by Radley Balko
Whitman returned to the top of the clock tower and, at about ten minutes before noon, opened fire on the people below. He shot indiscriminately, but with terrifying precision. A practiced and trained sniper, he fired just one bullet at each victim. As the victims fell, bystanders rushed out to help them. Whitman shot at them too. When ambulances began to arrive, Whitman shot at the drivers. As word got out that there was a shooter in the tower, some peered through windows at the scene unfolding, apparently feeling safe within the walls of a building. He shot them too. By the time Whitman was shot himself, he had killed thirteen people and wounded more than thirty, all from a position 230 feet from the ground. One victim, a basketball coach standing in the entrance to a barbershop, was five hundred yards away. Whitman’s killing spree lasted more than ninety minutes.
Austin police didn’t have guns that could reach the top of the tower. Some went home to get hunting rifles. Remarkably, a number of students and residents came out with rifles too. At least one witness said that the return fire limited Whitman’s options and may have prevented more casualties. For more than an hour and a half, Whitman indiscriminately picked off innocent people while the police were helpless to respond. His guns were bigger than theirs. And he’d positioned himself in a spot they couldn’t easily access.
Whitman was finally stopped when three police officers and a citizen named Allen Crum worked around his barricade and confronted him on the observation platform. Houston McCoy, a twenty-six-year-old Austin police officer, shot Whitman first, with a Winchester twelve-gauge shotgun. Officer Ramiro Martinez then emptied his revolver into the killer. Whitman was dead.28 In one of the notes he left behind, Whitman asked that his brain be studied to explain the onset of his violent urges. Doctors found an aggressive brain tumor growing in Whitman’s hypothalamus. The tumor was compressing an area of the brain in the hypothalamus known as the amygdala, which regulates primal emotions like fear and anger.29
Between Whitman’s massacre and the epidemic of urban riots, police leaders across the country started to consider whether they were prepared to respond if such incidents happened in their own cities, towns, and counties. The Austin Police Department clearly wasn’t prepared, and the incident there created an appetite for precisely the sort of police unit that Daryl Gates was cooking up in Los Angeles. According to author and twenty-five-year police veteran Robert Snow, after Austin “the country’s police chiefs knew they couldn’t always depend on luck. They needed a unit that could be called in at a moment’s notice and plans that could be carried out immediately.”30 In the magazine The Tactical Edge—a publication marketed to SWAT teams—Lt. Sid Heal of the LA County Sheriff’s Department writes that the Whitman shootings “marked the birth date of the modern police SWAT concept. Since that day, almost every police department in the United States has formed a special response team to handle similar situations.”31
The riots in Watts and other urban areas may have instilled in middle America fears of a rising black criminal class, but there was still some sense of safety in the suburbs. Whitman’s rampage on a college campus popped that bubble. His victims were college students, administrators, and instructors. The bodies dropping in Austin could have been anyone’s kids. Whitman himself was a crew-cut, good-looking ex-Marine. He was married. He played the piano. The shootings made the cover of all the major news magazines. Life ran a photo essay that was as heart-wrenching as it was terrifying. And all of this came as the country was still reeling from Richard Speck’s trial for torturing, raping, and murdering eight nurses at South Chicago Community Hospital a month earlier. The criminal threat no longer seemed to be limited to the inner cities. The victims were no longer urban toughs fighting among themselves. Both the Associated Press and United Press International called Whitman’s mass murder the second biggest story of 1966, behind only the Vietnam War.
Crime had grabbed America by the lapels.
