Police Reform

Los Angeles, home of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and numerous police shows featuring the Los Angeles Police Department has a much darker side. From the bombing of the Los Angeles Times in 1910, published by Harrison Gray Otis, a conservative businessman who referred to unions as “anarchic scum,” through strikes by the West Coast Waterfront and International Longshore and Warehouse Union Strikes of the 1930s, the LAPD had a reputation as racist, anti-union, and anti-immigrant. 

They enhanced their reputation for unrestrained violence during the Zoot Suit Riots in 1943, during which American servicemen and white Angelenos savagely beat Mexican Americans and other ethnic minorities deemed “unpatriotic.” The reputation of LAPD was cemented during the 1965 Watts riots in which 34 people died after an African American driver was pulled over and beaten. Dragnet’s honest, just the facts Ma'am everyday hero, Joe Friday, played well among the Anglo majority in LA, but in black and Latino neighborhoods, LAPD as well as the LA Sheriffs deputies were not respected but viewed with loathing and a healthy dose of fear.

Racial themed violence returned once more when a jury acquitted four law enforcement officers from several agencies for using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King, an African American motorist in 1991. This beatdown would have been excused like so many before it, with the victim charged with resisting arrest, being in possession of a weapon conveniently dropped by the police, or in possession of illegal drugs, planted again by the crooked cops, except for one small problem. This arrest was videotaped by a bystander and viewed by millions. Black Angelenos had finally reached a boiling point. Widespread looting, assault, arson, and murder, resulting in sixty-three deaths and over a billion dollars in property damage followed, shattering whatever civic comity had existed in LA. 

The Governor sent in the California National Guard, and the Feds added the Army and Marines to troops on the ground, to finally quell the disturbances. A quote from Dylan Thomas, that crazy drunken Welsh poet, whom I greatly admire for his ability to conjure the human condition, chronicling an earlier man-made tragedy, probably best described what occurred, as the overlooked, downtrodden, lost denizens of LA’s not so invisible underbelly spent several frightening uncontrolled days, “raging against the dying of the light.” 

What was clear to objective observers was that the police were viewed very differently by white and racial minority communities. In white communities, officers were overwhelmingly viewed as public servants and protectors of law and order. In Black and Latino communities, not just in LA but throughout California, the perception, based often on personal experience, was very different.

The motto of LAPD, “To Protect and to Serve,” was viewed more as a cosmic joke than a civic commitment in the barrios of East LA and the African American neighborhoods south of the Santa Monica Freeway. In LA’s ethnic communities, cops were often viewed as an invading army, and their squad cars were not viewed as civic protectors but symbols of a despised colonial power. As the Christopher Commission would later establish, a significant number, if only a small minority of LAPD officers, repeatedly abused minority residents, consistently ignored department guidelines regarding physical restraint, and “bias related to race, gender, and sexual orientation were regularly contributing factors in the use of excessive force.” 

Subsequent to the riots, the President of the Senate appointed Senator Torres chair of a select committee tasked with determining the causes of the LA unrest, and more ambitiously, investigating the relationship between law enforcement and minority communities throughout California. He was also directed to propose solutions or at least a process for narrowing the divide.

I was appointed counsel to the committee, which would become the most challenging assignment in my career to date. The committee held hearings up and down the state, from San Diego in the south to Arcata in the far north, as well as a very troubling hearing in Redding, located in the northern Sacramento Valley. 

The road show produced sensational testimony. In a hearing held in the community room of an East Los Angeles housing project after a young teen was shot dead by a Deputy Sheriff, numerous witnesses came forward who would not previously speak to the police. Witness testimony contrasted drastically from the official report submitted by the officers involved who claimed they had witnessed numerous infractions and illegal drugs. 

According to multiple eyewitnesses, including several elderly women who had observed the entire seen from adjacent windows, a group of young people were enjoying a peaceful summer night out, listening to music, enjoying a few cold beers to avoid the heat, when a patrol car rolled up and two officers approached and began hassling the young people who numbered about 20. After a few minutes of this, and an exchange of insults, someone in the crowd threw a beer bottle at the police cruiser, at which point, without warning, as one cop rushed to the car to call for reinforcements, the second cop pulled his gun and fired several shots into the crowd killing a 14-year-old boy. No drugs or weapons were found at the scene.

In San Diego, an officer shot dead a mentally disturbed young man in front of his parents, who had made the call in the first place. District Attorneys, who work closely with the police daily, declined to prosecute. Subsequent investigations found within the Los Angeles Police Department a criminal drug dealing enterprise, and within the LA Sheriffs, a white supremacist gang called “The Vikings.”

