Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (39 page)

They were hopeful that Jackson’s death would finally wake up a city seemingly inured to gang violence—just as Brian Watkins’s stabbing death had served as a powerful symbol of violent crime in New York for Bratton.

Nearby, Clive Jackson’s father rocked back and forth on his feet, inconsolable. By his side the boy’s mother stared at the ground as Bratton stepped toward the microphone. “
The gangs of Los Angeles,” said Bratton, “are much more of a national threat than the Mafia was, [and] if we don’t deal with them effectively, the disease that these gangs represent will spread across this country. We need to enlist the federal government as partners [against them], just as we are seeking to do with [the] probation and parole [departments] and various [other] entities.”

Then a
letter dated November 13, 2002, and addressed to UCLA was read. “My name is Clive Jackson,” it began. “I would like to know how to get into college so I can get ready [to apply]. . . . Who do I have to talk to? . . . How can I get a scholarship? . . . I don’t want my mom to pay for everything.” The letter continued in the same vein, heartbreaking in its simplicity, in its naïveté and innocence. For a moment even the cops and reporters appeared stunned. Which was exactly the point of having it read.

“It’s the whole idea of personalizing this problem,” Bratton said after the news conference. “This kid was just a good kid; he could be the one to put a face on crime here in L.A. . . . I describe it as the
Rosetta stone effect. I’m looking for that stone that really strikes a responsive chord.”

But it wasn’t to be. Clive Jackson’s tragic death turned out to be just another local black homicide, not a cross-racial killing of a white tourist with which the white middle class could easily identify and thus generate outrage and demands for action. So L.A. did not rise up as had New York following Brian Watkins’s death. California governor Gray Davis did not call offering tens of millions of dollars to help, as had New York governor Mario Cuomo. And Bill Bratton didn’t find his Rosetta stone.

Bratton would have to find another way to significantly halt the gang wars and violence that had caused an estimated 11,500 “
gang-related”
homicides in Los Angeles County from 1980 to 2000. It was an astounding number—the result of what Tom Hayden, in his book
Street Wars
, called an “
unchecked intra-tribal war.” A war that was nothing like a classic Marxist revolutionary rebellion, although it had the key elements: an impoverished black and brown underclass with a history of savage repression and a growing economic inequality, violently suppressed by wars on crime and drugs—that is, wars on them. But in Los Angeles the rebellion had turned inward onto itself, into a movement of what Hayden rightly described as “mass suicide” by generations of young men with a median age in their early twenties searching for power in the powerless world in which they lived.

**************

Bill Bratton had come to Los Angeles talking out of both sides of his mouth when it came to gangs. Spouting the rhetoric of war, he called gang members “
domestic terrorists,” “
a disease”—a cancer spreading across America, and “
more of a national threat than [was] the Mafia.”

In response, the Jesuit priest Father Gregory Boyle, the great East L.A. savior of lost gang souls and founder of the second-chance job program Homeboy Industries, told the
New York Times
that “
Al Capone is not what we’re dealing with here.” He explained that Bratton was engaging in a “
shoot-from-the-hip” analysis and bringing up memories of the bad old days of Daryl Gates. And he was.

It may well have been that the heated rhetoric was necessary for the new cop in town, signaling to communities that felt besieged by gang violence that he was going to reduce crime and keep them safe. Or that he was speaking to his first audience—his cop audience—and letting them know he was not some liberal, back-east reformer, and was going to make them safer too while restoring their tarnished image as crime fighters. But one thing was certain: if Bratton wanted to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles and be part of the process of stopping the criminalization of large portions of future generations of young black and brown Angelenos, he’d have to do more than talk—he would have to come up with solutions other than the failed blunt-force, paramilitary tactics of the old LAPD.