THERE WERE A COUPLE OTHER INCIDENTS THAT CONTRIBUTED to Daryl Gates’s SWAT vision. At about the same time as the Watts riots, labor strife was heating up the grape farms in Kern County, California. The first major strike began in September 1965, about a month after Watts, when the county’s mostly Filipino farmworkers were joined by labor activist Cesar Chavez and the group that would become the United Farm Workers. Chavez set up shop in Delano, making the small town in the north of Kern County ground zero for the farmworker labor movement.32
The Delano Grape Strike lasted five years. The involvement of Chavez and the National Farmworkers Association put the protests in the headlines, sometimes even on state and national television. Given the tumultuous history of labor strikes in the United States, the Delano police department looked for measures to keep the strikes from turning violent. The department turned to specialization. Individual Delano officers were given specific training in specialties like crowd control, sniper skills, specialized weapons, riot response, and surveillance.33 The strike and picketing in Delano never turned violent, though the reason was more likely Chavez’s emphasis on pacifism than the sniping skills of Delano cops. Nevertheless, Delano’s strategy and its apparent success caught the attention of senior police officials 150 miles down the road in Los Angeles.
The second incident came about a month after Watts, when LAPD officer Ron Mueller took a late-afternoon call about a domestic incident on Surry Street in northeast Los Angeles. When Mueller ascended a set of steps and knocked on the door, thirty-eight-year-old Jack Ray Hoxsie opened the door and immediately shot him. As Mueller attempted to crawl away, another officer, K. A. Shipp, pulled up. Hoxsie stepped out of the doorway and, with a .30-caliber Winchester, took off part of Shipp’s ear. As ambulances arrived, a citizen named Billy Richards attempted to help the medical personnel move Mueller onto a gurney. Hoxsie shot him too. Eventually, more than fifty police officers showed up, and just about all of them were exchanging gunfire with Hoxsie. Gates ordered the house tear-gassed, but as he writes in his autobiography, “by then there were so many holes in the house that the tear gas began spewing out faster than it was going in.” Finally, two officers kicked down Hoxsie’s front door and entered. The gunman was lying wounded in a rear hallway with a rifle and revolver by his side. Officer R. D. Johnson shot him once in the chest, then arrested him. “The incident alarmed me,” Gates writes in his book. “Later, as I analyzed how we had responded, I realized again, as I had during Watts, that we were going to have to devise another method for dealing with snipers or barricaded criminals other than our usual indiscriminate shooting.”34
After the Surry Street shootout, Gates and a small group of LAPD officials began informally consulting with Marines stationed at the Naval Armory in Chavez Ravine. The group included Jeff Rogers, who would later lead the country’s first SWAT team, and Sgt. John Nelson. Often credited along with Gates with inventing the SWAT idea, Nelson became a self-taught expert in guerrilla warfare. The informal project wasn’t sanctioned by the LAPD. In fact, when Gates first broached the idea of an elite police team for incidents like Watts and Surry Street, he was rebuffed. The Parker administration had little interest. But Gates, Nelson, and Rogers kept at it. They scoured the department for its best sharpshooters and put them on the shooting range for more training during off hours. They also brought in military personnel to teach strategies for handling snipers.35
At an awards banquet held in July 1966, Los Angeles police chief William Parker died of an aneurysm shortly after accepting an honor from a group for military veterans. New chief Thomas Reddin would serve only until May 1969, but his short tenure had a lasting impact on the career of Daryl Gates and the future of SWAT.
Shortly after Reddin took over, the LAPD faced a public crisis after officers clashed with antiwar protesters (and bystanders) in Century City. President Lyndon Johnson had been scheduled to give a public address, so the clashes—in which police were seen clubbing protesters and onlookers, and ramming them with motorcycles—received national attention.36 In response, Reddin created a new unit called Ta
ctical Operations Planning. The unit’s mission was to plan for and respond to big events such as riots, protests, and visits from dignitaries.37 Reddin put the new unit in the city’s Metropolitan Division, an elite, roving unit of officers given broad authority to “suppress criminal activity.”38 The Metro Division’s propensity for controversy had earned it the nickname “the Shake, Rattle, & Roll Boys.” Their charge from Reddin: “Roust anything strange that moves on the streets.” The new unit expanded Metro from 55 to 220 officers.39 Reddin put Gates in charge.
