Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (42 page)

So, as Beck took charge, seriously decreasing the area’s historic gang violence—along with avoiding another riot—became his top imperative. If history was any judge, however, his prognosis for success was not good. From 1979 to 2006, South Los Angeles had been a lodestar of a modern-day, post-1960s gang culture that during those years had produced, as previously mentioned,
over eleven thousand gang-related
homicides in Los Angeles County alone. From 2000 to 2009 there were 9,917 homicides in the county as a whole (which includes the city of Los Angeles), of which 43 percent were gang-related. Those gang killings were a terrible subcultural fratricide that was
costing the people of L.A. County $2 billion a year in police, medical, and other related expenses. Far more important was the terrible cost in the unlived lives of thousands of dead young men.

Nevertheless, the homicide rate wasn’t nearly as high as in the nineties. By 2004, in fact,
gang-related killings countywide had dropped from a peak of just over 800 in 1995 to 464, and had significantly declined in the city as well. Moreover, the crack wars and widespread street dealing that had caused so much of the violence had largely disappeared. Nevertheless, the homicide numbers were erratic—sometimes up, sometimes down, and still way too high. All one had to do to confirm that was to ask Pat Gannon.

Pat Gannon and Bo Taylor, Autumn 2005, 77th Street Division, South Los Angeles

By the time Charlie Beck arrived, few members of the LAPD were more knowledgeable about gang crime in South Bureau than Captain Patrick Gannon, who had received a crash course on the subject since leaving Internal Affairs. In the autumn of 2005 he’d been tapped to head the 77th Street Division—a gang-plagued section of South Bureau abutting Watts.

It was there, early one afternoon in November of 2005, that a call crackled over Gannon’s car radio as he was
cruising down the freeway: a drive-by shooting had just occurred near the corner of Manchester and Vermont, not far from his new division’s station house.

Immediately changing course, Gannon headed toward the scene, listening as he went to the beat of new information pulsating in over the radio: the victim was seventeen years old . . . a student who’d been shot in an alley . . .
wounded in the ankle . . . otherwise not seriously injured.

The alley was right next to a continuation high school. But the shooting had nothing to do with the school and everything to do with the victim being both a gangster and the latest casualty in an ongoing gang war between the Inglewood Family and the Rolling 60s Crips—a conflict that spanned about eleven square miles housing tens of thousands of residents.

Not more than a few minutes passed before another shooting call came in. Over the next four hours there would be nineteen more, for a total of
twenty—
twenty
—retaliatory shootings.

That night, black L.A.’s premier football game was scheduled between the city’s last two predominantly black high schools: Dorsey and Crenshaw. The schools were historically bitter enemies not only on the football field but also on the street. Dorsey’s gangs were Bloods, Crenshaw’s Crips.

By early evening two hundred additional cops were flooding the area, but both a drive-by and an officer-involved shooting nonetheless occurred that night.

Just one month into his tenure as the 77th Street Division’s commander, Pat Gannon found himself facing an astounding problem, and the responsibility of solving it. Bratton had made that clear during his first command staff meeting at the Police Academy: it’s your division; bring down crime legally, but otherwise as you see fit;
if there’s a problem, you own it, you fix it.

Gannon had reveled in the freedom of that concept when he’d first heard it. But twenty shootings in one afternoon would be no easy fix. The obvious one—overwhelming the area with cops—wasn’t a long-term option. The LAPD simply didn’t have enough officers to keep hundreds more of them assigned there permanently, in just one of South Bureau’s four divisions. They were needed in those other divisions, as well as in Central and Wilshire and East L.A., where the areas’ “hot spots” were also being flooded with cops as part of Bill Bratton’s all-out effort to bring down gang crime.

Besides, Gannon’s officers had already
been
“
stopping tons of people,” as Gannon later put it, and “using search warrants, and doing parole searches—all of which had changed nothing.” Then he remembered once witnessing a civilian gang interventionist successfully halt a similar
but much smaller episode, and began asking who was doing that kind of work in South L.A. Not long after, he was put in touch with a former gangster named Bo Taylor.

