Let’s Get It On! (14 page)

People randomly shot at us as we moved from situation to situation trying to regain some semblance of order. Shots were even being fired at firemen as we offered them extra body armor so they could save some of the buildings from burning down to their frames.

Victims stood on the corners pleading for help, but there was just too much to respond to at once.

I watched looters get run over by cars as they left a store across the street.
Good,
I thought.
You deserve what you just got.

The natural order of things was out of whack, and the police, of whom there weren’t nearly enough, had to adapt. We set up an abbreviated justice system in which normal procedure and paperwork went out the window. We stripped it down to the basics. Some of us took to the streets and apprehended lawbreakers, jammed them into police cars, vans, and buses, and sent them off to the stations where other officers would do the paperwork, book, and jail them. When one station radioed back that it was full and couldn’t possibly take another body, we took them on to the next station.

At a Vons grocery store where the sprinklers had been triggered at full blast, we watched as shoplifters waded through several inches of water, sweeping items off shelves into big garbage bags. There were so many of them ignoring our commands that we finally stood at the entrance and clocked anyone trying to leave with anything more than the clothes on their backs.

For two days it was absolute chaos, but they were the greatest two days I’d ever worked for the LAPD. I didn’t have to worry about use of force reports or paperwork or procedure. It was a free-for-all, and the world suddenly became clear to me. There were good people trying to save their businesses, homes, and families; they weren’t doing anything wrong. The rest of them, regardless of color or race, were animals.

I was scared to death for Elaine, who’d just finished the day watch and was on her way home when the riots broke out. I’d called her and told her to not answer her phone when the department rang to ask her to come back in for duty. It was wrong of me, but I was afraid she’d get hurt. She did the right thing and went to work the next day when she was called. Her station assigned her to security on the rooftop with a shotgun. She completed her shifts there for the next two weeks.

For two days, the LAPD used every resource it had to regain control of its hostile city. President George H. W. Bush even authorized and mobilized members of the National Guard before it started to calm down. By the sixth day, a citywide curfew was lifted, signaling the end of the riots. For the next two weeks, I and other officers stayed on the streets to make sure nothing flared up again.

The riots left undeniable damage in their wake. It seemed as if every corner I turned on had buildings and cars gutted by fires. Graffiti and vandalism were also rampant. In the aftermath, 53 people had died, another 2,000 had been injured, 1,100 buildings had been destroyed by about 3,600 fires, and material damage to the city was estimated at somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion.

What impacted me most was the feeling that the LAPD couldn’t handle a crisis of this proportion and our leadership was downright pathetic.

Honestly, though, I don’t believe the riots themselves had anything to do with Rodney King, the police, or the perceived racism between them. Yes, there were people who were frustrated that the police were acquitted. But if you look at the case, including the missing moments of video when King attacked the officer, you can see why the jury came to their conclusion. It was hard to find the officers guilty based on the letter of the law.

However, a lot of the black community honed in on four white officers beating on a black man and getting away with it. “That’s our lot in life,” they said. “This is the way we get treated, and we just got screwed again.” They were upset and felt cheated. I understood that. They were cheated in some ways, but it didn’t give anyone the right to harm others.

And during the payback moments of taking or wiping out what others had, looters and vandals destroyed their own neighborhoods and belongings without even thinking about it. I looked at people differently after the riots, just as people had looked at officers differently after the King arrest.

An officer couldn’t walk into a restaurant to pick up his dinner without hearing people whisper, “I wonder if he was one of them.” In their eyes, anyone who wore a uniform was guilty. Every time we’d go to do something, people would yell, “Rodney King! Rodney King!”

I was never embarrassed to be a police officer, but I was embarrassed by the way people perceived what had happened when they didn’t really know anything about it. I also knew some people were looking for reasons, contrived or not, to blow the whistle on police officers. Videotaping became a big trend, so officers had to be smarter about how they went about their work on the streets. I changed the kind of police officer I was; I didn’t go about being as free-willed as I’d been when I went after suspects. As a result, I didn’t put as many bad guys in jail.

The LAPD had been forced on the defensive.

About four months after the Rodney King beating, the Christopher Commission report was released. Chaired by attorney Warren Christopher, who later became the secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, the commission had been formed in 1988 to identify officers who were considered heavy-handed.

The commission came up with a list of forty-four repeat offenders, officers who had received six or more allegations of excessive force between 1986 and 1990. However, the screening process was flawed because they looked only at police reports, and officers’ definitions of use of force varied. While one might write up a report for grabbing a suspect’s wrist, another wouldn’t consider that worth reporting at all. Some who made the list were clearly not offenders.

I wasn’t on it, but one of my partners from Southwest made number one. He was strict about the way he did his police work, but I never saw him use force when he shouldn’t have. He was a great cop who just got caught up in the political game and didn’t survive it.

I didn’t need the Christopher Commission report to tell me what had gone wrong during the Rodney King incident, the first falling domino that had set a string of destructive events in motion. The problem was that too many limitations were being placed on officers in the heat of the moment and they didn’t know how to react. For instance, we had been told we couldn’t use chokes on suspects. In fact, the officers’ unofficial slogan in 1984 had been “Smoke ‘em, don’t choke ‘em.” The academy’s take on chokes was much the same as uninformed people’s perceptions of chokes in MMA today. They didn’t understand them, and the general consensus was that if you choked someone, they would die.

