Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (50 page)

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Charlie Beck began his tenure as chief with amazing skill, avoiding repetition of the department’s past sins and with great instincts saying and doing the right, fair, decent things while building on Bill Bratton’s legacy.

Beck would signal the best of his intentions on his first full day in office by going to Watts’s Jordan Downs housing project and symbolically walking patrol, greeting residents and shaking hands with people he’d once felt he had to get away from to save his humanity.

Soon he formed a special unit staffed only with LAPD officers who’d volunteered to work in Jordan Downs and other high-crime housing projects in an innovative community-policing program called
Community Safety Partnership Police.

The unit’s cops would be judged not by arrest numbers but by how effectively they strengthened and stabilized each of the housing projects; kept crime and violence low through gaining the community’s trust, partnership, and support; and worked with the projects’ kids and families to keep the kids out of jail. Like the Urban Peace Academy Beck also helped found, it remains today a community-building police mission that could never have existed in the LAPD before Beck and Bratton.

In addition, Beck began forging ties with the city’s Latinos and other immigrant communities, lobbying for
driver’s licenses for undocumented residents and stopping impounding cars driven by those license-less immigrants, saving them hundreds or thousands of dollars in towing and impoundment fees in the process.

At the same time the LAPD’s gang-injunction policing would continue unabated under Beck. According to the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office, as of 2015 there were “more than
forty-six permanent gang injunctions in place in the city of Los Angeles, enjoining the activities of seventy-nine criminal street gangs.” Some of the injunctions dated back to 2000.

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As all this was occurring, officer-involved beatings, shootings, and killings across the country were starting to make persistent national headlines, and, thanks to cell-phone videos and ubiquitous street and building cameras, had begun to cumulatively settle into public conspicuousness, and would carry over well into 2015 to become a long list indeed. Among the many recorded were the routine, the chillingly deadly, and the stupidly fatal.

The first featured a man so scared of San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies that he mounted a nearby horse and fled from them, only to be viciously, gratuitously gang-beaten by a swarm of deputies once they caught up with him—all of which was captured by a news helicopter whirling above.

A second involved a middle-aged black man in North Charleston, South Carolina, whose vehicle was bullshit-stopped by a white officer. When the unarmed man decided to run away because he didn’t want to again be jailed for back child-support payments, the officer casually and fatally shot him multiple times in the back. This incident too was recorded, on this occasion by the cell phone of a passerby.

A third, captured by a body camera worn by a sheriff’s deputy in Oklahoma, focused on a white seventy-three-year-old insurance company executive and armed and uniformed Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department volunteer who was also a generous giver of gifts to the department. Working with deputies on a stakeout, he accidentally pulled out his gun instead of his Taser and killed the unnamed black suspect.

The LAPD too was having its share of controversial shootings. According to the
Homicide Report
—the extraordinary blog written by veteran
Los Angeles Times
reporter Jill Leovy—there were
605 officer-involved homicides in all of L.A. County from January 1, 2000, through late April of 2015, of which almost 40 percent, or
228 deaths, were at the hands of LAPD officers. Meanwhile, a 2014 investigation by the
New York Daily News
found that the
NYPD, with more than three times the number of police officers as the LAPD, had killed “at least 179 people” over almost exactly the same time frame: January 1, 2000, to September 2014.

In 2014 the
Wall Street Journal
also analyzed officer-involved killings from 105 of the nation’s largest police departments and found there had been “
at least 1,800 killings in those 105 departments between 2007 and 2012.” (About 18,000 law-enforcement agencies “didn’t report any [officer-involved killings to the FBI].”)

During those years the LAPD reported 111 officer-involved homicides, and Chicago—the city closest in population to L.A., and with similar gang problems—reported 87, and New York City 68. Officer-involved
killings have always been high in the LAPD and in the Southwest in general, and under Bratton and Beck they remained comparatively so; and, as of June 2015, have again become a fiercely contentious issue in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, as the summer of 2014 progressed,
Charlie Beck seemed to be cakewalking to a second five-year term as LAPD chief. Then a bombshell hit.

