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

grata and went unused during the riots as part of his punishment for being critical of the department’s leadership when he testified before the Christopher Commission in June 1991.
    Simultaneously,Assistant Chief Robert Vernon was on leave pending his retirement. Earlier, he had been excoriated by the city council for preaching strict Christian fundamentalist practices to department officers, including, among other things, the benefits of using strict corporal punishment to discipline children and adolescents—advice that cumulatively would end his career.
    Vernon had been in charge of field operations long enough that Daryl Gates and his command staff had grown accustomed to him being their operational go-to guy. It was a big job—theoverseeing ofabout 85 percent of the department’s cops, including patrol officers and detectives. But after Vernon had gone on leave, no one seemed able to pick up his mantle. A lot of people may have disliked Bob Vernon, but nobody had ever accused him of being afraid to make a decision on the spot—a command characteristic that was sorely missing as the riots began exploding.
    Along with the leadership vacuum was the problem of communication. There was little between Gates and the Police Commission, and none between Gates andMayor Bradley, with whom he hadn’t spoken for over a year.
    Most astoundingly, there had also beenno coordination with the Los Angeles Fire Department—a particularly grievous act of arrogance and ineptitude, given that Gates had personally watched Watts go up in flames during the ’65 riots.Six hundred buildings had been burned, damaged, or destroyed by fires and looters in those riots.
    “One of the things that overwhelmed us,” Gates would say at that April 30, 1992, news conference, “was the number of fires that occurred and the attacks on the firefighters. It simply became impossible for the firefighters to go out and do their job without police protection. . . . Our resources were [consequently] engaged with the Fire Department and protecting the Fire Department.”
    But it soon became clear that Gates had been making it all up as he went along. In a postmortem following the ’92 riots, the city’s fire chief bitterly complained about the LAPD denying his fire department’s initial requests for escort service into South Central to fight the fires because, as the firefighters were told, it was “not a top priority.”
    Rumors would later abound in the black community that Gates and the LAPD had simply let the initial rioting explode so that, as Bill Parker had suggested twenty-seven years earlier, the white public would later get out and “support a strong police department.” But the truth was far more complex.
    Morale in the department was at an all-time low. Its leadership was in disarray and feared being accused by critics of escalating the violence if it responded forcefully. As Gates put it the morning after the breakout of the riots, “I think there was a lot of discussion that we [the LAPD]were being provocative . . . and so we were very, very, careful not to show that provocativeness.”
    But above all, the failure lay with Gates’s contempt for outside voices and his stubborn determination to continue policing and running the department the way Bill Parker had decreed. All these traits had become deeply embedded in the LAPD’s culture as well. Officers in station houses across the city literally cheered as the “not guilty” verdicts were announced. At the department’s Foothill Station, a young officer named Corina Smith pumped her fist in the air and told the Los Angeles Times , “I’m elated, absolutely elated. It’s like this sick feeling is finally going away.” Another officer offered a similar view: “I feel the truth came out,” he said, “and that the verdicts are a reflection of the truth.”
    That was how a lot of LAPD officers, perhaps most, felt: that the officers had really done nothing wrong, and that