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

was then broadcast to his officers at roll calls throughout the department. In it, Gates laid out the operational template, the black-and-white world—both literally and figuratively—in which his officers should operate. “It’slike having the Marine Corps invade an area that is having little pockets of resistance,”he told them. “We can’t have it. . . . We’ve got to wipe [the gang members] out.”
    It was no wonder that, of the overeighty LAPD officers who took part in the Dalton Avenue raid, nobody ever stopped to ask, “Wait a minute, what the hell are we doing here? What’s the end goal?”

Daryl Gates, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, LAPD Headquarters
    When the “not guilty” verdicts were announced at 4 p.m., Charlie Beck had agreed with the general consensus at LAPD headquarters that despite the pounding in the press since King’s beating, “the department still maintained enough community support to head off any significant protests, and it could now getback to business as usual.”
    It was an astounding misreading of the situation, a catastrophic failure of intelligence gathering at the most basic street level, coupled with the inability of the LAPD high command to grasp the pulse and mood of the city it policed.
    Earlier in April, in anticipation of possible trouble following the verdicts, Daryl Gates had earmarked$1 million for police overtime and to make a contingency plan. But according to then Assistant Chief David Dotson, “There never was a riot contingency plan. The Police Commission was never able to get Gates to tell them what it was, because it was nonexistent.”
    In fact, on Tuesday, April 28—the day before the verdicts were announced and the riots began—the Los Angeles Police Commission had convened its weekly meeting in Parker Center. During a break, then police commissioner Anthony De Los Reyes privately asked Gates about the contingency plan. “The jury was still deliberating in Simi Valley, so I said to Gates, ‘You know, I have been practicing law a long time, and you just can’t predict what a jury is going to do. What if these officers are acquitted?’ And he said to me in that drawl of his, ‘Well, Commissioner, we have a plan to take care of this.’ And I said, ‘Okay. Well, that sounds good.’ But we never saw it. . . . Later, just after the riots, he was interviewed by [CNN talk-show host] Larry King, and King asked him aboutnot having a plan, and Daryl came out with this big sheaf of papers and said, ‘There it is.’ And I thought, ‘No, that’s not it.’ ”
    “Nobody believed those officers were going to be acquitted,” Reyes’s fellow police commissioner Ann Reiss Lane would later recall, “so we never asked to see the plan he said he had in writing. . . . He assured us that everything was in hand, but it turned out it wasn’t.”
    At a news conference early on April 30—the second day of the riots—Gates would nevertheless maintain that the department was “as ready as we ought to be” and that “we deployed all that we could have deployed at that particular time without going in[to] some mode that allowed us to build our resources.”
    Not having adequate resources at “that particular time”—just as the riots broke out—was precisely the problem. Prior to the riots, in fact, Gates had failed to even declare a tactical alert despite a courtnews release issued by 10 a.m. that morning announcing that the verdicts would be handed down that afternoon. Instead, the department’sone thousand detectives, who worked from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., were allowed, like Charlie Beck, to clock out and go home at the end of their shifts. Moreover, many of the department’s field captains, the critical ground-level operational decision makers in any police department, weren’t even in Los Angeles—they wereforty miles away, attending a seminar.
    In addition,Dotson, one of the LAPD’s most experienced assistant chiefs, was then considered persona non