On August 9, just three days before Beck’s scheduled reappointment, a
Los Angeles Times
investigation revealed that from early October 2012 through September 2013, the
LAPD had misclassified nearly twelve hundred violent felonies as misdemeanors that consequently didn’t appear in the department’s annual report of serious (felony) crimes. (The paper had requested data for the past decade, but in the end had to settle for just one year.) The misclassifications included “
hundreds of stabbings, beatings and robberies”—the very crimes that people fear the most. Had those crimes been properly classified as the aggrieved assaults they actually were, the
Times
concluded, “the
total aggravated assaults . . . would have been almost 14 percent higher than the official figure [released by the LAPD].”

Beck responded by essentially saying that mistakes are inevitable when you’re dealing with 97,000 crimes in a single year. But when
Times
investigative reporters Joel Rubin and Ben Poston then reviewed their findings, they discovered a pattern that only magnified the seriousness of the problem: almost all of the misclassified crimes had “
turned serious crime[s] into minor one[s]”; almost none had been misclassified the other way around, so therefore could not have been simply random mistakes.

Afterward, no one accused Charlie Beck of being directly responsible for the subterfuge. But the pressure on commanding officers, division captains, and investigators to constantly report reductions in serious felonies was coming from the top, and had been intense enough to cause some of them to respond by deliberately misclassifying the crimes.

Despite what looked like a major breach of the public trust under a reform chief, Charlie Beck’s accomplishments were real enough that on
August 12, 2014—just three days after the
Times
released its exposé—the
Los Angeles Police Commission voted 4–1 to rehire him.

Acting to contain the damage,
Beck released a major reform plan in mid-December to ensure the department’s crime books would not again be cooked. Nevertheless, the
Times
story would not go away.

An investigation by the department’s inspector general into the bogus crime numbers remains ongoing. Later, at year’s end, the LAPD’s new major-crime report would paint a dramatically different picture of crime in L.A. Instead of the department’s upbeat 2013 portrait of declining crime, 2014’s numbers showed a
14 percent increase in violent crime, the first in twelve years.

The increase was driven by—guess what?—a soaring
rise of over
28 percent
in the very category of aggravated assaults the
Times
exposé had first pinpointed.

When Bill Bratton came to Los Angeles as chief, he brought with him Jack Maple’s policing-by-the-numbers COMSTAT system of judging command officers’ effectiveness and promotion potential, thus providing a particularly strong incentive for officers to cheat to meet production goals: live by the numbers, die by the numbers.

The same seems true in Chicago, where a similar phenomenon had also been discovered in 2014. There,
Chicago
magazine journalists David Bernstein and Noah Isackson investigated Chicago’s major violent crime statistics for 2013. In the process they “
identified 10 people . . . beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013 whose cases had been reclassified . . . or downgraded to more minor crimes; or closed as noncriminal incidents.” They also discovered “
serious felonies such as robberies, burglaries, and assaults” that had received the same treatment.

Of particular interest was the fact that Gary McCarthy, Chicago’s reform superintendent of police since 2011 and a Bill Bratton acolyte, had led the NYPD’s COMPSTAT meetings in New York as deputy commissioner of operations.

New York City’s COMPSTAT-driven felony crime numbers, it turns out, had also been questioned in 2012 by John A. Eterno—a former NYPD captain—and the highly respected criminologist Eli B. Silverman
in their book
The Crime Numbers Game
. Within the New York Police Department, they charged at the time, “
crimes are being downgraded, crime scenes revised, and the seriousness of the crime downplayed.”

There was plenty of smoke in both Chicago and New York over the accusations, but no smoking gun as there was in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, according to
Chicago police statistics, major violent and property crimes dropped 56 percent from 2010 to 2013—a number that Bernstein and Isackson describe as bordering on “
the miraculous.” Little or nothing of this, however, made its way onto the national stage. But other events with far more sizzle soon would.

