Gates’s Hell

EIGHT THOUSAND FEET over­head, a French-made Aerospa­tiale heli­copter jet­ti­sons its car­go: three para­troop­ers in police uni­forms. With smoke flares strapped to their ankles, they paint mad, swirling pat­terns in the sky. Moments lat­er, they land on the fair­way of the first hole at the Ran­cho Park Golf Course in Cen­tu­ry City and deliv­er a golf ball to the chief of police.
     Now the chief can take the first swing in the Los Ange­les Police Department’s annu­al char­i­ty golf tour­na­ment, an event that boasts “eighty celebri­ties.” Yet, for all the stars on hand (John Can­dy, Robert Stack, Peter “Robo­Cop” Weller), the chief draws most of the atten­tion. Daryl Gates is at the cen­ter of a nation­al debate on police bru­tal­i­ty, in the wake of the mer­ci­less beat­ing of an unarmed black man by white L.A.P.D. offi­cers. He has been blamed for a “racist” and “out of con­trol” police force. Pick­eters, civic groups, edi­to­r­i­al writ­ers, and final­ly the may­or have demand­ed his res­ig­na­tion. The past few weeks have brought one humil­i­a­tion after another—A.C.L.U. offi­cials dump­ing crates of protest mail at his feet, heck­lers chant­i­ng, “Hey hey ho ho, Daryl Gates has got to go!”
     But today Gates is smil­ing, and the crowd is smil­ing back. He auto­graphs sou­venir pro­grams and assures well-wish­ers that he is not about to step down after forty-two years in the L.A.P.D. and thir­teen as chief. Gates is raw­boned and clean-cut, with remark­able vital­i­ty for a man who will be six­ty-five in August. He is a fit­ness nut who runs and works out on a weight machine every day. (While he was hos­pi­tal­ized for pneu­mo­nia three years ago, the nurs­es caught him doing push-ups. “Didn’t mat­ter. I already got in eighty—my first set.”)
     Gates remains the most gawked-over celebri­ty until the ninth hole, when the tour­na­ment M.C. reunites him with “an old friend,” Bob Hope. The octo­ge­nar­i­an com­ic hits a few balls until, vis­i­bly worn out, he calls it quits. “Bob, you’re real­ly a super guy. You’ve done so much for me,” Gates says, embrac­ing him. Before a police escort whisks him off the green, Hope express­es his feel­ings in a pri­vate aside: “Just because a cou­ple of offi­cers were overzeal­ous doesn’t dis­cred­it the thou­sands of good ones.”
     Overzeal­ous is rather an under­state­ment. On March 3, a police heli­copter hov­ered over a street cor­ner in Lake View Ter­race, train­ing its search­light on an unem­ployed con­struc­tion work­er named Rod­ney Glenn King, who was in the process of being kicked and clubbed sense­less by three police offi­cers. A sergeant super­vised the beat­ing, and a score of oth­er offi­cers looked on with­out inter­fer­ing. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the police, a bystander on a near­by bal­cony cap­tured the hor­ri­fy­ing spec­ta­cle with his video cam­era. By the fol­low­ing day, the tape was being broad­cast around the world. King, who had been stopped for speed­ing, was struck more than fifty times with the offi­cers’ two-foot-long sol­id-alu­minum batons. There was no sound track, but, watch­ing the video, you could almost hear what a pas­sen­ger in King’s car lat­er described: “bones being cracked… loud thumps, gushy sounds.”
     Gates—who is far from media-savvy—underestimated the impact of the grue­some video. He brushed off the inci­dent as an “aber­ra­tion” and showed lit­tle regard for the vic­tim. Point­ing out that Rod­ney King was a con­vict­ed rob­ber on parole, Gates offered the hope that his most recent run-in with the cops “will be the vehi­cle to move him down the road to a good life.”
     And so, as he has often done in the past, the out­spo­ken chief made him­self the cen­tral issue in the con­tro­ver­sy. Com­ments attrib­uted to him over the years that appeared to show him as big­ot­ed and mil­i­taris­tic were quot­ed inces­sant­ly. Gates was alleged to have infect­ed the troops with his mean-spir­it­ed per­son­al­i­ty, much like the dark sergeant por­trayed by Tom Berenger in Pla­toon. But for every denun­ci­a­tion of the chief’s char­ac­ter came an equal­ly heart­felt protest from a friend or col­league that the real Daryl Gates was warm and com­pas­sion­ate and one of the most mis­un­der­stood fig­ures in pub­lic office.
     On television—the only place most peo­ple have seen him—Gates appears cold and bel­li­cose. But, meet­ing Gates in pri­vate, it is hard to give much weight to the Pla­toon the­o­ry. He is indeed warm, quick to laugh at him­self, with an almost boy­ish eager­ness to be liked. On a recent day out­side his sixth-floor office at Park­er Cen­ter, the down­town police head­quar­ters, he seemed mys­ti­fied by the ani­mos­i­ty he has pro­voked. “Peo­ple want to make me a mon­ster,” he said, shak­ing his head.
     As one learns more about Gates, the dichoto­my becomes less of a sur­prise. Almost every­thing about him is a para­dox. Gates is the son of a devout Mor­mon moth­er and an alco­holic father. He cre­at­ed DARE, one of the nation’s most laud­ed anti-drug pro­grams, yet his only son is a hero­in addict now in a methadone pro­gram. Dur­ing his own career as a police offi­cer, he was a mod­el of restraint; in the mid­dle of the Watts riot of 1965, while being pelt­ed with rocks and bot­tles, he calm­ly estab­lished a com­mand post in the mid­dle of an inter­sec­tion. Yet his rhetoric is a call to arms; he referred to one vic­tim of police abuse as “lucky” he wasn’t more seri­ous­ly injured, and last year he told the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee that “the casu­al drug user ought to be tak­en out and shot.”
     If Gates is impos­si­ble to paint in broad strokes, the same is true of his depart­ment. The L.A.P.D. is the most thor­ough­ly trained of all the nation’s police forces and, at its best, a mod­el of cool effi­cien­cy. But the King inci­dent is hard­ly the first indi­ca­tion of a bru­tal under­cur­rent. In August 1988, about eighty offi­cers, some armed with sledge­ham­mers, destroyed four apart­ments in a mis­guid­ed search for drugs and gang mem­bers, leav­ing such dev­as­ta­tion that the Red Cross offered dis­as­ter relief. (Twen­ty-two offi­cers were sus­pend­ed briefly, but only two were forced to resign.)
     Thanks to the Rod­ney King inci­dent, the Jus­tice Depart­ment is now study­ing whether police bru­tal­i­ty is on the rise nation­al­ly, and a blue-rib­bon pan­el is explor­ing the same issue in the L.A.P.D. For now, the ques­tion can be tack­led only anec­do­tal­ly, since there are no reli­able sta­tis­tics. It is true that last year the city of Los Ange­les paid out $11.3 mil­lion in court awards and set­tle­ments for police mis­con­duct, which should at least give Gates pause. But the chief is more apt to blame that on the lib­er­al court sys­tem than on his troops.
     Indeed, the men­tal­i­ty com­mon to the depart­ment and its leader can be char­ac­ter­ized as Us Against Them. The L.A.P.D. sees itself as the embat­tled foe of an increas­ing­ly hos­tile, armed, and dan­ger­ous pop­u­lace. With only 8,300 sworn offi­cers in a city of 3.5 mil­lion, the L.A.P.D. has the low­est ratio of cops to civil­ians of any major urban police force in the nation. The depart­ment has already dealt with more than two hun­dred gang-relat­ed killings this year, and gang mem­ber­ship is said to top 70,000. In response to the enor­mous influx of Mex­i­cans and Cen­tral Amer­i­cans, the police have come to feel like mer­ce­nar­ies fight­ing a war in a for­eign land. The result is what one offi­cer calls “the John Wayne Syndrome—you and me, pard­ner, against the world. Who do we stop? The dum­mies. It’s us against the dum­mies.”
