Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (14 page)

“What’s with this guy?” Woodle asked the sergeant in charge. “We’re just letting it happen,” he was told. “We don’t want to make any waves.” Meaning, as Woodle understood it, that they didn’t want to rile up the crowd. People were still firing off celebratory bullets in the air; they could hear the shots. But Woodle wasn’t having it. Florence and Normandie had been his beat, his
stomping ground
, when he had been a CRASH officer. He knew that the territory surrounding the intersection was controlled by the 8 Trey Gangster Crips, and that they were using this homeless guy as a patsy, like a character in some kind of weird, satirical performance, with him—LAPD sergeant Curtis Woodle and everything he stood for—as the butt of the joke.

But it was more than that. Woodle was a black man in a white department with a racist history he was trying to change. And the shovel-man was directing the traffic by race. If you were black or brown, you didn’t have to stick around, you’d be waved on through. If you were white or Asian, you weren’t going anywhere, not on that guy’s watch. And there was one more thing: For three days, Woodle—a native son of South Central Los Angeles—had watched his old neighborhood become engulfed in flames, violence, and looting. And he had done
nothing
.

Even now, Woodle’s hands were tied. He was outranked at the scene, so he headed back to the 77th Street station house and received permission from a deputy chief to take another patrol car filled with officers as backup to move the guy off the intersection. But when he called for volunteers among the cops hanging around the station, not a hand shot up. His only option was to return to Florence and Normandie with just the three state prison guards.

Woodle deployed them on three of the four sides of the intersection, where they provided cover with shotguns. Then, related Woodle, he adjusted his riot helmet and strode up to the homeless guy. “
Hey, man,” he said, “I appreciate what you’ve been doing, but I’ll take over from here.” They locked eyes, and the man suddenly gripped the shovel very hard. Woodle moved close enough so that only the shovel-man could hear. “If you raise that shovel,” Woodle told him, “I will kill you.” And with that, the shovel-man moved off his stage and onto the sidewalk as the city and its shell-shocked police department settled back into an uneasy, unresolved calm.

Charlie Beck, Saturday, May 2, 1992, Coliseum

Charlie Beck also stayed busy that Saturday,
shutting down the Coliseum command post. The last year, as Beck and many of his fellow officers saw it, had been horrific. But it had also been inevitable.

After all, the same bleak economic conditions and spiraling violence that existed in Los Angeles’s ghettos and barrios in 1992 had also existed, in varying degrees, in most big cities across America since the 1960s. Back then,
over 125 cities, from New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, to Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit and on to San Francisco
and
Los Angeles, had erupted in violent rebellion. But in the nineties, Los Angeles stood almost entirely alone. The only difference was the LAPD.

In the wake of the riots,
President George H. W. Bush declared Los Angeles County a disaster area, making it eligible for federal relief, and flew out to L.A. on Air Force One to personally tour the riot area as if it had been hit by some kind of category 4 Gulf Coast hurricane.

Connie Rice, Saturday, May 2, 1992, Jordan Downs

Shortly after the riots a lawyer named Connie Rice drove to Jordan Downs to see how she might help. Rice was the codirector of the Los Angeles office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a position she held since her arrival in Los Angeles in September of 1990. That day in 1992, Rice had come directly from court in downtown L.A., and was still dressed for the part—all decked out in a business suit, lawyerly blouse, and set of pearls, looking like a self-described “black Republican” matron. But it wasn’t just her outfit that made her appear out of place in Jordan Downs.

Although Rice unequivocally identified as an African-American, her heritage on both sides of her family was white as well as black, which sometimes led to confusion. Once, as a twelve-year-old in an Arizona junior high school—
a “coal black” classmate and migrant worker’s son—had “marched right up” to her, “thrust his ashy frown into [her] chin and blurted out in exasperation, ‘What
is
you?’ ”

As she walked across the grounds of Jordan Downs that day, Rice cut a striking, distinctive figure. At forty-six, she was slim, fine-featured, and youthful-looking, with light-brown skin and a wavy mane of black-brown hair worn long and always perfectly coiffed. Consciously or not, she carried herself like a diva—no-nonsense, self-aware, and straight-ahead—like the dreamy girl she once was, who was now the star in her own movie.

