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

usually no more than high school educated, they policed a historically abused people whose experience and worldview most couldn’t begin to fathom—a people who were also continually subject to the criminal behavior of a small but significant number of their own neighbors. For most of those white cops, their initial reaction was bewilderment followed by disgust and contempt—emotions that justified their special task of keeping all those racially segregated have-nots away from the white-skinned haves by using the violent power of the state.
    James Baldwin, that prophetic messenger of what it meant to be black in Jim Crow America, spelled out the experience in the sixties in his book Nobody Knows My Name : “He is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. He moves . . . therefore,like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where, he is.”
    By its “aggressive” policing philosophy the LAPD was exacerbating what was already a highly charged situation, and literally mandating that Wambaugh’s twenty-two-year-olds initiate racially volatile encounters where they’d constantly be challenged. As David Dotson later told the Christopher Commission: “We expect [our officers] to go out andaggressively identify people and investigate people. And that . . . results in police officers bluffing their way into situations, and when they stop people on the street, frequently the guy knows, ‘you don’t have anything on me’ . . . and time after time, we get into these conflict situations that end up frequently with uses of force, frequently with manufacturing . . . probable cause.”
    Rewarding high arrest numbers might initially have had some merit, had it been part of a wider, long-term crime-prevention strategy. But the LAPD had no such strategy. Instead, as Charlie Beck later pointed out, “it was all search and destroy andblunt-force military tactics and assaults.” The philosophy had deadly consequences. “There was a period at the time when I entered the police department in the fifties until 1977 when there wasno shooting policy,” says Jack White, a former LAPD commander and Police Commission chief investigator. “And this was by design. It was felt that a shooting policy would limit an officer’s activities in a department [with] a proactive morality of seek out the criminal and take action. [Consequently], we shot people running away from us for a long time.” As a result, among the police departments of the six largest cities in the United States, theLAPD ranked number one in killing or wounding the largest number of civilians, when adjusted for the number of officers on the force.
    What made it all so maddening was the same-old, same-old nature of the problem. In 1980, Gates had only been chief for two years when the American Jewish Committee, the Urban League, and the National Conference of Christians and Jews released a study of the LAPD’s treatment of the black community fifteen years after the Watts Riots. It concluded thatvirtually nothing had changed in terms of the department’s abusive treatment of African-Americans. A year later, in 1981, LAPD deputychief Lou Reiter warned in a retirement speech that the police in South Central had become “ahard-charging street army” that had “developed the philosophy that everyone who is black is a bad guy.”
    During his tenure as chief, from 1978 to 1992, Daryl Gates not only failed to address the problem, he made it worse. In pursuit of his war, Gates expanded the LAPD’s traditional deployment of techno-cop machines and military tactics. EighteenBell Jet Ranger or French Aerospatiale helicopters with state-of-the-art surveillance technology would regularly circle deafeningly low in the city’s ghettos and barrios. Sixteen-round, 9mm, double-action, semiautomatic Berettas had become the department’s standard-issue sidearm. Search-and-destroy missions like the