Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (49 page)

“So when I meet with my staff every Tuesday morning,” Gannon said, “or get notified of a shooting at night, my first question is, ‘What did gang intervention have to say?’ And I thank you for that.”

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

A number of other people would also speak that day. Connie Rice was the last. And given the newness of the Urban Peace Academy and the nature of the event, what she had to say was in the form of a pep rally for all concerned.

But what she told the
Chicago Reader
several years later best summed up what she, Gannon, Bratton, Beck, Taylor, Villaraigosa, and many others were trying to achieve.

“If your goal is not gang eradication, which none of us knows how to do, but instead is violence reduction, and you enlist [former gangsters to help you], then
you begin to change the physics of the neighborhood. We’re doing it with the cooperation of the gangs because they’re so powerful that they control some of the neighborhoods. We get them into classes and training, and we say if you help us stop the violence, we’re not going to hold the past against you. Everyone agrees we should keep the kids safe. [But] if you don’t give [gangsters] a way to exert power legitimately, they’ll do it another way. . . . Some of the cops are
saying, ‘We don’t like you treating the gangsters with respect.’ But once you create a different kind of momentum, people find it impossible to ignore.”

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

That momentum for reform has indeed been created in Los Angeles—spearheaded by Bratton and deepened by Beck. Most remarkable is the dramatic drop in the level of animosity between the city’s poor black and brown communities and the LAPD.

Equally as notable,
homicides by 2013 would drop to 250. Pat Gannon had both predicted and rightly boasted that the year
2010 would end with under 300 homicides, and it did, with 297. But for it to then decline by almost 50 fewer murders in 2013 was truly a triumph for which the LAPD deserved significant credit.

There were, of course, factors other than Bratton’s and Beck’s contributions that led to the decline in homicides. For one, drug distribution has shifted dramatically. The old method of street-corner dealing by young black guys in open-air, very violent marketplaces had greatly diminished. The market for crack cocaine had collapsed due to its terrible destructiveness. A lot of drug dealing was now being done through call-up, cell-phone distribution delivered by unlicensed taxis. Statewide, possession of small amounts of
marijuana became an infraction punishable by a $100 fine, with no arrest and no record, and medical marijuana cards were plentiful.

The Bloods and the Crips, in addition, simply weren’t as well organized as the Mexican gangs, and couldn’t sustain their business viability—which required discipline, organizational skills, and, on an ongoing basis, the social cohesiveness that the Mexican-American gangs have developed in abundance because of their multigenerational existence.

The demographic shift in Los Angeles has also been a huge factor in the city’s crime decline. In L.A. the immigrant family unit is strong, their work ethic is pronounced. The huge concentration of African-Americans in the housing projects has given way to Latinos, who are less involved in criminal conflict now that the cartels are keeping the lid
on gang fights over distribution, and because there’s also been a big lessening of racial tension on the streets of South Los Angeles.

“I’ll tell you how positive the change has been,” Ron Noblet told a reporter in 2010. A couple of hard-core guys—one of whom is Andre Christian—have been
running a fatherhood project paid for by the housing authority in Jordan Downs. Every Wednesday I go over there. Recently I have been bringing a young Chicana as a co-facilitator.

“
She’s the first person in her family to go to college, and the first to graduate, and is beautiful beyond belief. And not one person reacted to her negatively. Five or ten years ago she would have been hit on, beaten, or raped by either males or females—females because of jealousy, males because they wanted sex. Now everybody comments on her beauty and helpfulness. That’s because outsiders are no longer seen as the enemy to be preyed upon, and because three-quarters of the projects are now Latino.”

Daryl Gates and Charlie Beck, April 2010, San Clemente, California

Propped up in a hospital bed,
Daryl Gates was looking out onto a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean when LAPD chief Charlie Beck strode into his
hilltop condominium in San Clemente, California. Beck knew Gates was dying of
cancer. But he was still
startled by how frail he looked. He’d known the older man for decades as an ardent surfer, superbly conditioned marathon runner, and devoted jogger who had taken immense pride in his fit and tanned appearance.

