the rookie cop who rose from driver for a legendary chief to become
chief himself, leading the Los Angeles Police Department during a
turbulent 14-year period that found him struggling to keep pace with a
city undergoing dramatic racial and ethnic changes, has died, the LAPD
announced Friday. He was 83.
The controversial chief, whose tenure ran from 1978
to 1992, spent his entire four-decade career at the LAPD, where he won
national attention for innovative approaches to crime fighting and
prevention: He instituted military-style SWAT teams to handle crises
and the gentler DARE classroom program to prevent drug abuse. These
initiatives, emulated by police departments across
and other advances, such as a communications system that reduced police
response times, bolstered his reputation as an exemplar of modern law
enforcement. President
A proud emblem of progress to some, he was a
disturbing symbol of stagnation to others. When the city went up in
flames over the acquittal of four white officers accused of beating
black motorist
leader out of touch with the changing realities of the city, yet to the
end he remained righteous about his authority to police it.
Faced with a proliferation of illegal drugs and
street violence, he hammered gangs with police sweeps and broke into
crack dens with an armored vehicle armed with a steel battering ram. He
made no apologies for declaring that casual drug users should be shot.
By turns charming and brash, articulate and
tactless, he generated controversy with gaffes about Latinos, blacks
and Jews, most famously with a remark about blacks faring poorly under
police chokeholds because their physiology was different from that of
“normal” people. Fiercely loyal to his rank and file, he clashed
frequently with elected officials, particularly when they slashed his
budget or meddled in department discipline, and vowed he would never be
bullied by “crummy politicians.”
Throughout his tenure, he had a fractious relationship with
the former LAPD lieutenant and councilman who united a diverse
coalition of constituencies to become the city’s first African-American
mayor.
Gates “fought vigorously to make sure the chief’s duties were not encroached upon. That comes from understanding the struggles
Parks said it was important to remember that the
vilification of Gates after the King beating was not universal and that
his accomplishments as chief mattered to large segments of the city
long after he left the department.
“If you go to areas of the Valley, police
organizations, officers’ funerals … he gets the loudest ovation,”
Parks noted recently. “I’ve never seen a situation where … 18 years
after retirement, officers who never worked with him cheer him as chief
of police.”
Yet others just as vehemently argue that Gates’
strengths were outweighed by his weaknesses, particularly his failure
to evolve with a city whose politics and social fabric had been
transformed by the maturing of established minority communities and the
flowering of newer ones molded by immigration.
“This L.A. was a changing city. … He never made the adjustment to the new L.A.,” said
In 1991, the videotaped beating of King was replayed
around the world, shattering the carefully nurtured myth that the LAPD
of “Dragnet” fame — professional, honest and humane — never stooped to
such behavior. Gates was slow to criticize his officers’ handling of
the incident and missing from his command post when the officers’
acquittal provoked the worst urban violence in decades, causing at
least 53 deaths and more than
It was not the first time that critics had demanded his ouster, but it would be the last.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ROOTS
Gates’ combative style can be traced to a hardscrabble childhood in
When the Depression hit a few years later, his father, a plumber, took
to drinking and frequently disappeared from home. His mother found a
job in a dress factory, leaving Gates and his two brothers, Lowell and
Stephen, to fend for themselves.
Police often barged into their ramshackle home
looking for the senior Gates, whose debts and alcoholic behavior got
him into trouble. The harsh treatment of his father gave Gates a dim
view of law enforcement as “just a plague on society,” he wrote in his
1992 memoir, “Chief:
little respect for the police that when he was 16 he punched an officer
for writing him a parking ticket and was hauled to jail. The charges
were dropped when he reluctantly apologized.
