Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick

couldn’t tell officers we just met from other departments what to do.”
    Finally, Yamaki and his entourage headed to the Wilshire Division station house for a breather, arriving at about 4 p.m. The division captain quickly asked Yamaki to jump into his role of police commissionerandaddress the troops. Yamaki tried, but had nothing to say. Outside the station house, fires blazed. Nobody seemed to know how to bring some order to the situation. And Mike Yamaki was no exception.
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    Meanwhile, Andre Christian, having returned to Moreno Valley, remained sitting in his chair watching the riots live on TV, shaking his head in disbelief. “The cops, they’d waited just too long to respond,” Christian thought as he watched the riots spread that initial Wednesday night and into Friday. “Too many people were engaged now, too many supporting it. The gangsters, yeah, they were there. But there were just a lot of regular, normal citizens too.”
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    Historically, Los Angeles’s black citizens had always gotten the worst of both worlds when it came to cops and crime. Living in hyper-segregated communities crippled by violence, gangs, crack, and poverty, they were desperate for protection from a police department whose chief seemed to have no idea how to intelligently address their concerns. Instead, Daryl Gates led an army of occupation that waged war on the residents of black South L.A., Mexican East L.A., and Central American Pico-Union in the name of crime suppression.
    Yet those residents weren’t feeling any safer. The streets, in fact, were even more dangerous, despite the fact that those very residents were daily seeing a cop, talking to a cop, or interacting with somebody who’d just encountered a cop. And therein lay not just a problem but the heart of the matter. In the 1970s, ex–LAPD officer turned novelist Joseph Wambaugh put a name to the LAPD’s self-image and their perception of their job. “The New Centurions,” he called them.
    And ever since Bill Parker’s reign in 1950, that’s exactly how the LAPD had policed: aggressively confronting and commanding anyone with whom they came in contact, owning the streets, and stomping out the street lice. The definition of “lice” was extremely broad and zealously adhered to. As Gates later boasted: “If someone looked out of place in a neighborhood, we had a little chat with him. If a descriptionof a thief could be obtained, we stopped everyone fitting that description, even if it meant angering dozens of innocent citizens. . . . Using these proactive tactics [the] LAPD . . . became the most aggressive police department in the country.”
    Aggressive policing was more than just an LAPD modus operandi, however; it was a career-advancement imperative. Reputations were made and promotions bestowed based on high arrest numbers and, as David Dotson once put it, by “pounding the fear of God into people.” Making lots of arrests was the measure of the man, the gold standard of one’s worth among peers and supervisors—not just one way to achieve a public safety goal, but the goal itself. Few, however, dared question if aggressive policing correlated to effective policing. Instead, stepping out of the LAPD’s narrow tactical and philosophical box, and using one’s experience to develop new crime prevention strategies, was cause to be branded an upstart, a malcontent, a subversive.
    Patrol was consequently looked upon as a dead end, dominated—as Wambaugh once wrote—by “super-aggressive twenty-two-year-olds, full of testosterone . . . absolutely immortal, and unable to admit [or] verbalize fear, even to themselves.” This was not exactly a revelation, and certainly not exclusive to the LAPD. Tens of thousands of white cops who grew up in segregated white neighborhoods and went on to work in black areas in the decades preceding the ’92 riots knew that feeling described by Wambaugh. Seeped in the racism of white America, and