Over the next decade she would become among the most articulate, high-profile political commentators in Los Angeles, a smart, analytical, activist voice in the know about issues people wanted to understand, such as why L.A.’s public transportation and criminal justice systems were so bad. With her style, reputation, and sense of self, she could easily have made the Hollywood party scene. But Rice, it would turn out, had no aspirations and perhaps no ability in that direction. For one thing, she didn’t suffer fools lightly. For another, there seemed something of the loner about her, not fond of, interested in, or particularly good at frivolity or congenial, personal small talk.

But on this day in Jordan Downs in April of 1992, Rice was little known in L.A. Born into the black bourgeoisie, she’d yet to earn a dime
of street cred. Her family, she says, was all about “
hope and achievement.” Her mother had been a high school biology teacher, and her father,
Phillip Leon Rice, Sr., was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force who’d retired as a major. He’d graduated from Howard University, having majored in Russian, as had her second cousin, future secretary of state
Condoleezza Rice. Rice herself had graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe College in 1978 and then went to New York University School of Law, where she attended on scholarship. There, in her third year of law school, she’d work long hours each week keeping up with her studies and assisting in capital punishment law cases. Thurgood Marshall was her hero. She went on to clerk for
Judge Damon J. Keith of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, taking tough cases and getting top credentials, because, she says, “I wanted people to understand that
I
wanted
to be a civil rights lawyer” and that she “could have been a partner in a white-shoe law firm making $1 million a year if [she’d] chosen to.”

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

Easing her way around the projects, Rice finally found what she was looking for: a trailer in which Bloods and Crips, their colors wrapped around their heads, were sitting around at a table negotiating a gang truce. She’d heard about the negotiations, she told them, and wanted to help out.

It was the wrong play, trying to support gang truces, Rice would later learn, because “
when you sit down with the Bloods and Crips
as
Bloods and Crips, you just reinforce the symbols and ethos and dynamics of the gang. They needed to work and to be worked with, but as
individuals
, as leaders in the neighborhood, as men in their community, sitting at the table as community leaders.” But Rice knew nothing of all this at the time. For now, she would do what she could to make peace in the wake of the riots, working for the gang members, as she later put it, as essentially “
a research assistant.”

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

Even before Rice reached out to the gang members, she’d become aware of the LAPD’s cavalier brutality through reading headline stories in the
local African-American newspaper, the
Los Angeles Sentinel
.
Stories, in particular, about the dogs of the LAPD’s sixteen-man K-9 unit running wild and viciously, triumphantly, mauling and badly biting cornered suspects, almost all of whom were black and brown men and boys.

In three years, from January 1989 to January 1992, the dogs had
bitten nine hundred people. The Philadelphia PD had twice the number of dogs deployed as did the LAPD during the same period, but the number of suspects
bitten totaled just twenty. The
LAPD dogs sunk their teeth into 80 percent of the suspects they cornered. In the process they had put more people in the hospital than had their nine thousand human counterparts on the department combined. Forty-seven percent of the canine unit’s arrested suspects had to be sent to a hospital. The rest of the force had a less than 1 percent hospital rate.

“
None of us opposes safe and effective canine training that enhances the safety of officers, the dogs, and the public,” Rice would tell the Los Angeles City Council during a hearing on the issue in January 1992. “We do, however, oppose a ‘bite first and ask questions later’ policy that results in unleashing the dog to search and automatically bite whomever it tracks: Suspects. Non-suspects. Suspects who are non-threatening. Children. Bystanders. Whomever the dog finds.”

But the LAPD’s dogs were
trained
to do just that. Biting was their reward for hunting down and cornering or flushing out a suspect. “Find and bite,” it was called. Most other police departments used a “circle and bark” approach, where the dog is trained to circle once it’s found its suspect—not to bite. And like so many special units under Daryl Gates, K-9 cops were permitted to operate pretty much as they wished, defended always by Gates.