But on this bucolic Southern California day in April 2010, the evidence of his physical decay was undeniable. His pale skin hung from his bones, his once powerful legs were shriveled, and he’d been released into hospice care at home because there was nothing more to be done.

Beck had forgone wearing his usual long-sleeved chief’s uniform and tie for the visit and dressed instead in the comfortable, short-sleeved,
open-at-the-collar LAPD blues favored by his street cops. Gates had
been the first LAPD chief to wear that uniform style as a way of saying to the troops, “Look, I’m one of you.” By his dress choice, Beck was signaling to Gates their shared past.

Beyond that act of grace, Beck understood that despite being reviled by those outside the LAPD, within it and among the retired, Gates remained a revered, legendary figure who’d stood up for them until it all came crashing down.

Lost in a time warp, Gates and his men had railed against change in a radically transformed city no longer theirs, and yearned for the days when the L.A. media was their lapdog, they were heralded, publicized, and glamorized as the Golden Boys of American law enforcement, and portrayed in dozens of television series as the epitome of a cutting-edge crime-fighting machine.

That legend now lay on history’s scrap heap, killed in the 1980s and ’90s by the LAPD’s destructive policing and black and brown L.A.’s retaliatory fury. Yet for another decade, Daryl Gates and his tenure had lived on as a rallying cry for the faithful who believed in their hearts that there had been nothing about their department that needed reform.

It had been precisely that reverence for that legacy, for that
attitude
, that Bill Bratton, Judge Gary Feess, and so many others had to work so hard to bring under control—and now the task was in the hands of Charlie Beck to complete.

At fifty-six years old, and after thirty-two years in the department, Beck had been sworn in as Los Angeles’s fifty-fifth police chief in November of 2009, nearly three months after Bill Bratton had announced his resignation. And now, as Beck sat next to him, Gates spoke with pleasure about Beck’s rise to the top. And about his joy that the department had been given over to a brother in the LAPD fraternity—to a man he had known since he was a little boy running around at LAPD picnics with his father, Gates’s friend and one of his deputy chiefs. And about his deep relief that his department was no longer being led by a despised interloper who’d understood nothing about the soul of their organization. “
I feel I can go now,” he told Beck. “That it’s okay to leave.”

They talked a little more, Charlie Beck showing his respect for Daryl Gates, and undoubtedly a certain affection as well. But Beck had no
intention of restoring what Gates considered the good old days. He’d made that clear while speaking to the City Council during his nomination hearing, saying, as the
Los Angeles Times
would report, that “
his top goal was to extend the reforms begun by [Bill] Bratton and moving them down into the rank and file . . . [and] into the mindset of the thousands of officers who are the heart of the organization.” That effort, Beck added, will be the “hallmark of my administration.”

Today, however, that goal wasn’t figuring into the conversation. It was highly unlikely that Gates had any real conception of Beck’s plans. And what would have been the point of telling him, in any case?

Suddenly
an LAPD helicopter appeared against the blue waters of the Pacific and hovered in clear view through the condo’s picture window. After a moment,
Daryl Francis Gates struggled to sit up in his bed and, once he’d managed it, snapped off his final salute.

EPILOGUE: 2015

I
STARTED THIS
book with great admiration for Bill Bratton and Charlie Beck. And as I closed out the writing of this epilogue in the spring of 2015, I still found myself admiring them for many of the things they’ve accomplished, as well as for their personal drive, media savvy, refusal to defend the indefensible, and ability to garner support for their policies from liberals in a liberal Los Angeles, and from a previously highly critical African-American community. But perhaps most of all I came to respect their success in bringing change to moribund police departments while putting their engineer’s problem-solving minds to the vital work of improving public safety.