George Gascon, 2002, Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters

Fifty-year-old George Gascon was not a blunt-force kind of a guy.
Nor, thought Bill Bratton, was he the kind of a person “who would please you with a lie.” Bratton liked that. So it wasn’t all that surprising that one day Rikki Klieman approached Gascon—a lawyer and LAPD deputy chief—introduced herself, and, as she would later tell it, asked him if he wanted to do himself a favor. When he of course said yes, Klieman said, “
Go into Bill’s office and tell him everything you think is wrong with the LAPD.” Gascon’s face fell. But Klieman insisted. “
Do it and you’ll get what you want [the much-coveted number two job in the LAPD: chief of operations].”

By then, Bratton had been in office for about nine months. He had made an old friend named Jim McDonnell his operations chief. One reason he’d selected McDonnell was because he’d been impressed by a hundred-page, voluntarily written report that McDonnell had authored that delineated the department’s problems and how to fix them. Unfortunately, the laid-back McDonnell—who would later be elected sheriff of Los Angeles County—had turned out to lack the kind of dynamic leadership Bratton was looking for in an operations chief, and hence Bratton was now looking for somebody else.

Following Klieman’s advice, Gascon, a veteran of over twenty-five years with the LAPD,
met with Bratton. He told him that the changes taking place on a division and street level weren’t enough to significantly alter the status quo. Then he laid out the strategies he’d pursue if he were operations chief. A few months later Bratton made Gascon his operations chief.

Atypically for the LAPD, Gascon was a strong proponent of data-based crime prevention and strategies that focused on policing lawfully, with community acceptance and cooperation. In April of 2000, at the height of the Rampart scandal, Gascon had been placed in charge of the department’s training division. When the consent decree was signed, he began the decades-overdue revamping of the LAPD’s rote-drill, paramilitary training of police academy cadets and officers in the field. Focusing
on problem-solving and respect for civil liberties, he linked them, in a
new curriculum, to use-of-force and policing tactics. The linkage was so commonsensical and obvious that it was almost ludicrous that Gascon’s ideas were looked upon as amazing and innovative. But for the LAPD and police agencies operating in ghettos and barrios across America, they were. Instead of confronting and commanding people, arresting everyone in sight, quickly using force, and alienating entire communities as a way of reducing crime, Gascon instead was successfully advocating thinking through solutions to crime problems and being nice to the public as a way of getting its cooperation and support. The latter concept was really something straight out of Miss Manners or a self-help book about how to get what you want out of life. But for the LAPD it was somehow something new.

Gascon’s deep and abiding respect for constitutional rights was born out of his experience. He
arrived in the U.S. with his parents in 1967, when he was thirteen years old, as a
political refugee from Cuba. His father, a mechanic at a beer brewery in Cuba,
had been a supporter of Fidel Castro’s revolution, but became an outspoken critic of his government when Castro began to shut down all dissent to his policies. “
I got to see as a young person what it was like to live in a police state,” says Gascon, “where cops could just do what they wanted, and what it was like to be targeted by the police and have an organized neighborhood block club spying for the police. My mother and I were always fearful that when my father left the house he might not return [as had happened to
his uncle, a labor organizer who would spend twenty years in a Cuban prison]. One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about America is that the police are subservient to the people, not the other way around.”

Struggling to learn English, he
quit his Los Angeles high school,
joined the army,
became a military policeman,
earned his GED, and began college. Returning home, he
joined the LAPD in 1978. Struggling to raise his family, he quit after three years to make twice as much money
selling cars before
rejoining the department in 1987. Over the years he also earned a
degree in history from Cal State, Long Beach, and a
law degree from Western State University College of Law. He would
go on to first become San Francisco’s chief of police and then its district attorney.

George Gascon, in short, was exactly the kind of leader Bill Bratton was looking for.

Bratton, an avid reader of management books and profiles of business and political leaders, took “leadership identification” very seriously. One of the books he’d read was
Good to Great
, in which Jim Collins had written about the importance of “getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” For Bratton that meant not only positioning his LAPD leadership correctly on the organizational flowchart but matching those working out in the field to the right communities.

