Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing

A little background; I knew that the LAPD used be known for brutality, and I knew about the Watts riots, the 1992 LA riots, the Rampart scandal, and that Daryl Gates was a racist. I knew Tom Bradley and Daryl Gates didn’t like each other. After reading this book, I learned that LA’s problems with crime, drugs, and police abuses were a combination of race, geography, economics, and that nasty thing we call tenure.

Joe Domanick begins with history, and how the LAPD was known for extreme fitness standards, which helped cover up any discussion of abuses. The LA Times was the most conservative newspaper on the West Coast, and had no sympathies for Blacks or liberals. But the author discusses how that changed in the 1970’s, as the 60’s left-wingers grew up and wanted changes. However, he also discusses how tenure kept the mayor from firing police chief Daryl Gates. It was Gates who turned the LAPD into a paramilitary force, famous for smashing into drug houses with blue tanks. This hard-charging program was enough to bully people into cooperating, but it failed to stop the looting in 1992.

Domanick details the difference between Daryl Gates, the much hated racist LAPD chief, and Bill Bratton, who showed up in 2001. Both were college-educated, but Bratton was less heavy-handed; he believed in working with the community to find out what was going on. He also succeeded in building consensus between people by making his ideas clear. In what is probably the most dynamic story in the book, Bratton wiped out crime in MacArthur Park by turning it into a legitimately-used venue; lights were installed, bushes were trimmed, a soccer field was built, and shopping carts were banned. To get the city to do their bit, he simply spoke out. It wouldn’t look good for the city council members if they got blamed for underfunding public safety.

What’s missing from this book is any discussion of why the Rampart cop were so quick to take payoffs. There had to have been more than the fact that they had no oversight. He also doesn’t discuss the 20 cops who were on Suge Night’s payroll, the case of Kevin Gaines, and devotes only a few lines to Russel Poole. What about Bernard Parks’ cover up of this? Also, why does the author spend ¾ of the book on the pre-Bratton days, and so little on Bratton’s years?