Obituary: Daryl Gates

Daryl Gates, LA Crime Lord

Trying to explain why so many had died in his custody, Daryl Gates speculated that “blacks might be more likely to die from chokeholds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do on ‘normal people,’” – it was an insight into his policing methods.

Daryl Gates was appointed Chief of the LAPD in 1978, the beginning of a terrifying dictatorship over the cities black slums that would explode in the 1992 riots. He died on Friday.

August 1988, a company-sized detachment of 88 police from the Southwest Division swooped on a group of apartments in the 3900 block of Dalton Avenue. Wielding shotguns and sledghammers, the assault force, as Gates later admitted ‘got out of hand’.

Residents were kicked and punched, their homes torn apart with washing machines thrown into bathrooms, beach poured on clothes, and the words ‘LAPD Rules’ sprayed on walls. Damage was so bad the Red Cross offered tenants temporary relief. At Southwest Division thirty-two terrified captives of the raid were forced to whistle the theme tune from the 1960s Andy Griffith TV show while running a gauntlet of cops battering them with their fists and torches. (Davis, City of Quartz, 275-6)

Thirty-eight officers were later disciplined. But the Dalton Avenue raid was not a freak event: it was part of Police Chief Gates’ special anti-gang policy, HAMMER. Under HAMMER civil liberties were suspended and whole areas of the city placed under martial law, block by block, with entry and exit outlawed while all residents were processed. These raids were made on evidence of ‘gang signs’ like high five handshakes, or red shoelaces.

Gates innovated other programmes, like SWAT – which at first stood for Special Weapons Attack Teams, but that was thought too provocative, so they changed it to Special Weapons And Tactics.

Gates had his own secret service that operated within the Los Angeles Police Department, with undercover agents sent to infiltrate and keep files upon political rivals, journalists and subversives. At a meeting in South Central:

a gathering of blacks upset about LAPD violence erupted into demands from one person after another in the audience to attack LAPD officers and division buildings. The leaders at the actual meetings told these people to shut up. Year later court documents showed that the calls for violence all came from undercover LAPD officers. (1)

Gates had more than 200 officers as analysts and supervisors in the Public Disorder Intelligence Division. David Cay Johnston reported a story of Gates’ secret police provoking a riot among radical one May Day: “violence between [the] marchers and the LAPD began when an undercover officer posing as one of the communists gave a signal for people to run. That gave the police a pretext to attack. No one would have known this except that the officer was inadvertently captured on videotape.” (2)

After reporting the story, Johnston was approached by Gates, who described at length, and in detail, a report of the journalist’s first date with his wife, right down to the champagne he was drinking, that had taken place several years earlier.

In the early hours of 3 March 1991 LAPD Sergeant Stacey Koon, along with officers Singer, Briseno, Powell, Solano, and Wind detained Rodney King, who was beaten 56 times with batons while he was kneeling on the ground with his hands tied behind his back. The vicious beating was videotaped from across the street, and the officers were brought to court, but the legal system exonerated them on 29 April 1992.

Los Angeles erupted in rioting that made central LA a no-go zone for police for six days. Fifty three people were killed and more than a billion dollars of damage done. The LAPD’s crack troops were involved in firefighting with armed rioters, and, for once, were overwhelmed, so that 4000 National Guardsmen had to be deployed to restore order. A curfew was eventually lifted on 6 May, and the National Guard stood down on 9 May.

On June 28, 1992, under fire for his handling of the riots, Commissioner Daryl Gates resigned.

Daryl Gates
August 30, 1926 - April 16, 2010

JAMES HEARTFIELD

(1) Daryl Gates’ real legacy, David Cay Johnston, LA Observed April 16 2010
(2) Ibid