“
Risk taker” was among the highest of accolades Bratton used when describing a colleague or up-and-coming cop, and it was precisely that innovative quality—coupled with multicultural sensitivity and the ability to think innovatively and to build police-community and interpersonal relationships with black and Latino leaders and activists—that he was looking for, and that was essential to executing his brand of “assertive” but not abusive policing. Which, not incidentally, would involve
increasing
the already high number of pedestrian and vehicle stops the LAPD had been making, particularly in its barrios and in the African-American community. There, violent crime and murder numbers were rising, but hyperalertness to police violence and discourtesy still remained intense, and the relationships with the police fraught with mistrust.

Bernard Parks had reduced the use of the LAPD’s notoriously abusive stop-and-frisk practices, such as proning out suspects, spread-eagling them against a wall, or forcing them to kneel on the street with their hands clasped behind their necks while some LAPD officer, often using a loudspeaker, barked out orders.

The LAPD would have to significantly reduce those kinds of provocations if Bratton was going to successfully implement the kind of stop-question-frisk policing he had in mind, while convincing the black community that smart, better-targeted crime reduction and not harassment or arbitrary shows of force was the goal.

As all this was occurring, Bill Bratton was also devising a policing
strategy known as the “Safer Cities” Initiative.
In New York, Bratton had had thirty-eight thousand police officers, enough to flood any trouble spot with cops and keep them there until a problem was brought under long-term control.

In L.A., with a force of about nine thousand officers that would gradually expand to ten thousand, the department’s resources were stretched far too thin for him to do anything remotely like that citywide. So he decided to pick and choose his spots, designating five areas (including Skid Row) in which to concentrate police officers, and by so doing demonstrate that he could significantly reduce crime in the process.

But Bratton and Gascon, meanwhile, wanted to model and anchor their crime-reduction and community-cooperation theories within an even deeper, more independent and decentralized project than Safer Cities—one that would have a more immediate payoff, and where bureau chiefs, along with the rest of the chain of command, would be bypassed and division captains would report directly to Gascon.

They called it “
District Policing.” Gascon picked three divisions. None were in predominately black areas. Two of them—the Hollywood and Harbor divisions—were primarily selected because they already had highly regarded captains leading them. (Gannon was in Harbor.) The third, the Rampart Division, was chosen because it was crying out for immediate attention.

Charlie Beck, 2002, Parker Center

Charlie Beck had just left Parker Center and was walking across the street
to buy a deli sandwich when he spotted Bill Bratton in the crosswalk, coming the other way with his security detail. “So, Charlie,” he called out, “did you move to Rampart yet?”

“No, Chief,” Beck replied. “Next week.”

“
Make sure you clean up that fucking park.”

“I know, Chief. I will.”

“And that,” recalls Beck, “was
the entire extent of my instructions from him.”

Pico-Union was, of course, home not only to the disgraced Rampart Division but also to the park that Bratton had been talking about: MacArthur Park, a city oasis surrounding a small, man-made lake located on the easternmost end of the major commercial stretch of Wilshire Boulevard known as the “Miracle Mile.” Once an emerald jewel of Los Angeles, by the early nineties the park had turned into a crime-filled, semi-grassless brown wasteland whose deterioration symbolized the LAPD’s failure to provide public safety to the district.

When Charlie Beck first toured the park, he remembers seeing people selling drugs beyond the boathouse and the lake on its south side. “
Dope dealers would stand there and people would drive up on Wilshire, swing to the curb, get curbside service, and drive off,” he says. “That happened hundreds and hundreds of times a day. The park was literally a place that had been taken over by the criminal element.” And it wasn’t just dope dealers, Beck would add, it was gangsters, prostitutes, people hawking illegal IDs, selling counterfeit money.

“
There was literally no grass in the park,” recalls Beck. “Parks and Recreation had stopped doing maintenance, because they were afraid to go into the park. Regular people—families—wouldn’t come in either.” MacArthur Park was important to the LAPD’s new strategy in Pico-Union because it defined the area. “
Three hundred people were going to jail each month out of the park,” recalls Beck, “and nothing was changing. They would just go through the revolving doors of justice and be right back out.”