| Daryl Gates | |
|---|---|
| Los Angeles Police Department | |
| August 30, 1926 – April 16, 2010 (aged 83) | |
| Place of birth | Glendale, California,[1] United States |
| Place of death | Dana Point, California,[2] United States |
| Service branch | United States |
| Years of service | 1949–1992 |
| Rank | Sworn in as an Officer – 1949 – Commander – 1965 Chief of Police – 1978 |
| Awards | – Police Meritorious Unit Citation – Police Meritorious Service Medal – 1984 Summer Olympics Ribbon – 1987 Papal Visit Ribbon – 1992 Civil Disturbance Ribbon |
| Other work | Businessman/entrepreneur, talk-show host, radio commentator |
Daryl Gates (born Darrel Francis Gates,[3] August 30, 1926 – April 16, 2010) was the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) from 1978 to 1992.
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Gates was born to a Mormon mother and a Catholic father;[4] he was raised in his mother's faith. He grew up in Glendale and Highland Park, in the northeastern part of Los Angeles. The Great Depression had an impact on his early life: his father was an alcoholic, and frequently ended up in the custody of the Glendale police.[1] (Later in life, Gates often remarked on the taunts and harassment he received from schoolmates because of his father's behavior.) Gates later wrote that he had a low opinion of the police due to their rough treatment of his father, and at age 16 Gates himself was arrested after punching an officer who gave him a parking ticket (Gates apologized and the charges were dropped).[1]
Gates graduated from Franklin High School in Highland Park, and joined the Navy in time to see action in the Pacific Theater during World War II. After leaving the Navy, he attended Pasadena City College and married his first wife, Wanda Hawkins. He went on to take pre-law classes at the University of Southern California. After his wife became pregnant, a friend suggested that he join the LAPD, which was conducting a recruitment drive among former servicemen; Gates initially declined, then decided it was a good opportunity. (Gates later finished his degree at USC.)[1][2]
He joined the LAPD in 1949. Among his roles as an officer, Gates was picked to be the chauffeur for Chief William H. Parker. Gates often remarked that he gained many administrative and professional insights from Parker during the hours they spent together each day.
Gates worked hard to prepare for his promotional exams, scoring first in the sergeant's exam and in every promotional exam thereafter. On his promotion to lieutenant, he rejoined Chief Parker as Parker's executive officer. He was promoted to captain, responsible for intelligence. By the time of the Watts riots in 1965 he was an inspector (overseeing the investigations of, among other crimes, the Manson Family murders and the Hillside Strangler case). On March 28, 1978, Gates became the 49th Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Gates, considered the father of SWAT (Special Weapons And Tactics), established the specialized unit in order to deal with hostage rescue and extreme situations involving armed and dangerous suspects. Ordinary street officers, with light armament, limited weapons training and little instruction on group fighting techniques, had shown to be ineffective in dealing with snipers, bank robberies carried out by heavily armed persons, and other high-intensity situations. In 1965, Officer John Nelson came up with the idea to form a specially trained and equipped unit to respond to and manage critical situations while minimizing police casualties.[5]
As an inspector, Gates approved this idea. He formed a small select group of volunteer officers. The first SWAT team, which Gates had originally wanted to name "Special Weapons Attack Team,"[6] was born LAPD SWAT, D-Platoon of the Metro Division. This first SWAT unit was initially constituted as 15 teams of four men each, for a total staff of 60. These officers were given special status and benefits, but in return they had to attend monthly trainings and serve as security for police facilities during episodes of civil unrest. SWAT was copied almost immediately by most US police departments, and is now used by law enforcement agencies throughout the world.
In Gates' autobiography, Chief: My Life in the LAPD (Bantam Books, 1992), he explained that he developed neither SWAT tactics nor its distinctive equipment. He wrote that he supported the concept, tried to empower his people to develop the concept, and lent them moral support.
Gates made substantial use of the LAPD's Public Disorder and Intelligence Division (PDID) squad, even developing an international spying operation.[6] The lawsuit CAPA v. Gates, with the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) as one of two dozen or so plaintiffs, later sued the LAPD on First Amendment grounds that exposed the unlawful harassment, surveillance, and infiltration of the progressive movement in Los Angeles by LAPD agents. The lawsuit against Gates and the LAPD proved successful. The PDID was ordered to disband, and did so in January 1983[7]. In February 1984, an out-of-court settlement awarded $1.8 million dollars to the named plaintiffs, individuals, and organizations who had sued the City of Los Angeles [8]
In joint collaboration with the Rotary Club of Los Angeles, Gates founded DARE, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program designed to educate children about the dangers of drug abuse. DARE is currently used in schools worldwide, although scientific research has found it to be ineffective in reducing alcohol or drug use and there is evidence that it may increase drug use among some groups.[9]
Gates's appointment as chief roughly coincided with the intensification of the War on Drugs. A drug-related issue that had also come to the forefront at the time was gang violence, which paralyzed many of the neighborhoods (primarily impoverished and black or Hispanic) in which gangs held sway. In response, the LAPD set up specialist gang units which gathered intelligence on and ran operations against gangs. These units were called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, aka CRASH, immortalized in the 1988 film Colors. Gates' aggressive approach to the gang problem was effective in suppressing gang violence but allegations of false arrest and a general LAPD disdain for young black and Latino men were made. By this time, however, the department had a significant percentage of minority officers.
Gates himself became a byword among some for excessive use of force by anti-gang units, and became a favorite lyrical target for gang-connected urban black rappers notably, Ice Cube. Nevertheless, CRASH's approach appeared successful and remained in widespread use until the Rampart Division scandal of 1999 drew attention to abuses of the law that threatened to undo hundreds of criminal convictions.