Gates’s first task was to respond to a rash of robberies on the city’s buses. Needing personnel, Gates asked other divisions across the city to send him officers. According to Gates’s autobiography, “Most of the divisions sent me the least desirable people they had.”40 But the new crew put an end to the bus robberies, earning itself, and Gates, some added credibility with Reddin. Defying the organizational structure used in the rest of the department, Gates explains in his autobiography that he broke his new unit down into sixteen “military-type” squads. He then combined the squads into two “platoons,” adding yet more war terminology to the environment around him and the officers he worked with.
Gates was eventually able to get the sixty marksmen he had been working with across the department reassigned to Metro. Now staffed with top-notch, highly skilled cops, Gates mixed the marksmen with his best men from Tactical Operations Planning. He then broke the unit down into five-man teams: a leader, a marksman, an observer, a scout, and a rear guard. Two teams together made up a squad. They were called D-Platoon (somewhat confusingly, since there were only three platoons at the time).41
But Gates wasn’t fond of “D-Platoon.” He had a different name in mind. From his autobiography:
One day, with a big smile on my face, I popped in to tell my deputy chief, Ed Davis, that I thought up an acronym for my special new unit. He was still, as we all were, glued to the classic concepts of policing, which discourage the formation of military-type units. But he realized some changes would have to be made.
“It’s SWAT,” I said.
“Oh, that’s pretty good. What’s it stand for?”
“Special Weapons Attack Teams.”
Davis blinked at me. “No.”
There was no way, he said dismissively, he would ever use the word “attack.” I went out, crestfallen, but a moment later I was back. “Special Weapons and Tactics,” I said. “Okay?”
“No problem. That’s fine,” Davis said. And that was how SWAT was born.42
Gates still had some work ahead of him to win over his superiors. “That SWAT operates like a quasi-militaristic operation offended some of the brass,” he writes.43 So D-Platoon trained in secret on some city-owned farmland in the San Fernando Valley. They also began working directly with Marine units at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, with some help from Universal Studios. The movie company let the abecedarian recruits hone their special forces skills on the replica storefronts, buildings, and houses on its back lot in Burbank.44 Within a couple of years, Gates’s SWAT team would forge its place in history during a televised shootout that made national news. But Gates clearly never got over the lack of support during the project’s early years. Of course, that reticence stemmed from a healthy appreciation for the Symbolic Third Amendment that Gates clearly didn’t share—or at least didn’t think was threatened by cops who trained with and operated like soldiers.
Despite [the new unit’s] record and reputation, officials balked at police using fully automatic weapons. The standard cry was, “Hey, the LAPD is supposed to be a civil police force. Their job is to relate to the community, not put on combat boots and assault the community.”
For years we tried to assure everyone that, yes, we are a civil police force. The people are the police, and the police are the people. And we hold to that.
Though at times, assault is not a dirty word.45
For the types of situations Gates had in mind—the Watts riots, the Surry Street barricade, the Texas clock tower massacre—he was right. Assault wasn’t a dirty word. It was an appropriately swift, forceful response to defuse a violent situation.
As the domestic strife dragged on, other police departments began to see things the way Gates did. In March 1968, the Associated Press conducted a national survey and found that, “in city after city across America, the police are stockpiling armored vehicles, helicopters, and high-powered rifles . . . they are preparing for summer and the riots they hope will not occur.” In Gates’s Los Angeles, the AP reported, police watched a demonstration in which a twenty-ton armored personnel carrier crushed a barricade of abandoned cars. Tampa police chief James G. Littleton told the news agency that his department had “taken off the kid gloves.” He had just purchased 162 shotguns, 150 bayonets, 5 sniper rifles, 25 carbines and M-1 rifles, and 200 gas masks. Florida state attorney Paul Antineri told the AP that he had instructed police officers to “shoot to kill” if they spotted anyone committing or about to commit a felony. A spokesman for the New Jersey State Police told the AP, “We’re following through on the military concept in attacking this problem.”46
This was an understandable response to the growing sense that American cities were spilling over with crime, violence, and rioting. And indeed, starting the month after the AP article was published, 1968 would unfold as one of the most turbulent years of the twentieth century. But when the riots, strife, and unrest finally died down, when the threat of chaos and lawlessness eventually grew remote, the weapons, heavy-duty vehicles, and militaristic culture stuck around. Gates’s original intent for the SWAT concept may have been appropriate, but as SWAT teams swelled in number, mission, and frequency of use over the next forty years, Gates not only never spoke out against the trend but took pride in it, and actively encouraged it.
