Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing Read Online Free PDF Page A

crude, 250-pound machines over roads pockmarked with high moguls and deep, treacherous holes. That fact didn’t tell you everything needed to know about him, but it did tell you a lot about the fire in his belly.
    He’d spent much of the eighties being one of the cops that N.W.A so blisteringly rapped about in “Fuck Tha Police.” In the harsh, unforgiving confines of theSoutheast Division, Beck had been part of a narcotics task force that roamed black South L.A., busting open crack houses, three or four a day, arresting thousands of sellers and customers. Four sergeants and their squads—about forty cops in all—would burst through a door and capture some hapless fourteen-year-old who’d been given fifty or a hundred vials of crack to sell, some cash to make change, and a gun to defend the stash.
    Once, responding to a raid on a drug house, Beck arrived to find that his fellow gang officers had handcuffed and sprawled out a group of children on the street. It caught Beck up short, like a new line was being crossed. “They weren’t evil people,” he’d later tell the L.A. Times , referring to his fellow officers, “they were just doing what they were taught. There was [just] no room for independent thought in the department.”
    Sometimes after a raid, when they were cleaning up, customers would knock on the door to buy dope, and the undercover guys would make the sale and then the arrest. Having recovered thousands of dollars in small bills, they’d then go back to the station house, book the money, the kid, and the customers, and go out again the next day to repeat the same drill. “That,” says Beck “was the LAPD’s crack-war strategy”—a reminder that while the official motto of the LAPD might be “To Protect and To Serve,” the unofficial motto was always “Hook ’Em and Book ’Em.”
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    As dusk was settling in,Charlie Beckdrove his Ford Bronco west, back to Parker Center. Along the route, he could see plumes of smoke spiraling up from South Central as he listened to the staccato beat of riot news on his car radio. He couldn’t understand why the LAPD wasn’t flooding officers into the riot’s hot zones to nip the violence in the bud. He could readily fathom the reality of the riot. What he’d never imagined was that his department would fail to respond. If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction , as they had shown, for example, during the infamous1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue.
    There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that theRed Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end,the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “apoorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.”
    The attitude too had come right from the top. In 1986, two years before the Dalton Avenue raid, LAPD chief Daryl Gates was videotaped giving his end-of-year address, which