     Gates evinces a sim­i­lar para­noia, a feel­ing of being sur­round­ed by enemies—only his are polit­i­cal. This is hard to grasp at first, because he has a fire wall of pro­tec­tion unknown to oth­er urban police chiefs. Thanks to a city char­ter amend­ed in the 1930s after a polit­i­cal-cor­rup­tion scan­dal, the chief of the L.A.P.D. is answer­able only to a five-mem­ber Police Com­mis­sion. The com­mis­sion is appoint­ed by the may­or, but it effec­tive­ly blocks his pow­er over the police chief, who is a civ­il ser­vant and can­not be fired with­out “good and suf­fi­cient cause.” May­or Tom Bradley has for a decade been ask­ing vot­ers to change the char­ter so that he can sack the police chief if he choos­es. Gates sees this as a seri­ous threat, and tends to gruffly dis­miss all crit­i­cism of the L.A.P.D. as a vote for “bring­ing us back into the Dark Ages—a police depart­ment tied to politi­cians!”
     Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Gates accus­es Bradley of exploit­ing the Rod­ney King inci­dent in “a grab for pow­er.” On April 2, Bradley met with Gates and urged him to retire for the good of the city. Deputy May­or Mark Fabi­ani recalls that “the chief leapt to his feet, engaged in a short dia­tribe, and stormed out of the room.” Two days lat­er the bat­tle inten­si­fied when the Police Com­mis­sion vot­ed to fur­lough Gates for six­ty days. One day after that, the com­mis­sion rul­ing was con­test­ed by the City Coun­cil and sub­se­quent­ly over­turned. Gates won that round, but the effort to remove him goes on.
     Today, there are some tit­ters on the golf course from Gates’s ret­inue as Police Com­mis­sion­er Melanie Lomax appears with her young daugh­ter. A black civ­il-rights lawyer, Lomax has been open­ly antag­o­nis­tic toward the chief. Gates, who is skilled at keep­ing his emo­tions in check, is polite. But when the round starts, he briefly allows his feel­ings to show. Point­ing to the sky divers, one of Gates’s golf part­ners says, “Next year you’re gonna get the Police Com­mis­sion to do that, right, Daryl?”
     “Yes,” he agrees. “With­out the parachutes.”

THE EVENTS of March 3 that are the cause of Gates’s cur­rent trou­bles are still very much in dis­pute. On the orders of their respec­tive lawyers, nei­ther Rod­ney King nor his alleged attack­ers are talk­ing to the press. Four men were indict­ed in the beat­ing: Offi­cers Lau­rence Pow­ell, Tim­o­thy Wind, and Theodore Briseno (who alleged­ly kicked King), and the super­vis­ing sergeant, Stacey Koon. The tri­al of the four offi­cers on a num­ber of felony counts is pend­ing. All four have been charged with assault with a dead­ly weapon and exces­sive use of force; Pow­ell and Koon have also been accused of fil­ing false police reports; and Koon has been charged with attempt­ing to cov­er up Powell’s alleged mis­deeds. A report by the L.A.P.D.’s Inter­nal Affairs Divi­sion, obtained by the Los Ange­les Times has led to a depart­men­tal rec­om­men­da­tion that the four police­men be fired. King’s lawyer has filed an $83 mil­lion claim against Cal­i­for­nia author­i­ties; he is also bring­ing a civ­il-rights suit against Chief Gates, May­or Bradley, and all the offi­cers present.
Per­haps the first sig­nif­i­cant event of that fate­ful evening occurred after roll call at Foothill Divi­sion, locat­ed in the San Fer­nan­do Val­ley. A num­ber of offi­cers joined in a baton-train­ing ses­sion behind the sta­tion house. The sergeant in charge lat­er told Inter­nal Affairs that Lau­rence Powell’s tech­nique was “weak”—he was instruct­ed on how to hit the prac­tice board effec­tive­ly. After the train­ing ses­sion, Pow­ell and his part­ner, Tim­o­thy Wind (who, the sergeant said, had demon­strat­ed “excel­lent” baton tech­nique), climbed into their car and head­ed off.
Short­ly after mid­night, they inter­vened in a domes­tic dis­pute in a black house­hold. By 12:30 A.M., they were back in their cruis­er, and Pow­ell was swap­ping typed mes­sages with a female offi­cer on foot patrol, using his M.D.T., a com­put­er con­sole on the dash­board. Pow­ell sent a mes­sage describ­ing the domes­tic quar­rel as a scene “right out of Goril­las in the Mist,” a com­ment that has since been con­strued as a racial crack.
At 12:47, the emer­gency-board oper­a­tor broad­cast a call to all units. The high­way patrol was chas­ing a white Hyundai on Foothill Boule­vard. The dri­ver was alleged­ly speed­ing and had ignored police instruc­tions to pull over. Pow­ell and Wind, along with sev­er­al oth­er patrol teams, joined in the pur­suit. So did an “airship”—the offi­cers’ term for the L.A.P.D.’s pur­suit heli­copters. The Hyundai was final­ly stopped, and Rod­ney King climbed out, leav­ing his two pas­sen­gers inside.
Sergeant Stacey Koon, a four­teen-year vet­er­an of the L.A.P.D., was already on the scene. Oth­er police offi­cers would con­tin­ue to arrive as the arrest of King esca­lat­ed into vio­lence. In the end, there would be a total of twen­ty-one L.A.P.D. offi­cers on hand, as well as per­haps half a dozen high­way-patrol offi­cers and school-dis­trict police.
Koon lat­er told Inter­nal Affairs that he was imme­di­ate­ly wary of King, who was over six feet and “very mus­cu­lar.” Koon said he made eye con­tact with the twen­ty-five-year-old King, who appeared “spaced out,” as though he were on PCP—a drug that can ren­der some­one imper­vi­ous to pain and dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase adren­a­line. (Tests lat­er showed there was no “angel dust” in King’s sys­tem.) The high­way patrol gave King orders over a loudspeaker—“Hands up, get on the ground”—and King did get on all fours, but report­ed­ly moved his body up and down like a run­ner on a start­ing block. Pow­ell told Inter­nal Affairs that he tried to force King to the ground, but that King rose up and near­ly knocked the offi­cer off his feet.
Koon said he ordered Pow­ell to unhol­ster his gun in case dead­ly force was need­ed. Koon then pulled out his Taser—a small black plas­tic stun gun—and fired two darts into King, hold­ing down a but­ton that was sup­posed to send 50,000 volts of par­a­lyz­ing elec­tric­i­ty through the suspect’s body. Koon lat­er claimed that King did not respond to either dart. Koon then decid­ed that the cir­cum­stances called for seri­ous injury and severe pain. He gave the order: “Hit his joints, hit his wrists, hit his elbows, hit his knees, hit his ankles.”
(It might seem incred­i­ble that break­ing King’s joints was viewed by Koon as the prop­er means to sub­due him. But he is expect­ed to raise as a defense that ever since 1982 the pre­ferred method of “chok­ing out” an unco­op­er­a­tive sus­pect has been for­bid­den. The bar-arm choke hold made a sus­pect pass out long enough to get hand­cuffs on him—but also caused death in a few cas­es. When the tech­nique was out­lawed, the met­al side-han­dled night­stick and the Taser gun were giv­en to offi­cers as com­pen­sa­tion. “Before they took away the choke hold,” says one offi­cer, “I nev­er seri­ous­ly hurt any­one.”)
Pow­ell and Wind began to deliv­er the blows. Each lat­er claimed to have been focused only on King, and Pow­ell said he was unaware of the blows being struck by his part­ner. By 12:59, King was hand­cuffed and hog-tied, and an ambu­lance had been called. Pow­ell and Wind were sweaty and exhaust­ed after the beat­ing; when they arrived at the hos­pi­tal with King, Wind fell asleep for sev­er­al min­utes.
The tes­ti­mo­ny of oth­er wit­ness­es tak­en by Inter­nal Affairs—not to men­tion the video shot by Foothill res­i­dent George Holliday—suggested that in spite of Koon’s order to “hit the joints” Pow­ell struck King repeat­ed­ly in the face, head, and neck.