BY THE MID-1960S, THE PIECES WERE FALLING INTO PLACE TO make disorder a national political issue. The crime rate was climbing. High-profile incidents like Whitman’s mass shooting had shocked the country. Riots had white America terrified of the cities. All that needed to happen was for a savvy politician to run with the issue.
In an April 1965 Gallup poll, more than half the country cited race relations as their number-one concern, the first time in eight months that a domestic issue topped the poll.47 Columnists and media outlets on the right were taking shots at the Supreme Court’s “criminal-friendly” decisions, as well as President Johnson’s failure to address crime with adequately tough measures.48 Johnson also watched the polls closely (the New York Times wrote in 1966 that “the President appears to retain an almost psychological need for public approval”49) and was well aware that his approval ratings had started to sag—a long, slow decline starting in the spring of 1965.50
Johnson attempted to co-opt some of his critics’ momentum by adopting the crime issue himself. He first turned to a Washington, DC, perennial: the blue ribbon commission. He announced the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. His attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, would chair it. Its laughably lofty mission: to draw up “the blueprints that we need for effective action to banish crime.”51 The resulting report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, included over two hundred recommendations to fight crime, from establishing a national phone number for emergencies—the precursor to 911—to decriminalizing drug abuse and public drunkenness. But Johnson’s critics seized on the more platitudinous and abstract recommendations: the commission asserted that ending poverty would be the single most important crime-fighting initiative and recommended minority outreach bureaus within major police departments, the establishment of multiple crime and justice research institutions, family planning assistance, recommitting to desegregation, funding for drug abuse treatment, and gun control.52
To Johnson’s critics, this was just more leftist, mealymouthed academese. There was lots of government spending (the commission didn’t bother to estimate a price tag for its recommendations), plenty of lofty talk about social uplift, and ha
nd-wringing about the influence on crime of environmental factors—all of which rather conveniently aligned with Johnson’s other domestic policies. But there was precious little in the way of taking it hard to the bad guys. For a war on crime, there wasn’t nearly enough fighting.
Johnson responded by making the federal government more proactive in fighting the drug trade. He created the first major federal agency specifically tasked with enforcing the federal drug laws. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), which would later become the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), combined smaller agencies in the Treasury and the Health, Education, and Welfare Departments into one office that would operate within the Department of Justice. Johnson also expanded the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance into the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA),53 the first federal agency created to stream federal funding, equipment, and technology directly to state and local law enforcement agencies.54 The United States had long taken a federalist approach to law enforcement. Except for offenses involving the mail, bank robbers, and crossing those state borders, the power to make crime policy had been reserved to the states. Johnson’s successors would quickly discover that introducing a funding spigot like LEAA, then threatening to pull it away, was an effective way to persuade local police agencies to adopt their preferred policies.
Johnson’s efforts didn’t quell his critics. His attorney general, Ramsey Clark, was widely seen on the right as the walking embodiment of the root-causes, soft-on-criminals approach to criminal justice policy. In an interview for this book, Donald Santarelli, a young but influential aide to Nixon’s 1968 campaign, said that Nixon would often tell Republican supporters that his administration would “have an attorney general,” a bit of signaling that to law-and-order conservatives needed no further explanation.55