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

invest their savings in the happy home of sunshine and palms. News of local corruption and scandal was therefore studiously ignored. Consequently, the Times never developed a tradition of doing big, systemic investigative journalism. Bad news was bad for business.
    But reporters who’d come of age during the 1960s were now being hired at the Times and other local media outlets. Young and unwedded to local assumptions, they were filled with questions about why the LAPD was going uncriticized for actions that would get them lambasted in other cities.
    In 1976, newly arrived KABC reporter Wayne Satz produced a Peabody Award–winning series about the astounding number of unarmed people shot and killed by LAPD officers. The reports questioned not only the department’s whitewash investigations but the lack of oversight by the DA, the coroner, the Police Commission and the city council.
    Outraged, LAPD chief Ed Davis denounced Satz as “an enemy of law enforcement” over the LAPD’s closed-circuit TV station. “Satz Sucks” bumper stickers began appearing on LAPD patrol cars, and Satz’s picture popped up on targets at the police academy firing range. “Their arrogance was incredible,” Satz would later say. “They didn’t think they had any public accountability.” And “they”—Ed Davis and the LAPD leadership—were right. Despite Satz’s searing broadcasts, nothing changed.
    In 1979, the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner began covering the LAPD with new intensity. By focusing on the police-shooting death of thirty-nine-year-old South Central housewifeEulia Love over a $22.09 unpaid gas bill—and on dozens of other shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later police killings and inexplicable choke-hold deaths—the Herald-Examiner embarrassed the Times into action, and the paper began reporting on similar incidents.
    But they would still pull great investigative reporters likeDavid Cay Johnston off stories that dug too deeply into the LAPD’s clandestine inner workings. Working for the Times , Johnston had found out amazing things. That, for example, undercover LAPD officers were having sexual affairs with peaceful political activists in order to gather political information; that an LAPD lieutenant had posed as a Communist and traveled to Moscow and Havana; that LAPD agent provocateurs had infiltrated black and Hispanic organizations and were constantly calling for violent action; and that Gates had over two hundred officers working for his spy division. Johnston’s stories got printed, but usually in just one edition, without background or explanation. Eventually he was forced off the beat.
    After his departure, however, the Times finally started covering officer-involved brutality and shootings, and stayed with the coverage year after year, breaking scores of investigative articles and holding the LAPD’sfeet to the fire in ways that the city’s politicians simply would not. It was the Times , in fact, that broke the Brentwood fund-raiser story, establishing how long Gates had stayed at the event. On Face the Nation the weekend after the riot, Gates said he remained at the fund-raiser forten minutes. An audio of his Brentwood speech obtained by the Times , however, revealed that he had in fact stayed at the gathering forabout twenty minutes. Factoring in his travel to and from the event, Daryl Gates left his post for at least an hour and twenty minutes at the very moment when the riots might have been limited with a disciplined, centrally directed show of force. He may have been monitoring radio calls as he traveled, but if he was making decisions, they certainly weren’t being reflected on the street.
    Reginald Denny and other motorists were being beaten at Florence and Normandie during that time. And nobody from the LAPD even ordered the blocking-off of feeder roads into that chaotic intersection. Leaving the fund-raiser that night, Gates was asked about Denny and the others caught without police