Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick

when South Dakota was still the Wild West, and law and order had been hard-won. Loosen the screws even a little bit and all hell could break lose.
    So when Parker became chief, he’d added a new twist to the oldunwritten LAPD credo, one that would henceforth govern an LAPD officer’s conduct: If you beat, shoot, or otherwise abuse a suspect because you felt that’s what it took, we may not always condone it, but publicly we’ll always have your back. But if you steal even one penny, your ass is ours. And that’s the way it also was under Ed Davis, who’d served as chief throughout most of the seventies.
    Daryl Gates’s contribution had been to take the first part of that credo and apply it in a wider, deeper, astoundingly audacious manner. By doing so, and by proudly thumbing his nose at elected civilian authority and departmental critics, “Gates made himself a martyr within the Los Angeles Police Department—the guy who’d stepped up and died for their sins,” as Charlie Beck would later say. “He seemed to never realize he was already holding that suit of cards. In an organization with a huge belief in physical fitness, sharp appearance, and esprit de corps, he was an athlete with immense personal charm who could walk into a room and command it. They would have loved him anyway. But he thought he didn’t need the other cards, the other constituencies. He didn’t see that he could win a hand with that suit, but never the game.”
    White conservative voters in areas of the city such as the San Fernando Valley loved him too. About two months after the King beating, they’d held a boisterousluncheon rally for their beleaguered chief in a Valley ballroom. In attendance were blue-haired matrons from the mansions of Hancock Park, members of Encino Republican Women, Valley real estate brokers and salespeople, housewives and concrete-faced LAPD officers—essentially the same people who served on the Simi Valley jury that had acquitted Rodney King.
    When Gates walked in, the place broke into an ear-shattering standing ovation. Women rushed up to kiss him and men to shake his hand. The intensity of their emotions went well beyond political support. Itwas visceral, tribal. He was the defender of a city that was once theirs—a city that was now fading as surely as were they themselves. If they had still constituted a viable, influential majority in Los Angeles, no political force could have gotten rid of Daryl Gates. But they didn’t. Los Angeles politics were now was dominated by the white and black liberals who had put Tom Bradley in office, along with a rapidly growing base of Latino voters. Gates’s cops and a conservative white base that was fast becoming irrelevant could no longer shield him.
    For over a decade Gates had ignored, suppressed, and made enemies of his department’s other constituencies. Together they comprised a virtual Who’s Who of much of Los Angeles’s civic establishment: Mayor Bradley and his police commissioners, city council members, the black establishment, the ACLU and Latino civil rights organizations, women’s and gay organizations, social-service nonprofits and academics, civilian organizations trying to decrease gang violence, and the local press corps, led by the Los Angeles Times .
    It had not always been that way with the press. From the start of Bill Parker’s tenure through the early 1980s, in fact, the local media had been what former Police Commission president Stephen Reinhardt had famously described as a “patsy for the police.” By the early seventies, however, the once deeply right-wing, fiercely anti-union Times —the paper of record—had liberalized most of its coverage. But it was still failing to do hard-eyed, investigative reporting of the LAPD. The Times , after all, had been the embodiment of the ruling Los Angeles oligarchy that had made astounding fortunes in land speculation and selling real estate to middle-class, Midwestern immigrants flocking west to