Pho­tographs of King tak­en after the beat­ing and the report of the doc­tor who exam­ined him con­firmed this. Apart from a bro­ken ankle, King was found to have a frac­tured eye sock­et, facial-nerve dam­age, eleven skull frac­tures, and a severe con­cus­sion. The force of the baton blows knocked fill­ings from his teeth.

DARYL GATES says that when he first viewed the video­tape it made him “phys­i­cal­ly ill.” But if he was angry, it did not come across. Gates is per­fect­ly capa­ble of vit­ri­ol when one of his own is harmed. At a press con­fer­ence ear­ly this year, he referred to a cop killer, through clenched teeth, as a “no-good son-of-a-bitch ass­hole.” But in describ­ing his feel­ings about the attack on King, his lan­guage was odd­ly casu­al and lack­ing in emo­tion. He was “dis­ap­point­ed” in Stacey Koon; the inci­dent demon­strat­ed “total human fail­ure”; the offi­cers who stood and watched were “cow­ard­ly” for not step­ping in.
“Every­one want­ed me to express ter­ri­ble out­rage,” Gates says today. “‘Those offi­cers ought to be fired!’ Had I said that with­out any inves­ti­ga­tion, any­thing I said after­ward would have been mean­ing­less. Every­body was express­ing hor­ror at what they saw, and I had exact­ly the same feel­ings. But what I tried to tell the media is, I’m in a dif­fi­cult posi­tion. I am the judge. What I have is a one-dimen­sion­al picture—a video­tape. And some­times things are not as they seem.”
With­in a week of view­ing the tape, Gates instruct­ed the depart­ment to rec­om­mend felony charges against Offi­cers Pow­ell, Wind, and Briseno. Gates want­ed to spare Sergeant Koon, he says, because “although he clear­ly did not take appro­pri­ate action, at that point we had noth­ing to indi­cate that he was involved in the beat­ing itself.” The dis­trict attor­ney, how­ev­er, charged all four.
Gates feels in no way per­son­al­ly respon­si­ble for the inci­dent in Lake View Ter­race; he is sat­is­fied, he says, that his offi­cers know he approves only of “rea­son­able and nec­es­sary” force. After the inci­dent, in a video­taped mes­sage to the troops—Gates’s prin­ci­pal means of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the eigh­teen divisions—he reit­er­at­ed this pol­i­cy.
The fac­tion that blames Gates for what hap­pened to Rod­ney King argues that his tur­bocharged rhetoric—such as his remark about shoot­ing casu­al drug users—sends the wrong sig­nal to the force, what­ev­er his offi­cial poli­cies may be. He is also accused of putting too much empha­sis on the L.A.P.D.’s mil­i­tary tra­di­tions. “Daryl Gates is from the old school of police admin­is­tra­tion,” says Urban League pres­i­dent John Mack. “He’s from the Ram­bo school, the Clint East­wood ‘Make my day’ school, and we don’t need that in 1991 in the chief of police. Yes, we need some­one tough, but also com­pas­sion­ate, and who sets that kind of tone for the department—a Hill Street Blues approach.”
The mil­i­ta­riza­tion of the L.A.P.D. dates from 1949, the year Gates joined the force. The police chief had just been oust­ed in a pro­tec­tion scan­dal involv­ing a noto­ri­ous L.A. madam—clearly a case of “good and suf­fi­cient cause” under the revised city charter—and, in des­per­a­tion, the depart­ment brought in a retired Marine Corps gen­er­al, William Wor­ton, as an inter­im chief. He passed the man­tle to William Park­er, who con­tin­ued Worton’s reforms with a vengeance, becom­ing Gates’s men­tor and idol in the process.
Back in the six­ties, Gates fur­thered the tra­di­tion by pio­neer­ing the Spe­cial Weapons and Tac­tics, or SWAT, team, an elite corps of marks­men armed with high-pow­ered weapons whose spe­cial­ty is appre­hend­ing bar­ri­cad­ed sus­pects. Gates was so proud of SWAT that he offered to send a team to Iran in 1980 to help free the hostages.
Today, one need only vis­it the police acad­e­my, a bar­rack­slike row of build­ings tucked away behind Dodger Sta­di­um, to see the Marine Corps influ­ence. Cadets engage in com­bat wrestling. They par­tic­i­pate in war games, prowl­ing through “Hogan’s Alley,” a sim­u­lat­ed city block where a cutout of a man with a gun can pop up at any sec­ond. Even after they leave the acad­e­my, L.A.P.D. offi­cers pride them­selves on their ath­let­ic prowess and immac­u­late dress. The mil­i­tary-style train­ing con­tin­ues at roll call, where some pol­i­cy or tech­nique is reviewed or prac­ticed. Late­ly, because of the King inci­dent, there have been more ses­sions on the use of force.
Notably absent is any pro­gram that address­es the men­tal haz­ards of the job. The stan­dard, unof­fi­cial advice on how to cope with stress is: Live in the sub­urbs. By one esti­mate, as much as 90 per­cent of the force lives out­side Los Angeles—one more con­trib­u­tor to Us Against Them. By con­trast, about 60 per­cent of New York City police offi­cers live in the city, and while on the beat they tend to be part of the civic fur­ni­ture, min­gling on foot with res­i­dents or rid­ing the trains with them. The N.Y.P.D. has its own share of bru­tal­i­ty inci­dents. Still, “New York cops iden­ti­fy more with the pop­u­lace,” says one law-enforce­ment expert. “If a New York cop stops you, you can rea­son with him. In Los Ange­les, they have the whole world mapped out in an order­ly fash­ion, and they give you com­mands in a pro­grammed, robot­ic way.”
The L.A.P.D. has anoth­er dis­tinc­tion, a lega­cy from the days of Chief Parker—the “proac­tive” style of polic­ing. The idea is to pre­vent a crime, rather than wait for it to hap­pen, by look­ing out for peo­ple who fit a sus­pi­cious “pro­file.” L.A. cops can scarce­ly believe that their coun­ter­parts in oth­er cities for the most part respond only to calls on their radios. “I hear New York cops don’t do self-ini­ti­at­ed polic­ing,” one L.A.P.D. sergeant says. “Our guys love to be proactive—to go out and snoop and poop and make arrests.”
Unfor­tu­nate­ly, proac­tive police work means that a lot of inno­cent peo­ple get has­sled. And two recent inci­dents sug­gest that mere­ly being black can make a per­son fit the pro­file. In 1988, base­ball Hall of Famer Joe Mor­gan was mis­tak­en for a drug couri­er and wres­tled to the ground at the Los Ange­les air­port. Anoth­er black sports star, ex-Lak­er Jamaal Wilkes, says police hauled him from his car and hand­cuffed him while run­ning his name through a com­put­er, on the pre­text that his license-plate light was bro­ken. Wilkes has filed suit and the case is pend­ing; Mor­gan has won a $540,000 judg­ment against the offi­cer who roughed him up.
Gates is not in the least embar­rassed by his department’s behav­ior. In fact, Joe Morgan’s court vic­to­ry offends him.
“The nar­cotics detail at the air­port has done a mag­nif­i­cent job in the past,” he says. “Joe Mor­gan fit the pro­file and was detained, not much more. Appar­ent­ly some wrestling went into it. We don’t think the offi­cer was wrong. But even if the offi­cer were wrong in detain­ing this guy for a few min­utes, is that worth destroy­ing him? Because the next ques­tion is one the Amer­i­can pub­lic has to ask: Do you think that police offi­cer is ever going to stop anoth­er per­son?” In the wake of the King beat­ing, Gates adds, “Already I’m think­ing I can’t in good con­science tell my police offi­cers to do their work in the same fash­ion. And that both­ers me. I fear the result will be a city that is not a very nice place to live or do busi­ness in—not the City of Angels at all.”
