Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (37 page)

Nevertheless, implementing a new way of thinking about crime and the way the LAPD treated the public would take a shift in culture. The department had been so small and underfunded and under such intense criticism for so long that it had turned deeply inward, resulting in a calcified groupthink.

Fortunately for Bratton, the consent decree, with its mandatory, legal compliance, demanded a shift in culture. He
had
to carry out all those contentious reforms mandated by the decree, he could argue, because there was simply no way around them.

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

That day at the Police Academy, the reaction as the command staff filed out of the meeting was “
What’s with this guy?” Beck never noticed a lack of eye contact during Bratton’s fire-and-brimstone introductory address. He didn’t recall anybody being actively disrespectful either. But after they had been dismissed, he saw a lot of dazed-looking people who were extremely troubled by the message they had been sent. What he
didn’t see was the usual groups hanging around the parking lot shooting the shit. Everybody instead was getting into a car and getting the hell out of there. And Beck was thinking: “
Well, read his book [
Turnaround
], man. Read the book. We’re in the first chapters of the book [establishing the necessity to change], that’s where we’re at. And those first chapters are not fun.”

Alternatively they could have read the transcript of Bratton’s speech on the day he was sworn into office at the Police Academy: “The department is not strategically engaged in fighting crime,” he said. “
We have nine thousand officers smiling and waving as they drive around in their cars”—a statement that really wasn’t true at all. LAPD officers were engaged in fighting crime; they just weren’t doing so strategically or effectively. It was clear that Bratton wanted something new. What wasn’t clear to his command staff, however, was how to deliver it.

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

Years later, when Bratton was leaving the LAPD, much of the press coverage would give him credit for laying the groundwork for the successful implementation of community policing in L.A. “And there were people throughout the department,” says Pat Gannon, “who would ask: ‘
How does Bratton get credit for community policing? There wasn’t one program that was instituted throughout the department—not one department initiative that said here is how we are going to institute community policing in Los Angeles.’ ” And that was true.

But Gannon nevertheless thought the doubters were missing the point, which had to do with Bratton’s expectations on reducing crime. “
As crime declined, community trust and confidence grew out in the field and within the department’s divisions because we’d begun to do things differently—to develop relationships and partnerships within the community [to help make crime reduction happen]. That’s what community policing is.

“So,
Bratton didn’t give us a blueprint. The old LAPD way would have been to take six months to a year, draw up a beautiful program and a beautiful packet, hand it to somebody and say . . . now all throughout the 460 square miles of the city everybody has to do this the same
way. Bratton’s attitude was that you can’t do it that way. Because what is going on in Rampart versus what is going on in Harbor and what’s going on in South L.A. are all different. He wanted us to just do it! Develop those relationships, use our imagination, do it legally, ethically, but do it. And as an organization that’s what we started to do.”

Charlie Beck, 2002, LAPD Central Division and Skid Row

In 2002, the LAPD’s Central Division covered what was as close to a traditional, inner-city core as Los Angeles had to offer: a cramped, creaky Chinatown; a sterile, urban-renewed Japanese commercial strip; fish and produce markets; a performing arts center and a famous concert hall; a classic 1930s public-works Art Deco train station and a new bus terminal; a Catholic cathedral and seat of the archdiocese; the headquarters of the
L.A. Times
and the MTA; gleaming high-rise office buildings and hotels and once-glorious movie palaces and commercial structures from the 1920s through the 1950s. At its hub stood a civic center that included City Hall and L.A. County’s government offices.

In and around that center were the moving parts of Los Angeles’s criminal justice system: the LAPD’s soon-to-be-replaced home, Parker Center; a stark, bone-chilling, slit-windowed federal prison; federal and county courthouses; a dungeon-like L.A. County Men’s Central Jail; and a few blocks away a newer county lockup—the behemoth Twin Towers jail that served as a “receiving center” that processed both the roughly
20,000 inmates L.A. County had in custody daily and the
165,000 that flowed through its jails every year. It also contained a housing unit that daily confined about
2,300 mentally ill inmates—the
largest such mental-health facility in the nation.