Previously, there’d also been some choke-related deaths when officers had tried to apprehend suspects who were on PCP. The drug was especially popular in South Central Los Angeles at the time, and users were typically easy to spot, often found talking to someone they alone could hear and naked because they felt like they were burning up. They weren’t able to engage in rational conversation, and any stimulus could set them off. They didn’t feel pain and seemed to have superhuman strength, which made it difficult for officers to control them. They wouldn’t quit fighting or attempting to flee.

During struggles with officers, some suspects’ tracheas were crushed, although I believe it had more to do with the execution of the technique than its appropriateness. Still, many on the force questioned why an officer would attempt to use a choke hold on a suspect who was trying to cause him serious bodily harm when it would probably be much more effective to shoot the aggressor instead.

I thought this way of thinking was ridiculous and went looking for my own answers. What I discovered was that Sgt. Greg Dossey, who had once run the PT Self-Defense Unit, had studied and categorized the instances of use of force within the LAPD in 1988 and again in 1992. Both years, he determined that two-thirds of the altercations had ended on the ground with the officer applying a joint lock and handcuffing the suspect. I thought Dossey’s research could point us all in the right direction. If so many altercations ended on the ground, why weren’t we focusing on training officers there?

At the time, my knowledge of ground tactics was minimal. I’d wrestled and boxed, but my best friend, Joe Hamilton, also an officer, had studied karate and judo. Joe, a few other officers, and I exercised together regularly. During one workout, Joe mentioned some South American brothers who had their own ground art he thought I’d love. Joe couldn’t remember the family’s name, but I’d later come to know them as the Gracies.

I didn’t seek out the Gracies, but we all found each other eventually. In the wake of the Rodney King incident and the riots, the LAPD organized a Civilian Martial Arts Advisory Panel led by Sgt. Dossey, to come up with new tactics an officer could use in apprehending a violent suspect. Because I had a great interest in combat sports, I was asked to join to represent the police force. Aside from me, the panel included a who’s who of martial arts figures in Southern California, from kickboxer Benny “The Jet” Urquidez to judo expert Gene LeBell to the determined-looking Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt Rorion Gracie.

The panel, which started meeting about once a week, was a mess from the get-go. There was no way these practitioners, all experts in their chosen arts, would agree on doing something one way. Each one thought his art was superior to the other’s.

For the first few meetings, I sat quietly and watched them demonstrate their disciplines on dummies or assistants they’d brought. They’d throw the dummies around or subdue the assistants, and I have to admit they all looked great doing it.

However, it wasn’t realistic to think what they were demonstrating could be used by an officer on the street. After a few meetings, I decided to speak up. “I mean no disrespect, but your techniques work on your subjects because they’re letting you do it. On the streets, a suspect will put up a fight. They’re not just going to let you do it.”

The expert du jour said, “Do you want to come try being my subject?”

“Okay, I’ll do it,” I said, “but I’m not going to just stand there.”

The martial artist, who’d incidentally been on the cover of
Black Belt
magazine a few times, went to grab me, and I took him down, sat on his chest, and trapped his arm around his neck. I’m not sure what overcame me, but I started to slap him lightly across the face with my free hand. “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

I looked up at the rest of the congregated experts and realized I should get up. I hadn’t meant to make the man look bad, but my frustrations with the panel had overtaken me. I’d made a mistake, and Sgt. Dossey wasn’t happy. But Rorion Gracie, who usually yawned out loud at the demonstrations, seemed rather pleased.

Afterward, Rorion invited me to his academy to experience his art, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, firsthand.

At the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy in Torrance, California, Rorion introduced me to his skinny younger brother, Royce, who would demonstrate. Rorion’s family preferred to call the art Gracie Jiu-Jitsu because they’d perfected their own variation that utilized positioning and leverage to overcome strength once a fight hit the ground. I was impressed immediately with Rorion’s confidence. If you wanted to fight, the Gracies were ready to fight, and that said everything to me.

Usually, when I’d tried out other martial arts, I was told I couldn’t do this or that because I could get hurt. Rorion placed only one restriction on me during Royce’s demonstration: no biting. Otherwise, I could do anything I wanted: punch, kick, or tackle. At any point, we could stop if I tapped out by slapping any part of Royce’s body or the mat. We decided this time we’d grapple without punches or kicks.

I grabbed Royce’s legs and lifted him off the mat fairly easily—he must have been 100 pounds lighter than me—then took him down onto the mat. I didn’t realize I’d landed in his half guard, with one of my legs laced between both of his and my other leg on the outside of his. While I tried to crush him on the mat with my body weight, he started breathing in short, focused spurts. I actually thought I was doing well.

Royce began to talk to me. “You watch this movie
Rocky
?” he said in his Portuguese accent. He kept wiggling while I tried to squash him.

I didn’t know how to answer.

“You watch
Rocky
,” he continued. “Everybody think he lose too.” I thought that was funny.

With that, Royce draped his legs over my shoulders and straightened out my arm by pushing his hips up underneath it. My elbow joint extended at an uncomfortable angle, and I tapped out immediately.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

Royce flashed his all-knowing smile.

I’d have to return to find out.

Rorion, Royce, and I started training together almost immediately after that. I became a student in the subtleties of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu at Rorion’s academy, and he tried out his suggestions for the police panel on me.

I had no idea what it was like to be a jiu-jitsu expert, and Rorion didn’t know what it was like to be a police officer. Whenever he said, “This is the way I’d do it,” I’d give him the gun belt and let him try the technique on me.

In any situation as a police officer, a gun is involved. If you’re rolling on the ground with a suspect, you have to be conscious of your weapon because the suspect could always reach for it.