This rous­ing defense of his offi­cer draws on per­son­al experience—Gates him­self was suc­cess­ful­ly sued for dam­ages in a mis­con­duct case. The case con­cerned Jessie Larez. a fifty-five-year-old East Los Ange­les man whose son, Edward, was thought to pos­sess a gun used in a gang killing. In June 1986 six police­men sur­round­ed the Larez home in search of the weapon, which was not found. The police were greet­ed at the door by Jessie, who alleged­ly punched one of the offi­cers in the chest. Jessie was thrown to the floor and had his nose bro­ken.
In Octo­ber 1988 a fed­er­al jury deter­mined that the police had used exces­sive force, and award­ed Larez and his fam­i­ly $90,000. Encour­aged, the Larezes’ attor­ney, Stephen Yag­man, per­suad­ed them to press civ­il charges against Daryl Gates per­son­al­ly. Yag­man, who calls Gates a “charm­ing sociopath”—one of his kinder obser­va­tions about the chief—and who says his aim in bring­ing such cas­es is “to humil­i­ate the police,” hoped to demon­strate that Gates had sanc­tioned the vio­lence.
On the wit­ness stand, Gates kept his com­po­sure. “Do you con­sid­er a bro­ken nose to be a seri­ous injury?” Yag­man demand­ed at one point. “I think any bro­ken bone is seri­ous, yes,” the chief replied.
“I didn’t dam­age him much,” Yag­man admits. But then Gates met reporters out­side the cour­t­house and gave an impromp­tu press con­fer­ence. He com­plained that the Larezes had come to court “cleaned up and beau­ti­ful” so that jurors would see them as inno­cent vic­tims, rather than dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals. As for Jessie Larez’s nose, he was “prob­a­bly lucky that’s all he had bro­ken.”
Yag­man had card­board charts made up of Gates’s explo­sive remarks, and the judge admit­ted them into evi­dence. “The jurors were shocked,” says Yag­man. With­in two hours, they reached a ver­dict: Daryl Gates had to pay $170,000 to the Larezes from his own pock­et.
For once, Gates had the sup­port of May­or Bradley, who argued that the fine would set a bad prece­dent, and who vot­ed along with the coun­cil to pay it from the city cof­fers. (Yag­man, infu­ri­at­ed, calls Bradley, who is black, an Uncle Tom.) Gates has appealed the judg­ment, and he’s still bit­ter about the ver­dict.
“The court ruined me,” he says agi­tat­ed­ly, “ruined forty-two years of ser­vice, just for speak­ing my mind.” The force appears to agree with Gates. “He IS lucky—a lit­tle bro­ken nose,” a sergeant says of Larez. “Shov­ing an offi­cer is a felony. If the offi­cer had a night­stick, this guy could have had a bro­ken arm. Maybe that’s what the chief meant.”

GATES’s REACTION to the Larez inci­dent was a sure guide to his lead­er­ship style, as he proved in the after­math of Rod­ney King’s ordeal. Asked in a TV inter­view if he would apol­o­gize to King, who was still in the hos­pi­tal, Gates respond­ed that “in spite of the fact that he’s on parole and a con­vict­ed rob­ber I’d be glad to apol­o­gize.” The chief still wants to know what’s wrong with that. “Under­stand, this comes from a police per­spec­tive,” he says. “The last peo­ple on earth a police offi­cer wants to apol­o­gize to are con­vict­ed rob­bers on parole. But it didn’t make any difference—this guy deserved an apol­o­gy. That was the point I was try­ing to make.
“Obvi­ous­ly,” he adds with a sigh, “that point was lost.”
The point was not at all lost on the troops—it was a per­fect expres­sion of Us Against Them. “I agree with the chief. Rod­ney King’s actions in the past got him to be in this sit­u­a­tion,” says an offi­cer in one of the city’s busiest divi­sions. At one point anoth­er offi­cer pre­dict­ed that “King will be back in some kind of trou­ble.”
(He was right. On May 29, two under­cov­er cops fol­lowed a male pros­ti­tute dressed as a woman into a Chevro­let Blaz­er truck whose dri­ver turned out to be Rod­ney King. When they flashed their badges, King alleged­ly tried to mow one of them down with his vehi­cle. He is being inves­ti­gat­ed for assault with a dead­ly weapon—the truck—by the D.A.’s office.)
As for the four indict­ed offi­cers, their peers seem hes­i­tant to con­demn them on the basis of the video. Most say that their first thought on watch­ing the tape was that King must have done some­thing to pro­voke the offi­cers in the min­utes before the tap­ing start­ed. It is rare for mem­bers of the L.A.P.D. to open­ly defend the beat­ing itself. “It scares me that he could have made such a bad judg­ment,” says Sergeant Dan Hon­ey of Koon. “I just want to believe there was some oth­er fac­tor. Because when [King] was down, even if he’s not doing what you’re telling him, there’s no way in the world you can jus­ti­fy slam­ming the guy.”
Oth­ers are more out­spo­ken in their sup­port of the four offi­cers. “Most of [the video] looks good as far as I’m con­cerned,” one offi­cer at a down­town divi­sion says. “A cou­ple of things, they might have gone over­board. I don’t know if he was ‘moth­er­fuck­ing’ them—if he was still being ver­bal­ly aggres­sive. He still had his fist clenched. How big was he? That’s anoth­er thing. Why is it worth one police­man get­ting hurt over a dum­my like this? The most impor­tant thing is to go home to Mama. Safe­ty is num­ber one, and screw every­thing else.”

LISTEN TO THIS,” Daryl Gates says. He is seat­ed at the con­fer­ence table out­side his office. He slips a cas­sette into a portable play­er and hits the play but­ton. It sounds like bursts of fire­crack­ers.
“Gun­fire,” Gates explains. We are lis­ten­ing to a tra­di­tion­al New Year’s Eve cel­e­bra­tion record­ed from the top of the sta­tion house in the Sev­en­ty-sev­enth Divi­sion, down­town. “This should give you some idea how many guns are out there, and what police offi­cers have to face. If you lis­ten care­ful­ly, you can hear the semi-auto­mat­ics. Every year there are one or two fatal­i­ties from drunk peo­ple fir­ing their weapons in the air. It’s been so bad our police offi­cers have had to run for cov­er under the free­way bridge. One year we put on a cam­paign, and our slo­gan was ‘Don’t Shoot in the Air.’ We made a big error. Peo­ple thought, O.K., we’ll shoot in the ground.”
That Gates so well artic­u­lates the frus­tra­tions of the street offi­cer is anoth­er curi­ous paradox—he has spent most of his forty-two years in the L.A.P.D. in admin­is­tra­tive jobs, see­ing very lit­tle com­bat. As chief, Gates is usu­al­ly holed up at the Park­er Cen­ter, a sedate office com­plex, or in meet­ings with the Police Com­mis­sion, and he rarely gets to vis­it the eigh­teen divi­sions around the city. He relies on divi­sion com­man­ders and adju­tants to keep him informed. Most of his 8,300 offi­cers have met him fleet­ing­ly, if at all. But his pres­ence is always felt. Gates com­mu­ni­cates often with the troops in the “Chief’s Mes­sage” video­tapes shown at roll calls.
On a Sun­day after­noon at the New­ton Divi­sion, Bob Bran­non, a black sergeant with twen­ty-one years on the force, is defend­ing his chief, explain­ing that it would be bad for morale if he were forced to resign because of Rod­ney King. “How can the chief be with every­one twen­ty-four hours a day?” he asks. “All he can do is set pol­i­cy, and if offi­cers devi­ate, pun­ish them. And he does that.”
Bran­non used to work SWAT; he has a smooth pro­fes­sion­al­ism and a dis­arm­ing man­ner. The New­ton Divi­sion, in down­town L.A.—also known as “Shootin’ Newton”—has long been one of the city’s rough­est. As a teenag­er grow­ing up here, Brannon’s wife was shot in the face by a rob­ber at a Jack in the Box. Just last week­end, Bran­non says, there were six shoot­ings and three fatal­i­ties. The neigh­bor­hood used to be all black, but is now 50 per­cent His­pan­ic. Two of the best-known gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, are active here; in cop­s­peak, mem­bers are “gang­bangers.”
