was about to hit Los Angeles
hard
, which would dictate a severe financial retrenchment, and not the kind of dramatic and costly program
A Call to Action
required if followed correctly.

Nevertheless, the report would serve its purpose. As UCLA social welfare professor Jorja Leap would later write, “
There were many things the report was not. It was not a scientific evaluation . . . an exhaustive survey of gang programs in Los Angeles . . . [or] a document guided by research methodology. . . . However,” Leap added, “what the report so importantly did was capture the elements of the problem and illustrate how past efforts had fallen dismally short of ongoing need. Significantly, with a series of 100 recommendations, the [Advancement Project] put the concept of a comprehensive, citywide strategy front and center.”

Bill Bratton, May Day 2007, MacArthur Park

“I don’t know how,” says David Dotson, “they could have been
so
goddamn
stupid.” Dotson, who’d seen a lot of stupid things in the decades before his retirement from the LAPD, was asking the same question as many Angelenos about what had occurred the previous day: May Day 2007, which would prove to be the most startling and embarrassing day of William Bratton’s entire tenure as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.

May Day, the once great international people’s day, the day of revolution and of workers declaring their existence and their rights, had reemerged in L.A. in the years following the turn of the twenty-first century as a day of significance among a Latino immigrant population about to fully flex its political muscle.

Just one year earlier, on April 25, 2006—a week before May Day—over half a million Mexican and Central American immigrants and
their supporters had converged downtown, a mammoth sea of white T-shirts, placards, and flags, in the largest protest demonstration in the history of Los Angeles.

They were part of a monthlong series of nationwide
immigrant protests, including one in Chicago that numbered four hundred thousand. L.A.’s had been an almost festive affair. Nevertheless, the events driving the extraordinary turnout were absolutely crucial to the lives of many in the crowd.

Causing the immediate crisis was the fact that the passage of the comprehensive immigration reform bill proposed by President George W. Bush to grant eventual citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants had been blocked by the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives. Instead, the House had counterproposed a bill making it a felony to be in the country illegally, mandating the building of a
seven-hundred-mile border fence between the U.S. and Mexico, and explicitly providing no opportunity for undocumented immigrants to become citizens.

Nevertheless, despite the high-stakes nature of the protest rally and the underlying political tension, that huge May Day rally just a year earlier had been remarkably violence-free, given the crush of bodies and the historic propensity of the LAPD to react violently to such demonstrations.

“Get off the streets” had been the LAPD’s operational credo throughout the twentieth century. And in policing protests the department would often wait no longer than a minute or so between its initial order to disperse and the baton swinging, bone-crushing attack on those not very, very quick on their feet.

In the 1920s and ’30s—when the department had been a creature under the influence of the then ultra-right-wing
Los Angeles Times
and the city’s powerful Merchant and Manufacturers Association—using billy clubs to break up union rallies had been a routine occurrence. The same mind-set had continued during antiwar marches in the 1960s, a Justice for Janitors union organizing demonstration in 1990, and the protest demonstrations during the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

Now, as May Day 2007 approached, no one was expecting anything different from 2006. The old days were gone, and a new, practical-minded reform chief was firmly in the saddle.

Bill Bratton, in fact, was in the middle of a very good run. With his first five years in office now coming to an end, he was deep in the process of campaigning for reappointment to the second term he needed to complete his reform agenda—a task that in his mind would be at an end on the day federal judge Gary Feess lifted the consent decree.

But for now, at the very least Bratton had virtually disarmed his critics. The mayor and the Police Commission had become some of his strongest supporters, and so had most of the City Council. Just the night before, at his last public confirmation hearing prior to his reappointment, the occasion had turned into what he’d later describe as “
a love fest.” Little to no opposition had been expressed—a remarkable achievement, given the LAPD’s historically fractious relations with nearly everyone. As David Dotson would put it at the time: “He’s
managed to walk a tightrope between forging ties with the black community and activist groups like the ACLU, while improving troop morale and making everybody relatively satisfied.” Relatively satisfied—despite the fact that his officers had made almost
one million stops in one year, and hundreds of black motorists and pedestrians would file racial profiling complaints against his department.

So satisfied that John Mack, now president of the Police Commission, would say
this
in announcing his support for a second term: “Chief
Bratton [has] provided visionary and progressive leadership for the department. His efforts have greatly benefited the City of Los Angeles and advanced effective policing. . . . He has aggressively reached out to individuals, victims, immigrant rights organizations, Latino leaders, members of media, civil rights and civil liberties leaders and organizations.”