Now, four years later, people continue to ask me if the LAPD is really reformed. To that I answer, “Compared to what?” If they mean compared to Daryl Gates’s arrogant, combative fourteen years as chief in the eighties and early nineties, or the decade adrift under Williams and Parks, or to many other police organizations, my reply is yes, emphatically yes. In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, Bratton and Beck refocused officer training away from its singular obsession with creating instruments of repression by also committing the LAPD to real, innovative community service.

And with that has come a notably less hostile attitude toward the public, far more transparency in dealing with the media, and a willingness to listen and be open to their critics’ concerns. And, finally, they reduced crime—dramatically in the case of Bratton in New York in the early and mid-nineties, and steadily in Los Angeles (although the latter would be open to question, as we shall see). In all, their accomplishments
have not only been steps in the right direction but also rare, hopeful advances in the world of criminal justice, where progressive reform moves at a snail’s pace.

But halfway through the writing of
Blue
, I began to understand far more clearly the terrible ramifications of stop-and-frisk and broken-windows policing in poor communities throughout America; and as a result, my view of both men, based on their strong support for these tactics, became more nuanced. It all crystallized for me when the news that would mesmerize America in 2014 started surging in, announcing that American policing was in deep crisis—in large part because of the practice of these tactics across the country.

The first signal came on a mid-July day from a Staten Island sidewalk in New York City. There, a 350-pound unarmed black man named
Eric Garner was being cuffed and arrested by an NYPD officer for selling single, untaxed cigarettes known as “loosies,” when suddenly he made the fatal mistake of pulling his wrists apart. A split second later a tall, burly white cop standing directly behind him locked a forearm in a choke hold around Garner’s windpipe, pulling tight and ferociously yanking him by his neck to the ground. Several other cops instantly piled onto his back, choking and smothering the life out of Garner while ignoring the dying plea he would utter eleven times before he died: “I can’t breathe.”

Soon a vivid cell-phone video of the incident, captured by a bystander, made Garner a cause célèbre on the Web and TV news shows, spotlighting long-standing grievances over police abuse and sparking the beginning of a widespread public discussion of the issue not heard as intensely since the 1991 beating of Rodney King and the ’92 Los Angeles riots.

One month later, in a Midwestern backwater called Ferguson, Missouri, that discussion heated up exponentially. Demonstrators there were protesting the recent
shooting death of an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown by a white officer when a large contingent of local police suddenly arrived at the scene in army Humvees and armored vehicles. Dressed, armed, and equipped like combat marines ready to fight insurgents in the Second Battle of Fallujah, many of the officers then took positions on a skirmish line or atop their vehicles and
aimed red laser beams from their assault rifles directly at the chests of stunned protesters.

Broadcast live, the spectacle ignited public shock and outrage and inspired scores of sympathy demonstrations throughout the country. Many were led by young black grassroots community organizers and focused on killings of unarmed black men by white police officers. Some, however, were also directed at ending mass incarceration, stop-and-frisk policies, tight broken-windows policing, and the war on drugs, all of which were becoming
the
civil rights issues of the twenty-first century for African-Americans.

To the
protesters’ popular rallying cry of “I Can’t Breathe” were swiftly added two others: “
Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” in solidarity with an alleged gesture of surrender—later disproven—Brown was making when he was shot and killed; and “
Black Lives Matter,” a retort to the seemingly reckless manner in which cops were killing men like Garner and Brown in cities throughout the nation.

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

Six months earlier—on the very first day of 2014, in fact—Bill Bratton, amazingly but not unpredictably, was once again being sworn in as the new commissioner of the New York City Police Department. That July, the killing of Eric Garner and other events would plunge him, the NYPD, and the city’s new mayor deep into the thick of the national crisis of confidence in the police that, with Garner’s death, was arousing long-pent-up rage, as well as old fears of the city reverting back to the crime-filled years of the past.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Charlie Beck was entering his fifth year as LAPD chief, all but assured of reappointment for a second five-year term that summer, and unaware that his department too would become part of policing’s tribulations in 2014.