Bran­non slips his night­stick into the hold­er mount­ed inside his car door, checks his Taser gun, and heads out. As he turns his car off Cen­tral Avenue onto a side street, he gives a guid­ed tour of the rub­bled and graf­fi­ti-pocked neigh­bor­hood. “You get the low­est peo­ple liv­ing down here,” he says. “I bet if you check all these people”—indicating a loi­ter­ing group—“they’ve all been arrest­ed and did some kind of time.” The trans­ves­tites aren’t out yet, but Bran­non points out a cou­ple of “strawberries”—female pros­ti­tutes who turn tricks to buy rock cocaine. It’s still ear­ly and busi­ness is slow. “The crim­i­nal ele­ment is just start­ing to wake up.”
Min­utes lat­er, Brannon’s M.D.T. screen comes alive with the shift’s first “hot shot”—a dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion that calls for back­up. A gun has been fired at the inter­sec­tion of Towne and Fifty-first. Bran­non is not impressed. “A lot of peo­ple just shoot off guns to see if they work.”
The first to arrive, Bran­non finds noth­ing stir­ring. He stops a His­pan­ic man.
“Did you hear a gun?”
The man shrugs, uncom­pre­hend­ing.
“¿No pis­to­las?” Bran­non ven­tures. Span­ish is now taught at the acad­e­my, but a lot of offi­cers speak only pid­gin phras­es.
Over the next few hours, Brannon’s calls will fall almost even­ly into two cat­e­gories: gang vio­lence and domes­tic vio­lence. A gang­banger fires a shot into a woman’s house—the bul­let nar­row­ly miss­es sev­er­al guests and shat­ters a mirror—supposedly because she refused to give up her white church hat. An estranged hus­band threat­ens to burn down his wife’s house. A baby show­er ends abrupt­ly when one intox­i­cat­ed fam­i­ly mem­ber blud­geons anoth­er. “We put up with a lot of bull­shit,” Bran­non says.
Present­ly, there is anoth­er hot shot—a sev­en­teen-year-old black youth, pos­si­bly armed with a .45. This time, Bran­non is beat­en to the scene by two oth­er police cars. A blue-and-white Bell JetRanger heli­copter cir­cles over­head.
The elder­ly black man who report­ed see­ing the gun points out the youth to the police—a tall, lanky kid in a blue Dodgers cap, the Crips’ col­or. “His name is Jer­maine,” the man says. “Stu­pid-ass kid—I seen him grow up.” A blond offi­cer unhol­sters his gun and gets on his bull­horn.
“Come here, Jer­maine!” he orders, and as the boy approach­es, the offi­cer draws his gun in a two-hand­ed grip. Jer­maine flat­tens out on the ground. A woman offi­cer kneels down on his shoul­ders as taught at the acad­e­my and hand­cuffs him.
But no gun is found on him; the boy is let go. Now Bran­non has to explain what hap­pened to Jermaine’s moth­er, who wit­nessed the arrest. “A moth­er see­ing her son get proned out at gun­point,” he says, shak­ing his head. “But we can’t take a chance.…” For­tu­nate­ly, the woman doesn’t appear to mind, but these days, because of Rod­ney King, the offi­cers are espe­cial­ly wor­ried about exces­sive-force com­plaints. “You stop some­one for a traf­fic tick­et now,” Bran­non sighs, “and they say, ‘You’re gonna beat me like King, and I’m gonna sue you.”
Not far from New­ton is the Ram­part Divi­sion, which holds the record for crimes per day. A wedge of down­town, Ram­part includes MacArthur Park, of song fame—a place where flee­ing gang mem­bers like to toss their guns. As the morn­ing shift at Ram­part begins with roll call, the com­man­der, Cap­tain Richard Wem­mer, is giv­ing his offi­cers a pep talk, con­grat­u­lat­ing them because Ram­part “is the only divi­sion after the Rod­ney King inci­dent where arrests are up.”
One of Wemmer’s men, Sergeant Ron Moen, is the very pic­ture of an Adam 12 cop—tall, sandy-haired, forty-two, a Viet­nam vet­er­an. Moen uses his Code 7 time—lunch hour—to work out with weights. He lives in a “qui­et bed­room com­mu­ni­ty” up in the moun­tains to relieve stress. He is a depart­ment chap­lain, soft-spo­ken, but capa­ble in a split sec­ond of bark­ing an order—he has what the police call “com­mand pres­ence.”
Moen used to work up in the Val­ley, near where King was arrest­ed, but trans­ferred here because “my own people—I mean Caucasians—treated me worse than any black, His­pan­ic, or poor per­son has ever treat­ed me.” Ram­part is home to Sal­vado­rans, Colom­bians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans. “A lot of them, all they’ve known is vio­lence,” Moen says. “They bring it with ’em. Report­ed crimes seem to be going up. It’s a dete­ri­o­ra­tion of soci­ety. Yes­ter­day, we took five guns dur­ing day watch. They call us ‘the thin, blue line,’ and we are a very thin blue line, between the crim­i­nal and inno­cent pop­u­lace.”
Most crimes here involve gangs or drugs or both. Moen points to a pair of sneak­ers hang­ing over a tele­phone line—that means drugs are sold on this block. One promi­nent gang is called M.S., for mara sava­trucha (“cool Sal­vado­ran dudes”). Moen indi­cates a wall where some­one has x‑ed out one gang’s name and writ­ten the name of his own. “When you cross out a gang’s graf­fi­ti, you might as well be slap­ping their moth­er,” he says. “They will kill for that.”
By ear­ly after­noon, Moen seems almost apolo­getic. The hot shots have been few and unevent­ful. A man report­ed to have a knife is actu­al­ly armed with a small screw­driv­er. A gang mem­ber toss­es a Molo­tov cock­tail into a man’s liv­ing room, but inept­ly uses a Mich­e­lob bot­tle, which fails to shat­ter, and the intend­ed vic­tim puts it out in the kitchen sink.
But then, at about two P.M., Moen receives the famil­iar call—shooting in progress. He races to the spot, at Pico and Alvara­do, and finds the vic­tim lying at the end of a dri­ve­way, a bul­let hole in his back. On the side­walk are some live rounds and the victim’s cap and loafers. He is a His­pan­ic male in his twen­ties who, Moen lat­er learns, goes by the street name “Ras­cal.”
“Señor? Señor?” Moen says, but Ras­cal, a blank expres­sion on his face, is gasp­ing for breath.
A para­medic team arrives, shears off Rascal’s striped shirt and pants, and lifts him, buck naked, onto a stretch­er. The medics wrap him in a pres­sur­ized body suit, designed to keep blood in the brain and chest cav­i­ty, and load him into an ambu­lance bound for the U.S.C. Med­ical Cen­ter. Moen has a talk with the ambu­lance dri­ver before he takes off.
“The dri­ver says he’s gonna die—he just doesn’t know it yet,” Moen reports. His tone is flat; he’s seen this all before. “But if they can get him sta­bi­lized, maybe they can get a dying dec­la­ra­tion before he leaves this world.”

POLICE WORK is apt to make one gloomy about human nature, but Daryl Gates seems to have come to the job armed with a nat­ur­al pes­simism. In speech­es, Gates describes a world in which peo­ple are inher­ent­ly crim­i­nal and the only rem­e­dy is iron self-dis­ci­pline. It is tempt­ing to trace the chief’s Manichaean view back to his own upbring­ing with an alco­holic father. Gates admits that, hav­ing not­ed the parental addic­tion, “I have always tried to be in con­trol.” He feels he has suc­ceed­ed. “I guess that’s one rea­son I’m so crit­i­cal of oth­ers who show a lack of discipline—casual drug users, for exam­ple,” he adds, side­step­ping the glar­ing loss of con­trol exhib­it­ed by his own offi­cers in the King beat­ing.