A thirty-nine-year-old
father of four, Taylor was a charismatic
U.S. Navy veteran with a powerful personality who’d risen up the hierarchy of a local Crips gang by selling drugs. He skillfully melded his preacher-like persona with what Connie Rice called his “
Dr. Phil–like” conciliatory gifts. By 2005 he was out of the gang life and consumed with a born-again spiritual revival in the cause of advancing the gospel of gang-violence intervention through a grassroots organization called
Unity One that he’d founded after the ’92 riots. Gannon reached out to Taylor—who was already working with Connie Rice—and arranged for him to meet with about
thirty mostly self-declared interventionists, some out of active gang life and working with Unity One, some with one foot still in and the other out.

Partnering with civilian gang intervention workers—whose job was to help reduce gang violence—had never been part of the LAPD’s playbook. “For most of the past thirty years,” as veteran gang interventionist Ron Noblet later explained, “not only were we unwelcome,
we were actual
targets
of law enforcement, viewed—if not as gangsters ourselves—then as some kind of radical, militant anti-police scum, or as a social worker, which was just one click above scum.”

There’d always been LAPD officers who understood the need to work with grassroots community organizations who weren’t part of the department’s usual cast of police groupies—including those employing interventionists. But inevitably those officers would be singled out, disparaged for going native, and become persona non grata within the department.

Some community organizers weren’t ex-gangsters but people who’d trained in disciplines like social work (or, in the case of Noblet, in
Eastern European studies and the region’s ethnic animosities at USC) and had been hired by organizations funded by Los Angeles County or private agencies. There were also people like the Jesuit priest Father Gregory Boyle, who created and ran his own comprehensive gang intervention, rehab, and job training programs. But most such organizations
had few formal job requirements and, often, no real criteria for evaluating effectiveness.

That unstructured, often ad hoc nature of gang intervention—along with the gangster past of many of the interventionists—had made it inconceivable that an LAPD notoriously unwilling to partner with any “outsiders” would readily collaborate with these groups. Many
were
mixed bags, and the LAPD had every right to be cautious. But others, like Taylor, were genuinely trying to help their neighborhoods and themselves transition out of a self-destructive situation.

They constituted an entire spectrum of men, from those who never did much of anything in gangs, to shot-callers who’d done their twelve years in prison, matured, learned and changed, and were now back on the street. They possessed a unique range of insights into gut-level cultural street values, gang norms, and street psychology—all of which uniquely allowed them to dispel rumors, calm fears, lower passions, and stop a single outbreak of violence from escalating into the kind of tribal retribution Pat Gannon was now confronting.

They understood, for example, that while street-gang violence was sometimes about money and business—as it was during the crack wars of the 1980s and ’90s—drugs were not why the participants were gangsters. They might use drugs and sell drugs, but they’d become gangsters because of where they lived, so that they might become part of that neighborhood’s most powerful street fraternity. Drugs just happened to be one of the businesses they did, unlike the drug crews on the East Coast, which formed precisely
so
they could deal drugs.

In L.A. it was all far more primal than just money. It was a way of exercising power in a closed, segregated subculture where kids and young men had been exposed to very little other than answering slights and insults with guns. In their world, you had to defend your reputation, and your gang’s, to survive. That was the sad, dog-eat-dog reality at the lowest rung of urban America’s class and racial ladder. Some of them—some of those ex-gangsters turned interventionists like Bo Taylor—seemed also to have a new, hard-won understanding of their experience—one best summed up by a gangster named Kumasi who, in Stacy Peralta’s brilliantly revelatory documentary
Crips and Bloods: Made in America
, says: “Part of the mechanics of oppressing people is to pervert them to the extent that they become their own oppressors.”