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That summer Bill Bratton was dealing with his own problems in New York City. He’d been rehired as NYPD commissioner in January 2014 by the city’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio.

At first they appeared a very odd couple indeed.

An unabashed progressive populist, the white, underdog de Blasio had deep ties to the city’s black, left-wing political activists—a group that included his African-American wife—and had run for mayor in 2013 as a sharp critic of stop-and-frisk, a key issue in the race. He’d even employed his charming biracial teenage son, Dante, in a highly effective campaign commercial in which he labeled his father “the only one who will end a stop-and-frisk era that unfairly targets people of color.” De Blasio’s candidacy soon caught fire, and he went on to win a resounding victory significantly propelled by an astounding
95 percent of the African-American vote.

Bratton, on the other hand, was mistrusted by many of de Blasio’s most ardent supporters for introducing and championing stop-and-frisk in New York City and never disavowing it.

But after meeting together over a dozen times, he and de Blasio apparently reached an agreement that at the very least stop-and-frisk would have to be dramatically scaled back, and throughout 2014 they would publicly speak as one on the issue.

De Blasio’s reasons for hiring Bratton were obvious and would become far more so as Bratton’s stature among conservatives, older cops,
and bellicose police unions helped de Blasio recover from ugly attacks that would come his way later in the year.

That stature was, of course, the product of experience derived from successfully transforming the New York City Transit Police—and police departments in Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles—and learning key political lessons—like how to work well with mayors—along the way.

Bratton’s desire for the job was more complex: money; status; vindication after being forced out as commissioner back in ’96 by Giuliani; an
absolute
love of the reform game and playing it out again on America’s biggest stage; and a legacy that he was very much aware could be tarnished if he himself didn’t fix it.

Now, in New York, under a new, progressive mayor, Bratton would have the opportunity to end the NYPD’s repressive policing tactics and remake its culture into a community-policing model without undoing his “broken windows” strategy.

Done right, done judiciously as part of a wider community-policing strategy, broken-windows enforcement can be a useful tool in decreasing the kind of quality-of-life crimes like public urination and intoxication, aggressive street prostitution, and panhandling. Done wrong, however, the practice can often lead to police confrontations with people who feel they’re simply being harassed by police acting out yet another variation of stop-and-frisk. After an interview with Bratton,
Politico
summed up his vision of broken-windows policing as “Most of the time, the level of enforcement [of] broken windows [will now be guided] by the complaints and standards of the neighborhood.”

But he’d start the process by tackling stop-and-frisk. By 2014, New York was no longer the high-crime, sometimes out-of-control city it had been in the eighties and early nineties, and hadn’t been for close to twenty years. Nevertheless, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk enforcement in the city’s ghettos, barrios, and housing projects had grown ever more intense, becoming so omnipresent, heavy-handed, and racially divisive that by 2014 it seemed to be no longer politically sustainable.

When Bratton’s predecessor, Ray Kelly, was named commissioner by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002, for example, the
NYPD stopped-
questioned-and/or-frisked over 97,000 New Yorkers.
By 2011, that number had exploded to over 685,000. That same year the total number of black males aged fourteen to twenty-four who were stopped would
exceed
the entire population of the city’s young black men in that age group by ten thousand—that is, a large portion of the
158,000 black males in that age group were stopped more than 168,000 times.

In the summer of 2013, criticism peaked when a federal judge ruled that New York’s stop-and-frisk policy was unconstitutional racial profiling. The ruling was then underscored in 2014 by de Blasio’s decision as mayor to drop the Bloomberg administration’s appeal of the judge’s verdict and by his agreement to make all the changes the judge had ordered.

As he did so, de Blasio described his actions as “a
defining moment in [New York] history . . . for millions of our families, especially those with young men of color.”