In 1943, after graduating from Franklin High School in
Gates joined the Navy and served two years as “a plain old seaman” on a
destroyer in the Pacific. Following his discharge, he enrolled at
When a friend suggested that he join the Los Angeles
Police Department, he said there was no way he would ever become “a
dumb cop.” He changed his mind when he realized that earning the
then-considerable sum of
He started out in the traffic division, working as
an accident investigator until he was transferred to patrol. He
completed his rookie year still intending to be a lawyer when he was
tapped to serve as driver and bodyguard for Parker, newly installed as
chief. Over the next 16 years, Parker shaped the department into one of
the most highly regarded in the country.
Parker talked a lot as Gates drove around the city,
and Gates listened, soon earning a reputation as the chief’s
fair-haired boy. “What I received during my 15 months with him turned
out to be more than a primer on policing,” Gates wrote. “It became a
tutorial on how to be chief.”
When he returned to the field, Gates worked juvenile
patrol, then vice, before winning promotion to sergeant in 1955. He
studied hard for every promotion exam and earned top scores that
enabled him to make lieutenant in 1959 and captain in 1963.
In the spring of 1965 he rose to inspector, a
position now called commander. He was overseeing patrol officers in the
Watts area when long-festering racial tensions surfaced that summer.
They were sparked by the drunk-driving arrest of a
black man named Marquette Frye. When his mother attempted to intervene,
a crowd gathered. After several unsuccessful attempts by officers to
disperse the crowd, rocks and bottles began to fly and the officers
pulled out. Angry mobs began to spring up throughout the area. “We had
no idea how to deal with this,” Gates later said.
Six days of violence left 34 people dead, more than 1,000 injured and 600 buildings damaged or destroyed.
Parker died in 1966. Under Parker’s successor,
Amid the turmoil of the late 1960s, Gates had, at
Reddin’s request, begun to develop a special unit to respond to crises.
Gates recruited 60 of the department’s top marksmen and called the team
SWAT. He originally meant the acronym to stand for Special Weapons
Attack Team, but then-Deputy Chief Davis thought “attack” was
impolitic, so Gates changed the name to Special Weapons and Tactics.
SWAT’s first test came in a shootout at a Black Panther stronghold on
“We were roundly criticized for our brutal activity,” Gates noted
later, but the SWAT team weathered the controversy and went on to prove
its value by resolving other crises without bloodshed.
When Davis resigned to enter politics, Gates applied
for the job, coming in second behind an outside candidate on the civil
service exam. When credited for his years of experience, the 29-year
LAPD veteran moved into first place and was approved by the Police
Commission despite concerns that he would flout civilian oversight. He
was sworn in as the LAPD’s 49th chief on
His troubles began almost immediately.
About a month after his swearing-in, Gates addressed
a Latino civil rights group, where he shared an observation that black
officers sought promotions more aggressively than Latinos. Describing a
conversation with a Mexican-American lieutenant who had failed the
captain’s written exam, Gates said he told the officer that the reason
he failed was that he hadn’t studied hard enough. “You’re lazy,” the
chief scolded.
The next day’s headlines blared that Gates had disparaged Latinos. The controversy raged for weeks.
A few months later, a black woman named
“Any way you viewed it, it was a bad shooting,”
Gates said years later. Nonetheless, he decided at the time that the
shooting was within department policy.
Then came a rash of LAPD scandals in which officers
were accused of cavorting sexually with teenage Explorer Scouts,
getting drunk in police station parking lots, consorting with
prostitutes and stopping innocent motorists to rob them of their
wallets. Two members of a special LAPD burglary unit pleaded guilty to
stealing electronic equipment from a shop in
Gates got much of the blame from the media, citizens
and politicians, including Bradley. Several high-ranking officers even
suggested privately that Gates should step down.
him to hire more women, minorities and civilians. Critics considered
him incapable of adapting to changing attitudes. He was forced to
disband his special unit, the Public Disorder Intelligence Division,
which conducted surveillance on “subversives,”political figures and
LAPD bashers such as the American Civil Liberties Union.
“All these people don’t know what the hell they’re doing, telling me how to run my organization,” Gates bristled.
That was strong language from the chief, a usually
courteous and even courtly man who seldom raised his voice in anger.