In fact, just before the city council hearing in January 1992, as the
Los Angeles Times
would later report, Daryl
Gates had “fiercely defended the K-9 unit and rejected charges that its dogs [were] allowed to bite suspects as reward for their work. ‘We do not teach our dogs to bite as reward. Absolutely not,’ Gates told reporters. ‘These are good dogs . . . (and) if they are attacked themselves, they react to that. . . . You would too,’ he said. . . . ‘We keep very careful records . . . and, I think, 70% to 75% are nothing more than Band-Aid injuries.’ ”

That turned out to be precisely the story that juries had been buying. Lawyers representing victims were losing case after case, even though their clients’ wounds were egregious and the use of such force overwhelmingly unwarranted. Many of the victims were no angels. And when the K-9 officer would come into the courtroom, his dog would sit in a chair and pant as the officer threw a ball up in the air for the dog to catch. As Rice would later describe it, “The dog,
these beautiful German shepherds, would catch the ball and sit back in the chair looking adorable. And the jury—now in love with the dog—would essentially rule in favor of the dog.”

Finally, the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund banded together and filed a class-action civil suit through the Police Misconduct Guild—twenty-one lawyers dividing up enough dog-bite cases to keep many of them busy, including one law firm that had two full-time lawyers who did nothing but K-9 cases.

It took two years of court discovery orders for the attorneys to finally get a version of the LAPD’s in-house use-of-force database. The statistician they then hired did scatter-plot graphs that told a story of massive use-of-force abuse. In addition to the extraordinary number of bites and the hospitalization rates, they showed that the dogs weren’t just being deployed for canine crimes but were being used indiscriminately in South Los Angeles. They also discovered that the K-9 unit had a special code to alert its members that a cop and his dog had a suspect cornered and that they should quickly hustle over to watch. They called it “
feeding time.”

Sometimes the live action would be videotaped, such as one night in March 1989, when a jumpy video camera recorded a young black car-theft suspect hiding under an overturned couch in a darkened backyard. The clip shows at least four officers standing around, some high-fiving each other. A large German shepherd, meanwhile, is straining and growling at his prey under the couch. When one of the officers kicks it off the suspect, the dog instantly reacts by sinking his teeth into the man’s leg, where they remain embedded as Sergeant Mark Mooring yanks the dog backward and the man is dragged across the backyard, howling in fright and pain. Mooring would later describe the encounter as “
one of the
greatest experiences ever.” The video, entitled “Why Be a Cop,” aired on
CBS Evening News
nationally. Taped by LAPD officers, it was credited as being “produced by [the LAPD] and Chief Daryl F. Gates.”

When the consolidated class-action suit came to trial, the judge viewed the video, looked at the statistics the lawyers had shown him, and told the deputy city attorney representing the LAPD that if she tried the case she’d lose, and that the LAPD had better settle. And that’s what happened.

During the settlement negotiations, as Rice tells it, something remarkable occurred. Several ranking K-9 officers proposed that instead of being forced to meet court-structured and court-mandated changes, they—the K-9 unit—be permitted to make the changes themselves. Eventually, the Misconduct Guild attorneys agreed. “
If you get the bite rate down from 80 percent to below 10 percent and do it quickly,” they responded, “you can do it on your terms.” The unit then instituted psychological profiling of each of the sixteen handlers. Four of them, recalls Rice, “tested off the scales for
sadomasochistic behavior. They were the guys doing the filming. And they got forced out of the unit. Within seven months every single dog had been changed from “find and bite” to “find, circle, and bark.” The bite rate plummeted from 80 percent down to 5 percent.”

Later, after the case was officially settled, Rice called one of the lawyers whose practice focused on dog-bite cases. “
Give me the bad news. How bad did [the K-9 unit] revert?” she asked, knowing that they had to have reverted, because that was what the LAPD always did. “We don’t even do K-9 cases anymore,” the attorney replied. “They not only kept it down,” Rice later summed up, “they kept it below 9 percent for fifteen years.” It was then Rice realized that when the LAPD
wanted
to change, they could change quickly, and they could change permanently. That was realization number one.