Meanwhile, the ACLU would also release its own statement of support for Bratton’s rehiring. This too was a remarkable occurrence engendered by Bratton. The ACLU had commissioned a Yale researcher who made an overwhelmingly strong case against Bratton’s stop-and-frisk policies, declaring not only that the department was engaged in an extraordinary
number of stops but that the LAPD was engaged in racial profiling. The organization also criticized Bratton’s heavy enforcement actions in Skid Row. Then it said this in a letter supporting Bratton’s rehiring: “
Without minimizing the importance of [our] disagreements, we recognize Chief Bratton’s firm commitment to and leadership in reforming the LAPD, preserving open and accountable policing, policing with respect for the constitutional rights of the residents of Los Angeles, and making the LAPD responsive to the concerns of the community whose trust he recognizes his Department requires.” The letter was signed by the ACLU’s Southern California executive director, Ramona Ripston, who, like Mack, had for decades been one of the LAPD’s most outspoken and unstinting critics. Like Mack and Ripston, Connie Rice would also strongly support Bratton’s rehiring.

At the same time, Bratton’s personal bottom line, his ace in the hole—those declining crime statistics for which he’d built up such expectations—were right there for him to boast about. From 2002 through 2006, serious crime had fallen by almost 35 percent, and homicides by over 35 percent. A good case, and one that Bratton would vociferously make when challenged, was that those declines were due to aggressive enforcement of the combination of policing strategies he’d employed in areas like South Los Angeles.

But equally good, and certainly at least complementary, factors that might also have influenced the decline were minimized or dismissed by Bratton. Among them were the racial transformation of much of South Los Angeles and the cyclical nature of gang crime in the city.
In 1992, there had been over 1,000 homicides in Los Angeles.
By 1998, under Willie Williams and Bernard Parks, that number had fallen by nearly
60 percent
to 419. By the time Bratton had been named chief
in late 2002, homicides had risen again by over one-third to 647 before
dropping by almost one-third under Bratton to 480 in 2006. The truth was nobody yet knew for sure why crime had dropped so significantly under Bratton’s first four full years in office. It could well have been because of his heavy police-saturation policies, or those policies in combination with any number of other factors. The proof would be in the long-term sustainability of the decline.

In any case, as May Day 2007 rolled around, radiating from Bill Bratton was the shine of success. And then the people whose stupidity David Dotson never could understand made their move.

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

Bratton arose on May Day morning scheduled to fly down to El Salvador
to join Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on a six-nation tour of Latin America. But he wanted to remain in L.A. until the end of the day to make sure everything unfolded as planned. And for most of the day it did.

The demonstration turned out to be small compared to the preceding year—very small: between fifteen and twenty-five thousand people peacefully assembled in downtown L.A. for an uneventful rally. At its end, an estimated six to seven thousand then trekked a couple of miles west to MacArthur Park, where they arrived at about 5:00 p.m. accompanied by a contingent of Spanish-language reporters.

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

Early that evening Bratton decided to leave the demonstrators’ closing rally at the park and return to his
home in the old, stately neighborhood of Los Feliz. There he prepared for the flight he was taking later that night to El Salvador, keeping one eye on the television as he packed. At one point he noticed the station was broadcasting helicopter shots of a
rock- and bottle-throwing disturbance on Olvera Street, a major thoroughfare bordering MacArthur Park. But there were a lot of cops down there, and he wasn’t getting any calls to alert him of serious trouble, so he assumed it would easily be handled, and continued going about his flight preparations.

On his way to the airport, however, he received a phone call bringing news of just how wrong his casual assessment had been. And it was coming not from his command staff at Parker Center, or his commander at the park, or even anybody in L.A. Instead it was from the mayor of Los Angeles,
Antonio Villaraigosa, who had just deplaned in El Salvador. “I’m surrounded by the Spanish-language press,” he told Bratton. “
They’ve been showing me live shots of LAPD officers breaking
up the crowd in MacArthur Park. The journalists
there are reporting that live [non-lethal] rounds have been fired by the officers and that they’re beating up people.”

Bratton immediately phoned LAPD assistant chief Earl Paysinger, who was in his office at Parker Center. His response was at once both reassuring and disconcerting. “No,” he told Bratton, “there’s nothing going on that I’m aware of.”