L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

There were three passengers in the car, all black men. Two passengers got out and, following police instructions, lay down prone on the ground. The driver of the car hesitated and then slowly climbed out. Across the street, the sirens and police helicopter awakened a plumbing supply store manager, who’d recently purchased a video camera. He dressed and stumbled out to his balcony with the camcorder. Then he turned it on and captured nine minutes and twenty seconds of footage that showed a large black man charging the police. An officer swung his baton at the man, knocking him down. The officer kept swinging as the man writhed across the ground. A large group of officers stood by, arms folded. The man was then taken into custody. The videographer was disturbed by what seemed to be a brutal and blatant example of “street justice.” The next day, he offered his tape first to the LAPD and then to CNN. Neither was interested. On Monday, the videographer took it to a local television station, KTLA. That evening, KTLA put the tape up on the ten o’clock news. By Tuesday morning, CNN (which had an affiliate agreement with KTLA) had started to put an edited version on the air, one that had cut out the driver’s initial charge at the police. NBC had a tape by later in the day. The beating of Rodney King was now playing endlessly across the country.

The LAPD hierarchy was shocked by what they saw, although many commanders saw something very different from what the public did. LAPD Sgt. Charles Duke, a martial arts consultant, was distressed by how ineffectively the arresting officer used his baton. Other officers were disturbed by the failure of the supervising sergeant to make use of the large numbers of officers who had arrived at the scene and stood by watching. But the brass had no interest in examining the possibility that poor training had played a role in the beating. Instead, Chief Gates described the beating as an “aberration” and promised a full investigation. Mayor Bradley vowed that “appropriate action” would be taken against the officers involved. County DA Ira Reiner immediately convened a grand jury and within two weeks of the incident, four of the officers involved were indicted.

Mayor Bradley decided the time was right to assert his authority over the police department—authority that, legally, he did not have. On April 1, he announced the formation of “an independent commission” on the Los Angeles Police Department. Its chairman was attorney Warren Christopher, former vice chairman of the McCone Commission, deputy attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson, deputy secretary of state under President Jimmy Carter, and a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, the city’s most powerful law firm. The day after announcing the appointment, Bradley asked Gates for his resignation. Gates refused.

The Police Commission, whose members were Bradley loyalists, met secretly (in violation of state law) and then informed the chief that they were voting to put him on unpaid leave to investigate “serious allegations of mismanagement.” This angered the chief. It was Mayor Bradley, not he, who had recently been dogged by a series of allegations about improper entanglements with businessmen seeking favors from the city. Gates said he’d see them in court. The city council, led by John Ferraro, pressured the Police Commission to reinstate Gates. Finally, after a judge issued a restraining order against the commission’s attempted action, Ferraro managed to persuade Bradley and Gates to agree to a truce. Privately, though, Gates had come to believe that Bradley “had brought to Los Angeles a rat’s nest of impropriety not seen since the days of the Shaw regime of the 1930s.” Meanwhile, the prosecutors’ case against the officers involved in the beating moved forward.

Three months later, on July 9, the Christopher Commission issued its report—and called for Chief Gates’s resignation. Its conclusions were damning. The report described a department with a small number of “problem officers,” who employed deadly force yet who never seemed to receive serious punishment. The commission criticized the department’s retreat from community policing and spoke directly to the culture Daryl Gates had inherited and intensified:

L.A.P.D. officers are trained to command and to confront, not to communicate. Regardless of their training, officers who are expected to produce high citation and arrest statistics and low response times do not also have time to explain their actions, to apologize when they make a mistake, or even to ask about problems in a neighborhood.

The historian Lou Cannon would later characterize the Christopher Commission report as “an impressive and penetrating indictment of the Los Angeles Police Department and its ‘siege mentality.’” But Cannon noted that it was also seriously flawed.