But for all of Gates’ seeming self-control, the intemperate remarks
kept spewing forth.
After officers were criticized for using a carotid
chokehold that caused injury and sometimes death, Gates commented: “We
may be finding in some blacks that when it is applied, the veins or
arteries do not open up as fast as on normal people.”
When criticized for that remark, Gates said he had meant people of all races with healthy arteries.
“One stupid word,” he lamented.
Sometimes things went very well.
In 1983, Gates met with officials with the Los
Angeles Unified School District, and together they created the Drug
Abuse Resistance Education program, or DARE, which sent uniformed
officers to elementary classrooms to talk about the perils of drug use.
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics also were a huge
success. Police security was tight but not oppressive, and the Games
went off without incident.
Gates remained popular in many circles — with
conservatives and even to the end of his life with rank-and-file
officers. But his tendency to shoot from the lip continued to hurt him.
In 1990, for instance, Gates, whose own son had problems with drugs,
said in testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that
“Casual drug users ought to be taken out and shot.”
But that was nothing compared with the surge of outrage that followed the brutal 1991 arrest of King.
VIDEOTAPED BEATING
Officers stopped King after a high-speed chase that ended in
A graphic videotape shot by a resident showed King face-down on a dark
street being kicked and savagely beaten by several LAPD officers as
other officers stood by and watched.
King, who had been driving under the influence and
evaded pursuing officers, suffered multiple injuries, including a
broken cheekbone, fractures at the base of his skull and a broken leg.
Despite the officers’ contentions that King had threatened their lives,
he was never charged.
With a national furor building, nothing Gates said
publicly about the beating satisfied critics. Hesitant at first to
criticize the officers involved, he called the incident “an
aberration.” He apologized to King in a backhanded way, calling
attention to King’s status as a parolee with a long arrest record.
Conservative columnist
The Police Commission placed Gates on paid leave, but a judge ordered his reinstatement a few days later.
On
who later became U.S. secretary of State, issued a scathing report on
the LAPD, saying it was apparent that “too many patrol officers view
citizens with resentment and hostility; too many treat the public with
rudeness and disrespect. . . .
“The problem of excessive force in the LAPD is
fundamentally a problem of supervision, management and leadership,” the
Christopher Commission said.
The commission called for a “fundamental change” in
LAPD values. And it called for a new chief. So did several newspapers,
including The Times.
The next 11 months turned into an acrimonious contest of wills.
Gates announced he was leaving, then he said he
wasn’t, then he said he was just bluffing when he said he was staying.
When Police Commissioner
He was not on speaking terms with Bradley on the afternoon of
The rioting erupted at Florence and Normandie avenues while Gates was attending a
function to raise funds in opposition to a police-reform ballot
measure. Several hours passed before he returned to take charge, and by
then his officers were in full retreat. By the time order was restored
two days later, with an assist from the National Guard, at least 53
people had died.
Gates blamed two subordinates, but a panel led by former FBI and CIA director
provide a real plan and meaningful training to control the disorder.”
On
In the months that followed, King, who had been on
parole for armed robbery and whose life continued to be plagued by
run-ins with police for drug violations and other offenses, was awarded
The four officers acquitted in
In his post-LAPD years, Gates had a 15-month stint
as a talk-show host on KFI-AM, surprising former adversaries with his
mild manner. He also worked as a security consultant and had a few
cameo roles in films.
When the chief’s job became available in 1997, he
sent an electronic message to the city’s executive search firm
indicating his interest. “I did it just to get their juices going,”
Gates later explained, adding “I’m not sure I could get one vote.”
He was probably right about that. His refusal to
give up the job during the King episode ultimately led to new
provisions in the City Charter that gave the mayor and the Police
Commission the power to select — and remove — the chief, who now has a
term limit. Although he did not intend it, the move to civilian
oversight of the LAPD provided an ironic last chapter in the Gates
legacy.
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