These situations were, if sensational and headline grabbing, sadly not unusual. Similar stories were told in Oakland, Sacramento, and Humboldt County. Senator Torres received a call from the Police Chief of Redding, who was so disturbed by the behavior of Butte County deputies towards members of the Pitt River Indian tribe that he requested the Committee hold a hearing in his conservative city. Testimony by the chief and numerous tribal members laid out a pattern of “drunken Injun” arrests and beatings that seemed rooted more in the nineteenth century than the twentieth. Native Americans were regularly stopped for dubious offenses, roughed up and arrested, then sentenced to county work farms.

When the hearings concluded, Senator Torres was faced with a dilemma: he could rest on the publicity and hope the light he had shined on this dark little corner of American law enforcement would lead to systemic change, or he could introduce legislation to continue to highlight the issue. He determined, despite heavy pressure from police unions, that the problems were systemic, and that local action, such as that subsequently recommended by the Christopher Commission in LA, would be insufficient. 

Los Angeles was quietly settling cases for hundreds of millions of dollars for civil rights abuses by police, away from public scrutiny. But the problem was far more widespread than just LA, and many local jurisdictions did not have the will, the training dollars, or the stomach to change police culture. Furthermore, police unions had the legislature tied in knots. Democrats who supported public employee unions enjoyed police cred, showing they were tough on crime. Republicans supported “law and order” at all costs and were certainly not above inciting racial division, convincing their primarily white suburban and rural supporters of impending doom if police were restrained from current practices. 

Local DAs depended on police daily to investigate crimes and provide testimony, and had no interest in opposing local law enforcement, because that path could lead to a loss at the next election. Police enjoyed special legal protections that made justice nearly impossible.

A glaring example was something called the Peace Officers Bill of Rights, which protected good and bad cops alike. Under this law, future employers could not review an officer’s previous employment record. In other words, if a cop were fired in LA for use of excessive force, bias, civil rights violations, or all of the above, and subsequently applied for a job at Oakland PD, Oakland had no right to see why he had left his previous employment. 

Zapata determined that statewide legislation was needed. He instructed me to draft a bill that called for civil review of complaints against officers, removing local DAs from the process. It called for more female officers, more diversity in outreach and hiring, and a less militaristic approach to training, in addition to making officer misconduct complaints available to future employers. With the support of Senator Ed Davis, the former police chief of LA, it called for a return to community policing, something Davis had instituted during his tenure at the Parker building. In other words, cops would be on foot, bicycles, and horseback so they could get to know the community they were policing, rather than riding through in squad cars looking to make a promotion with drug busts. 

The bill was met with deafening silence by legislators, and fierce hyperbolic opposition by the police unions and their legion of lobbyists. Police unions had this thing locked down. For Torres, this was personal. While growing up in LA he had witnessed overt racism directed at members of his family and community, and in the ensuing years the situation had clearly not improved. Over the next months he would amend the bill, introduce different versions, and switch committees, all to no avail. I was being regularly threatened by lobbyists for the police unions, with one burly cop actually pinning me against a wall outside of a committee room and threatening my family. I got to a point where I was afraid to start my car at night. 

This went on for six months, the Senator determined to carry on, while threats increased. When the legislative session mercifully ended, I was relieved. The bill had never even passed a single committee. This had been a pressure cooker like none I had previously experienced, and the legislature did nothing. 

It would take another twenty-five years and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Missouri, along with similar incidents in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Oakland, Sacramento, and Minneapolis, before legislators in various jurisdictions nationwide would begin to have the courage to again tackle endemic police violence against minority communities. 

Years later, Senator Torres would have been a national hero for addressing this smoldering problem, but in the short term, the fallout was severe. The police unions declared war on the Senator as an example was needed to put an end to this accountability heresy. 

As a somewhat comical aside, just after the legislative session had come to a merciful end, I was having Thanksgiving dinner at the home of future wife number two’s father, a 25 year veteran of the Highway Patrol, with six of his officer friends and spouses, all in a celebratory mood over the demise of the nefarious attempt to hold them accountable for occasionally shooting unarmed Black and Latino citizens, when my future wife quietly asked her father if he had heard of the Bay Area group, “Bad Cop, No Doughnut?” When her dad indicated that yes, he knew of the “traitorous, commie pansies,” she laughed and told the assembled, now partly inebriated comrades in the thin blue line, that her boyfriend, the quiet, bearded one, already exceedingly uncomfortable and studiously ingratiating in this environment, had led the effort to reform police practices, and recently joined the aforementioned organization. The girl did have a wicked sense of humor - likely the root of my attraction, though through the remainder of that evening, I was the recipient of enough Medusa-like glares that had I indeed been reduced to stone, I would have looked back more fondly on the experience!