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

After Bo Taylor arranged the meeting with the gang interventionists, Pat Gannon was instructed to dress in civilian clothes and show up alone to the basement of a local church. There he met with them three times.
Dur
ing the first two meetings, they hammered him about constantly being stopped, harassed, and arrested. At their third gathering, Gannon finally interrupted them. “Look,” he said, “I’m having serious trouble with the Rolling 60s and the Inglewood Family. I’ve had eight murders in just the last two weeks. I’ve arrested people and have multiple resources, but I’m not making any headway. Can you help?” After Gannon’s request, the running gun battles stopped. Dead cold. That day.

“Nothing was working,” says Gannon. “
That worked.”

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

Many LAPD officers in South Bureau had long viewed themselves as dumped into a hopeless, thankless situation, one caused by a community of people who were alien to them and who, they believed, were in some inexplicable way inherently inclined to criminality. The cops’ incomprehension, their frustration, was impossible to hide. The LAPD was an organization with a strong work ethic, and in South Bureau, where the atmosphere was fraught with physical danger and psychic shocks, that attitude played into how officers policed. That, and the fact that no matter how hard they tried, the situation on the street never got any better. It was therefore easy to assume it that it was only going to get worse, and that the present was only a prelude to a
Blade Runner
future.

Consequently, when crime and violence rose in the area, the LAPD would simply up their game and increase their workload, doubling down with all they knew, which was the big stick and indiscriminate arrests. And the more they did, the worse things had indeed gotten in South Bureau—a push-pull catch-22 the department had historically seemed incapable of even questioning.

Instead it employed its own form of zero-tolerance, “broken windows” policing—
a harassing, indiscriminate stop-question-and-frisk enforcement that the department referred to not as “stop-and-frisk” but as “aggressive” or “proactive” or “confront-and-command” policing. What they’d learned in the process was how to make sure nobody came out on the street at night, but not how to stop crime once their Operation Hammers were over.

They, the cops in South L.A., were good at what they did, if one considered it a positive social good to arrest as many people as possible, see them sent to jail and prison for as long as possible, and then do the same to their little brothers and sons, on and on, for generations.

Slowly, however, some did start to question that strategy. Gannon was one of them. Charlie Beck was another. Beck had even developed an analogy to illustrate his perplexity. A young police officer is standing
at the end of a conveyer belt. He’s the last guy on the assembly line, catching all these guys from South L.A. as they fall off, and then packing them off to jail. And next to him is his older, more thoughtful self, wondering what’s going on at the start of the line that’s placing all those guys—nonstop—onto the conveyer belt in the first place.

There were a few other people who were also asking that question and exploring the astounding, multilayered, complex influences that defined poor black areas of cities across the country, like Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Oakland, St. Louis, and Los Angeles—and law enforcement’s bludgeon-like response to them. Richard Price, in his uncannily knowing novels about the intersection between cops, crime, drugs, and race, was one of those voices, as was David Simon in
The Wire
, his incomparable television meditation on the drug war and the underbelly of big-city America during the crack years. And there was David Kennedy, the brilliant activist anthropology professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, whose “lifework,” as the
New Yorker
once put it, was “designing a modern system of deterrence that includes a moral component.”

And then, from inside law enforcement, there was Bill Bratton. He was asking a couple of different questions: why are we permitting this level of crime and violence to continue, and what can we do as cops, as strategists and managers, to stop it?

A man of ideas, logic, and solutions,
Bratton was a true believer in rules and laws. He seemed personally to find manifestations of disorder such as graffiti both disharmonious and disgusting. Considerations of big-picture social and economic injustice needed to be addressed, he believed, but if they didn’t directly apply to policing, were beyond his job description. What he prided himself on, what he loved, and
what he did
was develop smart, effective policing strategies that quantifiably drove down crime numbers. That was his mixed gift to modern, big-city law enforcement.

To accomplish that goal in Los Angeles, he had to significantly reduce gang crime and violence. The other values he would espouse about policing within the letter of the law—helping build stronger neighborhoods through community policing partnerships, holding officers accountable for abusing the public, easing racial animosity between his cops and poor blacks and Hispanics—were all things Bratton publicly espoused. But ultimately they were ancillary problems to be unpacked and dealt with in the service of his one overriding imperative of reducing and preventing crime.