The chief is full of jere­mi­ads against the citizenry—indeed, in a favorite after-din­ner speech, he lit­er­al­ly casts him­self as the bib­li­cal Jere­mi­ah, fore­telling the ruin of a too per­mis­sive soci­ety. Just like his police force, with whom you can­not nego­ti­ate, there is no for­give­ness of sin in his the­ol­o­gy.
Gates was born in Glen­dale, Cal­i­for­nia, on August 30, 1926, and grew up in High­land Park, not far from where he lives today. (He also keeps a beach house in Orange Coun­ty.) He had two broth­ers: Low­ell, who was four years old­er, and Steve, eleven years younger. His father, Paul, was a plumber-“Good one, too,” Gates says—and his moth­er, Arvil­la, was a dress cut­ter who worked in a fac­to­ry six days a week, twelve hours a day.
Gates speaks of his moth­er, who died in 1973, in rev­er­en­tial tones—usually as “my dear moth­er.” “One Sun­day, she was tak­ing a great big pot of oat­meal from the stove to the table, and she slipped, and the pot went up in the air, and that hot oat­meal came down all over her legs. Ter­ri­ble burns. Yet she was some­how able to drag her­self out of bed every morn­ing, walk a long dis­tance to work from the end of her street­car ride, then stand all day doing her dress cut­ting. Peo­ple are just not made that way today.”
Gates grew up poor, and Paul Gates’s drink­ing prob­lem did not help mat­ters. “It was a very embar­rass­ing peri­od of my life,” Gates acknowl­edges. “It was harm­ful to the fam­i­ly struc­ture, extreme­ly dif­fi­cult for my moth­er. I had a lot of resent­ment with my father—not that I didn’t love him. He was a good guy when he was sober, and not a good guy when he was drink­ing.” Paul Gates even­tu­al­ly swore off liquor, but remained large­ly absent from Daryl’s life. By the time he dried out, he had sep­a­rat­ed from Arvil­la and set­tled in Sacra­men­to.
Low­ell became a sur­ro­gate father, Gates says, and was a good role mod­el. “Talk about moral. Nev­er swore, nev­er drank, nev­er smoked. He was great with kids, always teach­ing them sports, great with his hands, a fine artist—he could build any­thing, from a small mod­el to a house.” Low­ell was also an epilep­tic, which led to his pre­ma­ture death in 1953, at age thir­ty-one. He was surf­ing off the beach at San Onofre when he suf­fered a seizure and drowned. Gates was dev­as­tat­ed. “That was the only time I’ve ever seen him cry,” says Wan­da Stiles, his first wife.
Gates met Wan­da at John Muir Junior Col­lege, where he enrolled after a stint in the navy. “She was one of the cheer­lead­ers and gor­geous,” recalls Daryl’s broth­er Steve. When they mar­ried, he was still a few months shy of twen­ty-one; his moth­er had to give her con­sent. Daryl and Wan­da were whisked direct­ly from the license bureau to a guest spot on Art Linkletter’s radio pro­gram. “I guess we were the cutest cou­ple that signed up for a license that day,” Wan­da says.
In 1949, Wan­da became preg­nant, and Daryl, still in school, felt a press­ing need to earn some mon­ey. A friend sug­gest­ed the police force, which, he point­ed out, encour­aged its mem­bers to con­tin­ue their edu­ca­tion. Daryl fit the phys­i­cal profile—more than two hun­dred pounds and in excel­lent shape—but he felt the job was beneath him intel­lec­tu­al­ly. So did his father and broth­ers. “There was a gen­er­al dis­dain for police offi­cers in my fam­i­ly,” recalls Steve Gates, who lat­er fol­lowed in Daryl’s foot­steps and is today a cap­tain in the L.A.P.D.
Daryl was final­ly swayed by the large salary: $290 a month. (Today he makes $168,000 a year.) In Sep­tem­ber 1949, one month after Wan­da gave birth to Suzanne Deb­o­rah, he entered the police acad­e­my, con­vinced that “I was prob­a­bly the smartest guy becom­ing a cop there ever was.”
He soon changed his mind, caught in the spell of a deputy chief, William Park­er, who taught the his­to­ry of polic­ing. A nat­ur­al ora­tor, Park­er is said to have been the one who coined the phrase “the thin blue line.” He was also so icy that for­mer L.A.P.D. sergeant Gene Rod­den­ber­ry, who cre­at­ed the Star Trek series, sup­pos­ed­ly made him the mod­el for Mr. Spock.
By 1950, Daryl Gates had earned a bachelor’s degree in pub­lic admin­is­tra­tion from U.S.C., and was direct­ing traf­fic on the cor­ner of Olympic and Broad­way. That year, Chief William Wor­ton retired, and Bill Park­er replaced him. One of the priv­i­leges of being the chief was hav­ing a per­son­al dri­ver who also served as a body­guard. An Inter­nal Affairs sergeant, remem­ber­ing Gates’s strong phys­i­cal build and tal­ent as a marks­man at the acad­e­my, rec­om­mend­ed him for the job.
Park­er found a most will­ing pro­tege in Gates. “I’ve always felt we devel­oped a rela­tion­ship that was more than just a chief and a police offi­cer, but kind of a father-son rela­tion­ship,” Gates says. “He didn’t have any chil­dren, and I think he saw in me an oppor­tu­ni­ty to mold some­body. He knew that I had a tremen­dous respect for him and that I hung on every word.”
The secu­ri­ty job last­ed for about a year, and then Gates moved into the juve­nile divi­sion, a job akin to social work. From there, Gates trans­ferred to cen­tral vice, a beat that entailed bust­ing up ille­gal gam­bling games, arrest­ing pros­ti­tutes and book­ies, and roust­ing homo­sex­u­als from pub­lic rest rooms. On the vice squad, Gates suf­fered his worst injury. He was chas­ing a hook­er when her pimp grabbed him from behind. As Gates tried to shake the man off his back, the woman pulled out a knife and slashed Gates’s head. “That wasn’t so bad,” Gates says, “but then she bit me to the bone—and talk about painful.” Gates wasn’t too wor­ried about the knife wound—“I have such a hard head, that was my least vul­ner­a­ble spot”—but as he was being ban­daged, he fret­ted about the bite. “I kept won­der­ing if I could get syphilis.”
Gates was soon trans­ferred off the vice squad and into a series of admin­is­tra­tive jobs. Rumor had it that Park­er, alarmed over the stab­bing, did not want to see his pro­tege and a poten­tial future chief get him­self killed. In any case, Gates wound up as Parker’s adjutant—a glo­ri­fied appoint­ments secretary—and the only bru­tal­i­ty he wit­nessed was in the chief’s man­age­ment style.
Gates began to study hard for depart­men­tal exams, scor­ing first on every test he took—a feat unmatched in the annals of the L.A.P.D. He made sergeant in 1955, lieu­tenant in 1959, cap­tain in 1963. Two years lat­er he was pro­mot­ed again, to inspec­tor, a rank that today is known as com­man­der.
Around this time, after eigh­teen years of mar­riage, Gates sep­a­rat­ed from Wan­da. Their divorce would not become final for three more years. In addi­tion to Deb­by, they now had two oth­er chil­dren, Kathy Lea, born in 1950, and Low­ell Scott, born in 1955. Wan­da retained cus­tody. It is not entire­ly clear what caused the divorce, or even who ini­ti­at­ed it. Gates will not dis­cuss the sub­ject, and Wan­da is still at a loss to explain why the mar­riage failed. “They grew apart,” offers one fam­i­ly mem­ber. “We all have idio­syn­crasies, and theirs became acute.” Wan­da has noth­ing crit­i­cal to say about her ex-hus­band, apart from observ­ing that “there real­ly has to be some­thing wrong with some­body who is so hon­est.”