Close by was another of Central Division’s key defining features: the
largest skid row in the western United States, a fifty-block area of prime real estate ripe for gentrification. From the 1920s through the 1960s the district had been home to cheap, single-occupancy hotels and bars for hard-drinking transient laborers working in the city’s factories and fields and on the loading docks for the downtown railroads.

By 2002, however, what had once been a seedy last stop for working men had turned into a centralized human trash heap. One that featured a large open-air drug market; people OD’d on the street; and long rows of small tents, discarded brown-cardboard-box bedrooms, faded lawn chairs, and human feces and urine on the sidewalks. Interspersed throughout stood overstuffed shopping carts containing the possessions of the about fifteen hundred degraded, beaten-down men and women who lived their lives in full view, out on the street.

About 40 percent of L.A. County’s homeless were mentally ill, with many of them dual-diagnosed as severe drug addicts or alcoholics as well. As Los Angeles County supervisor Gloria Molina would point out at the time: “
There are just no facilities for the mentally ill homeless. You can go up and down skid row and you’ll see that 95 percent of the people there need mental-health counseling right away.”

The homeless population in Los Angeles and California, like those elsewhere in the nation, had begun to rise after 1967, when the state abolished the forced incarceration of the nonviolent mentally ill and closed many of its large, often abusive lockdown mental institutions. The follow-up plan was for the state’s mental-health department to open new, community-based clinics and provide housing and other services. But that never occurred. Instead, tax cuts mandated by voter-approved ballot initiatives like the permanently tax-lowering Proposition 13, the recession of the 1980s, and the devastating crack epidemic would all hit L.A. particularly hard. The result was the near collapse of the county’s mental-health-care system and the explosion of the population of Skid Row as the homeless and mentally ill were recycled off the streets, into jail for short stays and then out into the streets again. The small number of homeless housing units that were being provided, meanwhile, proved woefully inadequate to keep up with demand.

By 2000 an estimated ninety-one thousand homeless men, women, and children were living in Los Angeles County, with only about
eighteen thousand beds in shelters across the county and about
eighty-three single-room-occupancy hotels for the homeless, most of which were located in Skid Row.

It was as if the powers that be in the city and county had sat around
thinking about the looniest solution to the homeless problem, and then decided to just let it happen. As Charlie Beck, who’d been made lead captain of Central Division and Skid Row in 2002, would later put it: “For whatever reason—and I can’t really speak to why—the police and society had allowed
a different standard of behavior for that area of the c
ity than anywhere else.” Then he added something that perfectly illuminated the situation: “It’s not so much what the police let you do, it’s what everybody else lets you do. Human behavior to me is more about what your neighbor says to you than the random acts of the police department.” Beck didn’t have to add the obvious: that by concentrating so much human misery into so small a district, L.A. had created a dazed, bedraggled community of severe, untreated addicts and the mentally ill that was disastrous not only for them but for the businesses located in the area, and for a Los Angeles struggling to revitalize its central core—an area that L.A.’s non-homeless currently were avoiding at all costs.

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

The first of the LAPD’s twenty-one divisions that Bill Bratton decided to inspect was Central. On a Skid Row walking tour with Beck, Bratton, unsurprisingly, was deeply unhappy with what he was seeing. “
How long you been in charge here?” he asked. Beck thought, “I’m going to tell him the truth, and I hope it’s not too long.” “Six months,” he confessed. He could almost hear the wheels clicking in Bratton’s brain.

“Have you made any progress?” Bratton finally said.

Beck had his answer ready: “Yes, but not enough. Here’s what I’ve got planned.”

After listening, Bratton replied with one word: “
Okay.” Beck wasn’t sure what that meant. Was it good or was it bad? It was neither. What Bratton had meant was “Okay, show me what you’ve got.”

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

Beck’s task was to tame the lawless chaos of damaged people who had been left, essentially, to fend for themselves. Establishing a sense of order in Skid Row, Beck reasoned, was, by necessity, his first task. He began by
counting the tents and packing-box bedrooms as a way of approximating
the number of people living on the area’s streets. Then, in conjunction with homeless shelter staffers and mental-health workers, his officers began approaching those camped out and
giving them a choice: sleep on the street or sidewalk in a tent or box during the day and risk ticketing or arrest, or use the mission services that were being offered.

