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

infamous 1988 raid on South Central’s Dalton Avenue became an integral part of the department’s drug war. Fierce-looking, heavily armed officers from the department’s special-unit Metro Division—the department’s “elite” shock troops—were deployed at the first hint of trouble, or just to make a point. By tradition, Metro’s officers were pulled from the toughest divisions. Their mission, as Daryl Gates once described it, was to “roust anything strange that moved on the streets.” And they did, brutally, at demonstrations, marches, and rallies, or in areas like South Central when things looked hot. And in 1988, they had been sizzling indeed—a prelude to the pot that would boil over into the flames now engulfing Los Angeles.
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    Separated by great distances, and cursed with a slow, inefficient mass transit system, street crime in Los Angeles is more a local, neighborhood affair than in more densely packed cities. But in January of 1988, there occurred an exception to the rule. As twenty-three-year-oldKaren Toshima was strolling through Westwood she got caught in the crossfire between two warring black gangs and was shot in the head and killed. Toshima was just one of ninety-six homicide victims killed by alleged gang members in the city of Los Angeles in the first five months of 1988. Ninety-five of them were just business as usual.
    Toshima’s, however, had taken place in Westwood, a once small college town abutting UCLA. Over the years, it had grown into a commercialhub of restaurants, movie theaters, shops, and high-rise office buildings surrounded by the homes of the wealthy inhabitants of residential Westwood, Brentwood, Holmby Hills, Bel Air, and a string of million-dollar condos known as the Gold Coast. Consequently, not only did the largely white upper middle class feel threatened by Toshima’s killing, but Entertainment Tonight ’s wealthy “Hollywood Royalty” did as well. So while Toshima’s shooting was an anomaly notable only for occurring where it did, it set off a furor. If you weren’t safe in Westwood, where were you safe? In response, Daryl Gates ordered “Operation Hammer.”
    Crudely conceived, Operation Hammer was a series of LAPD “gang sweeps” during which streets were barricaded, police poured into South L.A., and at leasttwenty-five thousand overwhelmingly black men of all ages were corralled and arrested. The arresting officers’ orders, as once summed up by a department spokesman, were simultaneously extremely vague and startlingly clear: “Pick ’em up for anything and everything.”
    Posting those massive arrest numbers took diligence as well as brute force and imagination. Using techniques they’d employed for decades in black L.A.,motorcycle and patrol officers multiplied their justification for initiating stops, issuing tickets, and making arrests. Cars parked twenty-three inches from the curb when the law said it should be eighteen were ticketed, as were those whose windshield wipers didn’t work, or that had a missing floor mat. And if a driver or passenger had an outstanding parking, jaywalking, or traffic violation, it was off to jail. Alternately, officers would find a reason to deem a car “unsafe” and have it hauled off to an impoundment yard where it would sit, gathering daily fines so large that many owners couldn’t pay them and consequently would lose their vehicles.
    Retrospectively, it seems astounding that such a plan of concentrated, indiscriminate mass arrests would be executed in a major, liberal American city a quarter of a century into the post–civil rights era. But then, in Los Angeles the tactic had a predicate: The LAPD had pioneered the modern use of the big-city police “dragnet” way back in the 1920s, when its officers would regularly fan out across ten or twelve majorboulevard intersections for no particular reason and stop to examine all passing vehicles in an effort to ferret out any “suspicious characters.”