A few years after the sep­a­ra­tion, Gates met a flight atten­dant in her twen­ties, Sima Lal­lich, aboard a Unit­ed Air­lines jet head­ing for Los Ange­les. She was the dark-haired, viva­cious daugh­ter of a West Vir­ginia steel­work­er. They mar­ried in 1970. There are no chil­dren from the chief’s sec­ond mar­riage. Gates denied sev­er­al requests to allow Sima, whom he calls Sam, to be inter­viewed for this arti­cle. Sev­er­al years ago, how­ev­er, she described their home life to the Los Ange­les Times as one of hap­py seclu­sion: “We don’t enter­tain much. I guess we’re real­ly sort of dull.”

GATES’s SELF-CONTROL would meet its sever­est test in the sum­mer of 1965. It is worth remem­ber­ing that the infa­mous Watts riot, in a fore­shad­ow­ing of the Rod­ney King inci­dent, was touched off when the Cal­i­for­nia High­way Patrol stopped a black motorist. (“We have a lot to thank the high­way patrol for in our long his­to­ry,” Gates says, observ­ing the irony.) On August 11, 1965, Mar­quette Frye was pulled over at the cor­ner of 116th Street and Aval­on in the pre­dom­i­nant­ly black Watts neigh­bor­hood, and placed under arrest for drunk­en dri­ving. When he resist­ed, one of the offi­cers struck him in the stom­ach sev­er­al times with a black­jack. A large, angry crowd gath­ered at the scene, and the offi­cers radioed for help.
Gates, who had just been pro­mot­ed to inspec­tor, was on his way to check out a strike at near­by Har­vey Alu­minum when he got word of a “415”—a dis­tur­bance of the peace. The riot­ing had begun. Over the next few days, cars were over­turned, store win­dows smashed, build­ings gut­ted. By all accounts, Gates acquit­ted him­self well. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, oth­er mem­bers of the L.A.P.D., and the nation­al guards­men called for by Bill Park­er, did not. A report pre­pared at the time by the L.A.P.D. dis­clos­es that about thir­ty peo­ple were killed by offi­cers and guards­men, many of them sus­pect­ed loot­ers flee­ing the crime scene. Each of these deaths is labeled a “jus­ti­fi­able homi­cide.”
Park­er did noth­ing to soothe racial ten­sions. The riot­ers, he said, were “mon­keys in a zoo.” There was no point in sit­ting down with black medi­a­tors, because “the so-called lead­ers of the Negro com­mu­ni­ty can’t lead at all.” Park­er even went on tele­vi­sion to warn that “by 1970, 45 per­cent of the met­ro­pol­i­tan area of Los Ange­les will be Negro.… If you don’t [sup­port the police], come 1970, God help you.” There were loud calls for his res­ig­na­tion, includ­ing a rebuke from Mar­tin Luther King Jr.
Park­er weath­ered the storm, but died a year lat­er of a heart attack, hav­ing served six­teen years as chief. After an inter­im replace­ment, Gates ran for Parker’s job, but was beat­en out by Tom Red­din, who quit after two years to become a TV com­men­ta­tor. Gates ran for chief again, this time los­ing out to Ed Davis, who stayed on for nine years and is now a state sen­a­tor. Daryl Gates was final­ly sworn in as chief on March 24, 1978. He was fifty-one.
To many out­side observers, Gates is the very rein­car­na­tion of Bill Parker—tough, mil­i­taris­tic, racist. That Gates is a staunch apol­o­gist for Park­er, blind­ly refus­ing to admit that his men­tor was a big­ot, does lit­tle to enhance his cred­i­bil­i­ty with his crit­ics. Gates’s own image prob­lems stem from a num­ber of pub­lic com­ments he’s made over the years. No soon­er had he become chief, for exam­ple, than he explained to the Police Com­mis­sion why Lati­nos were not being pro­mot­ed in large num­bers: a lot of them were “lazy.” This remark has haunt­ed Gates for thir­teen years—and per­haps unfair­ly. Bob Med­i­na, a His­pan­ic cap­tain in the Hol­len­beck Divi­sion, says that Gates was mere­ly quot­ing a remark that he him­self had made to the chief a few days ear­li­er.
No com­ment has haunt­ed Gates more than his 1982 expla­na­tion to the Los Ange­les Times of why more blacks than whites were dying in police choke holds: “We may be find­ing that in some blacks when [the choke hold] is applied, the veins or arter­ies do not open up as fast as they do on nor­mal peo­ple.” Gates insists that this com­ment, although mis­er­ably word­ed, was mis­con­strued by oth­ers; to him, “nor­mal” meant those not suf­fer­ing from hyper­ten­sion, a dis­ease more com­mon in blacks.
Gates has found wide­spread sup­port among his black offi­cers. For­mer assis­tant chief Jesse Brew­er, for instance, admits that the “nor­mal peo­ple” state­ment both­ered him, but insists that Gates is “absolute­ly not” a racist. “You have to real­ize, this was a very racist depart­ment in the old days,” he says. “Gates gave me com­mand of the elite Met­ro­pol­i­tan Divi­sion, and pro­mot­ed more blacks and His­pan­ics and women to posi­tions of influ­ence than any oth­er chief.” And although Gates won’t com­ment, depart­ment insid­ers see Deputy Chief Bernie Parks, who is black, as his cho­sen successor.

EVERY NEWBORN is a lit­tle sav­age,” Gates has remarked on more than one occa­sion, and he is hap­py to embell­ish this theme: “They puke all over you and crap all over you, they don’t work, there’s no way you can deny them what they want. That’s the begin­ning, and par­ents have to rec­og­nize their tremen­dous respon­si­bil­i­ty to mold that lit­tle sav­age into some­thing worth­while.”
For Gates’s son, it didn’t quite work out that way: Scott is a junkie and a felon. There is a wide­ly held belief that Gates cal­lous­ly washed his hands of Scott as soon as he got into trou­ble. The facts do not sup­port this conclusion—though it seems cold-blood­ed to some peo­ple that in light of his son’s his­to­ry Gates would rec­om­mend, even in jest, shoot­ing casu­al drug users. Gates finds this crit­i­cism exas­per­at­ing. “My son is an addict,” he points out—and addicts live in their own pur­ga­to­ry, hav­ing already, in effect, “shot them­selves.”
Gates speaks of Scott with an over­whelm­ing sense of sad­ness, stat­ing sev­er­al times that he still loves his son. Some guilt creeps in as well. “Every par­ent that’s ever had a child go wrong in any way, shape, or form—every thought­ful parent—always blames him­self,” he says. “You think of all the things you didn’t do and should have done, and you can dri­ve your­self crazy over that.” But, at the same time, Gates is hard-pressed to cite any­thing he could have done dif­fer­ent­ly. “You always look for the ‘rea­sons,’ but the rea­sons are very sim­ple. It’s a break­down in a person’s self-con­trol.”
“I’ve nev­er ques­tioned my father’s love,” Scott says, agree­ing that the chief deserves none of the blame for his drug prob­lem. As he recounts his sto­ry, a trag­ic theme emerges: his life’s ambi­tion has been to please his father, yet he has been a ter­ri­ble dis­ap­point­ment. It did not start out that way. When Scott was ten, he was one of the few in the Alham­bra school dis­trict to win the Pres­i­den­tial Phys­i­cal Fit­ness Award. But around that same time he real­ized his par­ents were divorc­ing.
“Ini­tial­ly,” Scott says, “I was told they were sep­a­rat­ing because Dad need­ed time to study for his exams, which made sense—but kids are per­cep­tive. When I saw what was real­ly hap­pen­ing, it was dev­as­tat­ing, and I didn’t want to have to face it. And that’s when I found escape through chem­i­cals.”
One day before a cru­cial junior-high foot­ball game, he expe­ri­enced severe stom­ach cramps. A neigh­bor­hood doc­tor gave him a shot of Demerol. “It not only relieved the pain of the cramps, but also all the stress and trau­ma I was feel­ing from the divorce,” he says. Scott kept beg­ging for anoth­er shot. In the eighth grade, he broke his leg doing the long jump, and a doc­tor pre­scribed Per­co­dan. “When Mom wasn’t look­ing, I took hand­fuls of those. That’s when I knew.”