At the rescue missions, Beck knew he’d have captive audiences right before lunch, when residents had to first go into the auditorium for a daily sermon. So he began
a series of talks to about four hundred of the homeless, “many of whom,” he says, “had
a slim grasp on reality. Some would listen; some would be talking in tongues.”

“
You’re no longer going to be permitted sleep on the sidewalks before 10 p.m.,” he told them, “and you can’t block or sit on the sidewalks during the day. If you do, you’ll be ticketed.” The same, he added, would apply to such actions as drinking in public, jaywalking, and littering—“broken windows” policing straight out of Bill Bratton’s playbook.

The missions had rules too: no drinking, getting high, bullying, or fighting; and mandatory lining up for meals and attendance at daily sermons. Beck’s cop-eyed assessment of the situation was this: “
Folks that were lawless liked [L.A.’s] Skid Row because there were no laws. So they wouldn’t abide by the missions’ rules either.” His solution: get them into the missions or to leave the area. And many did leave, thus reducing the Skid Row population to a more manageable number of those needing and wanting services and temporary mission housing.

“People always ask,” said Beck later, “ ‘
Where’d the homeless all go?’ That question assumes that the situation was insolvable, immutable. But it wasn’t. Some went into treatment; some went back to wherever their family roots were and became a problem there. But they stopped congregating in huge numbers on Skid Row, reinforcing each other’s destructive behavior in the only area of Los Angeles that allowed it. Just having a routine downtown—roll up your beds at six in the morning and you can’t put them up until ten at night—had a tremendous effect [in reducing the number of homeless living on Skid Row’s streets] because it’s a pain in the ass for them to have to do it. For most of the people that don’t want any rules,
that was way too many rules. So many just left.”

Bill Bratton labeled Beck’s concentrated effort one of his “Safer Cities Initiatives”
and gave him fifty additional officers to patrol Skid Row. They proceeded to enforce Charlie Beck’s rules while writing tens of thousands of tickets for petty crimes and infractions like jaywalking and loitering, or anything that would drive the hapless homeless off the streets and out of the area. Those actions had an immediate effect, despite the fact that federal courts afterward would at least twice brand key aspects of the department’s enforcement policies unconstitutional and order them halted.

Crime fell, for example, and blatant street-corner drug dealing and prostitution were sharply curtailed as was regional hospitals’ wickedly venal practice of dumping their just-released homeless and often mentally ill patients onto the streets of Skid Row overnight and clandestinely, leaving them alone and often clueless in their hospital garb.

In the wake of all this came the steady reclamation of key blocks of Skid Row that had been a civic disgrace, and their gentrification and integration into the heart of a surging, redeveloping downtown L.A. Bratton and Beck had acted, and those were the payoffs. None were small accomplishments. But time would prove that the unwillingness of L.A.’s power brokers to provide funding for services and especially for permanent housing for the homeless outside the city’s core would ensure that nothing much changed on Skid Row, and that the LAPD and the poor, desperate residents of the streets of Skid would still be dancing to much the same tune over a decade later.

As Bill Bratton told the
Los Angeles Times
, his “responsibility was not [homeless] housing, not their medical care, not their social needs. Those were the responsibility of city and county government, and in those areas, the county and the city and the state have been incredibly deficient in serving that population.” Bratton was right. But like rest of L.A.’s city and county agencies, he too had no answers that didn’t ultimately just kick the problem down the road while further dehumanizing the lives of the people being kicked.

But it would take Ta-Nehisi Coates, the great
Atlantic
magazine essayist, to express the real heart of the problem. “
At some point,” wrote Coates in his commentary “The Myth of Police Reform,” “Americans decided that the best answer to every social problem lay in the power
of the criminal-justice system. Vexing social problems—homelessness, drug use, the inability to support one’s children, mental illness—are presently solved by sending in men and women who specialize in inspiring fear and ensuring compliance. Fear and compliance have their place, but it can’t be every place.”