Daily Archives: April 16, 2010

Daryl F. Gates, the rookie cop who rose from driver for a legendary chief to become chief himself, leading the Los Angeles Police Department during a turbulent 14-year period that found him struggling to keep pace with a city undergoing dramatic racial and ethnic changes, died Friday. He was 83.

Gates died at his Dana Point home after a short battle with cancer, the LAPD announced. (An earlier version of this story said Gates had died in Newport Beach.)

The controversial chief, whose tenure ran from 1978 to 1992, spent his entire four-decade career at the LAPD, where he won national attention for innovative approaches to crime fighting and prevention: He instituted military-style SWAT teams to handle crises and the gentler DARE classroom program to prevent drug abuse. These initiatives, emulated by police departments across the United States, and other advances, such as a communications system that reduced police response times, bolstered his reputation as an exemplar of modern law enforcement. President George H.W. Bush called him an “all-American hero.”

A proud emblem of progress to some, he was a disturbing symbol of stagnation to others. When the city went up in flames over the acquittal of four white officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King, he was castigated as a leader out of touch with the changing realities of the city, yet to the end he remained righteous about his authority to police it.

Faced with a proliferation of illegal drugs and street violence, he hammered gangs with police sweeps and broke into crack dens with an armored vehicle armed with a steel battering ram. He made no apologies for declaring that casual drug users should be shot.

By turns charming and brash, articulate and tactless, he generated controversy with gaffes about Latinos, blacks and Jews, most famously with a remark about blacks faring poorly under police chokeholds because their physiology was different from that of “normal” people. Fiercely loyal to his rank and file, he clashed frequently with elected officials, particularly when they slashed his budget or meddled in department discipline, and vowed he would never be bullied by “crummy politicians.”

Throughout his tenure, he had a fractious relationship with Tom Bradley, the former LAPD lieutenant and councilman who united a diverse coalition of constituencies to become the city’s first African American mayor.

Gates “fought vigorously to make sure the chief’s duties were not encroached upon. That comes from understanding the struggles Bill Parker went through moving the department out of corruption,” said City Councilman and former Police Chief Bernard C. Parks. He was referring to William H. Parker, the tough, reform-minded chief in the 1950s and ’60s, who became Gates’ mentor.

Parks said it was important to remember that the vilification of Gates after the King beating was not universal and that his accomplishments as chief mattered to large segments of the city long after he left the department.

“If you go to areas of the Valley, police organizations, officers’ funerals . . . he gets the loudest ovation,” Parks noted recently. “I’ve never seen a situation where . . . 18 years after retirement, officers who never worked with him cheer him as chief of police.”

Yet others just as vehemently argue that Gates’ strengths were outweighed by his weaknesses, particularly his failure to evolve with a city whose politics and social fabric had been transformed by the maturing of established minority communities and the flowering of newer ones molded by immigration.

“This L.A. was a changing city. . . . He never made the adjustment to the new L.A.,” said Ramona Ripston, the longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

In 1991, the videotaped beating of King was replayed around the world, shattering the carefully nurtured myth that the LAPD of “Dragnet” fame — professional, honest and humane — never stooped to such behavior. Gates was slow to criticize his officers’ handling of the incident and missing from his command post when the officers’ acquittal provoked the worst urban violence in decades, causing at least 53 deaths and more than $1 billion in property damage, but he faced inevitable calls for his resignation with characteristic defiance.

It was not the first time that critics had demanded his ouster, but it would be the last.

Southern California roots

Gates’ combative style can be traced to a hardscrabble childhood in Glendale, where he was born Aug. 30, 1926. When the Depression hit a few years later, his father, a plumber, took to drinking and frequently disappeared from home. His mother found a job in a dress factory, leaving Gates and his two brothers, Lowell and Stephen, to fend for themselves.

Police often barged into their ramshackle home looking for the senior Gates, whose debts and alcoholic behavior got him into trouble. The harsh treatment of his father gave Gates a dim view of law enforcement as “just a plague on society,” he wrote in his 1992 memoir, “Chief: My Life in the LAPD.” He had so little respect for the police that when he was 16 he punched an officer for writing him a parking ticket and was hauled to jail. The charges were dropped when he reluctantly apologized.

In 1943, after graduating from Franklin High School in Highland Park, Gates joined the Navy and served two years as “a plain old seaman” on a destroyer in the Pacific. Following his discharge, he enrolled at Pasadena City College and married a classmate, Wanda Hawkins. He was taking pre-law courses at USC when he learned that she was pregnant. Unsure how he was going to support a family, he did not greet the news happily.

When a friend suggested that he join the Los Angeles Police Department, he said there was no way he would ever become “a dumb cop.” He changed his mind when he realized that earning the then-considerable sum of $290 a month to train at the Police Academy while continuing his USC studies was too good to refuse. On Sept. 16, 1949, he joined the force.

He started out in the traffic division, working as an accident investigator until he was transferred to patrol. He completed his rookie year still intending to be a lawyer when he was tapped to serve as driver and bodyguard for Parker, newly installed as chief. Over the next 16 years, Parker shaped the department into one of the most highly regarded in the country.