Scott was afraid to share his secret with his father. “There was a lot of denial on both our parts,” he says. Then, in 1976, when Scott was twen­ty, he was dri­ving a girlfriend’s BMW through a sleazy neigh­bor­hood in search of drugs, all the while being watched by nar­cotics offi­cers. The narcs got in touch with Gates, who incred­u­lous­ly demand­ed proof. Three days lat­er, Scott was arrest­ed for the first time. Awake to the prob­lem at long last, Gates offered his sup­port. “I told him I’d get up, go any­where, hold him, strap him down, do anything—all he’d have to do is call me,” Gates says.
But Scott con­tin­ued to get into trou­ble, steal­ing from fam­i­ly mem­bers and grad­u­at­ing from mar­i­jua­na and booze to PCP and cocaine. He found his drug of choice—heroin—the day his father was con­firmed as chief. Only two weeks lat­er, an inco­her­ent Scott Gates was arrest­ed in a San Gabriel park­ing lot. He was charged with pos­ses­sion of drugs and drug para­pher­na­lia, and sen­tenced to a one-year reha­bil­i­ta­tion pro­gram. In 1980, after drugs were detect­ed in his blood, he was thrown in jail for vio­lat­ing his pro­ba­tion. Mean­while, Gates was warned by his broth­er Steve, who had served in the nar­cotics bureau, that he was show­ing Scott too much under­stand­ing. Steve advised him to prac­tice what is known in coun­sel­ing cir­cles as “tough love.”
Gates took the advice, find­ing it dif­fi­cult at first. “When you engage in tough love, peo­ple think you’re a mis­er­able S.O.B.,” he says. “I told Scott’s girl­friends to stay away, that he would hurt them even­tu­al­ly. And they just thought I was hor­ri­ble. Well, that was before their tele­vi­sions were stolen and their hearts were bro­ken.”
In May 1985, Scott checked out of a rehab cen­ter, renewed his drug habit, and began sleep­ing on the street. Wan­da, also a con­vert to tough love, agreed to put him up for one night. The next morn­ing, he walked to a near­by Hunt­ing­ton Beach phar­ma­cy, faked a stick­up with a pipe, and left with $5,000 in drugs. By the time he got back to his mother’s house, the law was in hot pur­suit. As Scott hid, trem­bling, in the attic, he heard squad cars pull up, the sound of a hov­er­ing heli­copter, and the click of shot­guns. He gave him­self up after a SWAT team threat­ened to use tear gas, and was arrest­ed with an M16 rifle at his head. He wound up in the iso­la­tion tank, and it was there that he read, in a news­pa­per, Daryl Gates’s now infa­mous and wide­ly quot­ed com­ment about his son: “He’ll get no help from me.” Father and son have bare­ly spo­ken since.
Scott, now thir­ty-five, com­plet­ed the L.A. Marathon last year and says he has been clean for more than a year and a half. Gates isn’t buy­ing it: “He’s on methadone—that’s a drug.” Gates is also unhap­py that his son recent­ly sold the rights to his life sto­ry for a TV mini-series. “He’s not sell­ing his life story—he’s sell­ing mine.” (So has Gates, who col­lect­ed a report­ed $300,000 advance from Ban­tam to write his mem­oirs.) “I’d rather see him go out and get a job as a ditchdig­ger or gas-sta­tion attendant—just make a con­tri­bu­tion. Gas-sta­tion atten­dants are sore­ly need­ed these days.”
Scott has lit­tle to say in his defense, though he does pro­pose that he is not the only fam­i­ly mem­ber with an addic­tion. “My father is a worka­holic,” he points out. “Had it not been work, it would have been some­thing else.”
Sub­stance abuse has also tak­en its toll on anoth­er rel­a­tive. A decade ago, Deb­by Gates mar­ried Daniel Ledes­ma, a sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive with a record for drunk­en dri­ving. After one such arrest, Ledes­ma was sen­tenced to a year of pub­lic ser­vice. Recent­ly, he alleged­ly bumped his car into anoth­er vehi­cle and was arrest­ed as he tried to run from the scene. “Daryl won’t even talk to Dan­ny,” Wan­da says. (Gates’s oth­er daugh­ter, Kathy, mar­ried into a more upscale envi­ron­ment. Her sec­ond hus­band, Sam Per­ri­cone Jr., is the wealthy son of the largest cit­rus grow­er in the Unit­ed States.)
Steve Gates, Daryl’s police-offi­cer broth­er, has had prob­lems as well. A decade ago, he had an affair with a woman who, it turned out, owned a San Fer­nan­do Val­ley broth­el. Though he broke no laws, he was sus­pend­ed for five days for his lapse of judg­ment, and has nev­er been pro­mot­ed above captain.

DARYL GATES has remained free from the taint of per­son­al scan­dal. The same can­not be said of his neme­sis, May­or Tom Bradley. In March 1989, City Attor­ney James Hahn launched a probe into Bradley’s finances. When Gates was asked for help, he amenably put sev­er­al L.A.P.D. bun­co-forgery detec­tives at Hahn’s dis­pos­al. The mat­ter was set­tled out of court in Decem­ber 1989 when Bradley admit­ted fail­ing to dis­close stock and bond invest­ments worth about $160,000, as required by state law, and paid a $20,000 fine. Mean­while, the L.A.P.D. con­tin­ues to inves­ti­gate Bradley on oth­er pos­si­ble mis­deeds, includ­ing polit­i­cal fund-rais­ing vio­la­tions. Need­less to say, this has only deep­ened the ani­mos­i­ty between Bradley and Gates.
Bradley him­self spent twen­ty years as a police­man. He is said to be bit­ter about the depart­ment because his efforts to rise above lieu­tenant were thwart­ed by racism. “When I served on the police force, black and white offi­cers were not allowed to ride in the same patrol car,” Bradley observes. (The depart­ment was deseg­re­gat­ed in 1960.) “No one can deny racism was a fact of life.” Nev­er­the­less, Bradley says, his years in the L.A.P.D. made him “more aware of the needs of our offi­cers.” Gates scoffs at the notion. “I don’t think he has any sen­si­tiv­i­ty to how police offi­cers feel,” he says.
Gates’s para­noia about his polit­i­cal ene­mies tends to exac­er­bate his defen­sive­ness, and he has even been accused of keep­ing “Hoover files” on some of them. In 1983, the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia chap­ter of the A.C.L.U. won a $1.8 mil­lion inva­sion-of-pri­va­cy suit against the police depart­ment on behalf of sev­er­al clients who had been spied on. “We found if you crit­i­cized the police in any way, you were very like­ly to have a file,” says A.C.L.U. exec­u­tive direc­tor Ramona Rip­ston. Many of these files still exist, and Gates has been rumored to have leaked their con­tents from time to time.
When asked to com­ment, Gates sounds as though he’s about to admit it’s all true, before spring­ing back into a flat denial. “You can­not be in this busi­ness as long as I’ve been with­out know­ing an awful lot about a lot of peo­ple,” he says, smil­ing. “That’s just the nature of the business—you know where a lot of the bod­ies are buried. I could prob­a­bly relate sto­ry after sto­ry about a lot of peo­ple in this com­mu­ni­ty and this state. But”—and now the smile vanishes—“I don’t keep files on them, don’t extort peo­ple, don’t engage in that ridicu­lous exer­cise. Nev­er would.”
For now, Gates insists that he is not going to leave his job, espe­cial­ly as long as there is pres­sure on him to do so. There is no manda­to­ry retirement—the very word seems to make the chief ner­vous. He points out that he is still in excel­lent phys­i­cal shape. Any­way, Gates wants to make sure his suc­ces­sor comes from with­in the depart­ment so that the tra­di­tions of Bill Park­er can be car­ried into the next mil­len­ni­um.
Gates says he is wait­ing to see a list of in-house can­di­dates who can pass the civ­il-ser­vice exam. “Then I’ll think about retir­ing,” he says. “If I don’t get that list, for­get about it. I’ll be here till I’m ninety.” ♦