Gates became LAPD chief of police a little over two months before the enactment of California's Proposition 13, during a time of tremendous change in California politics. While the LAPD traditionally had been a "lean and mean" department compared with other American police forces (a point of pride for Parker), traffic congestion and continually decreasing officer-to-resident ratios (approximately 7,000 police officers for 3,000,000 residents in 1978) diminished the effectiveness of LAPD's prized mobility. Gates was eager to take more recruits, particularly for CRASH units, when the city made funds available.
Gates later claimed that many officers recruited in the 1980s — a period in which the LAPD was subject to a consent decree which set minimum quotas for hiring of women and minorities — were substandard, remarking:
In 1979 Gates helped craft and implement Special Order 40, a mandate that prohibits police officers from stopping people for the sole purpose of obtaining immigration status. The mandate was created in an effort to encourage residents to report crimes without the fear of intimidation or deportation.[10]
Like his mentor Parker, Gates publicly questioned the effectiveness of community policing, usually electing not to work with community activists and prominent persons in communities in which the LAPD was conducting major anti-gang operations. At the time of the Rodney King beating, Gates was at a community policing conference. This tendency, a logical extension of the policies implemented by Parker that discouraged LAPD officers from becoming too enmeshed in the communities in which they served, did not serve him well politically: allegations of arrogance and racism plagued the department throughout his tenure, surfacing most strongly in the Christopher Commission report.
Many commentators criticized Gates for Operation Hammer, a policing operation conducted by the LAPD in South Los Angeles. After eight people were gunned down at a birthday party in a drive by shooting in 1987, Gates responded with an extremely aggressive sweep of South Los Angeles that involved 1000 officers at any given time.
The operation lasted several years, with multiple sweeps, and resulted in over 25,000 arrests. (This was not unprecedented: during the run-up to the 1984 Summer Olympics, Mayor Tom Bradley allegedly ordered Gates to take all of the city's gang members—known and suspected—into custody, where they remained until shortly after the Games' conclusion.)
As a vast majority of those arrested were never charged, Operation Hammer was roundly criticized as a harassment operation whose chief goal was to intimidate young black and Hispanic men. In a PBS interview, when asked whether the local people in the minority areas expressed thanks to the police for their actions, he responded:
| “ | Sure. The good people did all the time. But the community activists? No. Absolutely not. We were out there oppressing whatever the community had to be, whether it was blacks, or Hispanics. We were oppressing them. Nonsense. We're out there trying to save their communities, trying to upgrade the quality of life of people... | ” |
On March 3, 1991, Rodney King was arrested and beaten by LAPD officers after a car chase. A bystander, George Holliday, recorded the beating on videotape. Gates and his department faced strong criticism in the aftermath of the beating; the Christopher Commission report, issued July 10, 1991, identified a police culture of excessive force and poor supervision, and recommended numerous reforms, as well as Gates's removal. Mayor Tom Bradley also called for Gates to resign, but he refused, leading to an extended stand-off between Gates and the mayor.[1]
The 1992 Los Angeles riots, which began when a jury acquitted four white Los Angeles Police Department officers accused in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King following a high-speed pursuit, brought an end to Gates's police career.
On the first evening of the riots, Gates told reporters that the situation would soon be under control, and attended a previously scheduled fundraising dinner.[11] These actions led to charges that Gates was out of touch. General command-and-control failings in the entire LAPD hierarchy during the riots led to criticisms that he was incapable of managing his force. In the aftermath of the riots, local and national media printed and aired dozens of reports deeply critical of the LAPD under Gates, painting it as an army of racist beat cops accountable only to an arrogant leadership. While evidence of systematic racism among the rank-and-file and by Gates himself was not clear-cut, the paramilitary approach that Gates represented came in for criticism, and calls for the LAPD to shift to a community policing strategy.[12]
Gates finally resigned on June 28, 1992, and was replaced by Willie L. Williams.[12] A second commission, the Webster Commission, headed by former FBI and CIA Director William H. Webster, was formed in the wake of the riots. Its report, released on October 21, 1992, was generally considered to be scathingly critical of the department (as well as other government agencies) and was especially critical of Gates' management of it.[1][13]
Gates earned notoriety for his controversial rhetoric on many occasions. Some of the most notable examples of this were:
Gates remained active after leaving the LAPD, working with Sierra to create the computer game Police Quest IV: Open Season, an adventure game set in Los Angeles where gamers play the role of a Robbery/Homicide detective trying to solve a series of brutal murders. He appears in the game as Chief of Police, and can be found on one of the top floors of Parker Center. In addition, Gates has been the principal consultant for Sierra's SWAT series, appearing in them as well. In 1993, Gates was a talk show host on KFI, replacing Tom Leykis. His tenure was short lived but he remained a frequent guest on talk radio, especially in regards to policing issues.
Gates was President/CEO of Global ePoint, a security and homeland defense company dealing primarily in digital surveillance and security technology. He also served on the Advisory Board of PropertyRoom.com, a website for police auctions.
In 1992 he published Chief: My Life in the LAPD, an autobiography, written with the assistance of Diane K. Shah (Bantam Books). The book has much detail about Gates's career and high-profile cases, although the book went to press before the L.A. riots.[17]
After Bernard Parks was denied a second term as Chief of Police by Mayor James K. Hahn in 2002, Gates, aged 75, told CNN that he intended to apply for his old job as LAPD chief.[18] This led Los Angeles media to ridicule Gates' announcement as a publicity stunt. Hahn ultimately appointed William J. Bratton, a former police commissioner of Boston and New York City, to head the department.
On April 16, 2010, Gates died at his home in Dana Point, California at the age of 83[2] after a battle with bladder cancer.[19]
| Police appointments | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Robert F. Rock |
Chief of Los Angeles Police Department 1978–1992 |
Succeeded by Willie L. Williams |
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