Let’s Get It On!

by McCarthy, Big John; Loretta Hunt, Bas Rutten; Bas Rutten

  Another officer I thought I’d recognized in the King video was a supervisor on the scene. He was a good guy. He wasn’t afraid to put his hands on suspects, but he wasn’t a racist in any way. I’d watched him give mouth-to-mouth to a Dragon in the holding cell. This black man had vomit coming out of his mouth and hadn’t showered in weeks, but this officer hadn’t hesitated in trying to save his life. Here was a sergeant who hadn’t shown prejudice in the past. Watching this officer in the video, I figured he’d been paired up with guys who didn’t really know how to handle an aggressive, high-pressure situation.

  I remembered this when my dad called again and said, “The district attorney asked me to testify as an expert witness against the four officers.” The DA wanted him to speak about the incorrect procedure they’d used. My dad was pissed off about what had happened and that the whole episode had hurt his friend Daryl Gates, the chief of police at the time, so he’d agreed to do it.

  Not only did I know this move was going to ruin my dad’s reputation at the LAPD, but I also knew he didn’t really have a handle on what was going on. “Don’t sit here and judge somebody you don’t know based on your experience as a police officer,” I said. “You got to work with the best, so the results you got were the best. When you work with crap, you get crap, and you can’t always blame the supervisor for what’s happening.”

  Thankfully, my dad listened to me and withdrew from the trial. But the real fireworks were yet to come.

  On April 29, 1992, in a court in Simi Valley, about thirty miles outside of Los Angeles, with a jury absent of any black members, one of the four police officers was acquitted when the jury couldn’t come to a decision on one of his charges, and the other three were exonerated of the charges altogether.

  Much of the Los Angeles South Central community, made up of many black and minority residents, took to the streets immediately in sporadic groups. At first, they yelled obscenities at passing cars. Then they threw rocks and other objects at them. The more brazen groups of disgruntled teenagers and adults then swarmed on the vehicles, smashing out the windows with pipes, as other terrified drivers looked on in horror.

  Officers were dispatched to the disturbances, but quickly there were too many instances with too many aggressive civilians involved for the police force to handle. Officer reserves quickly ran dry. Unable to control the tide, a supervising lieutenant from 77th St. Division ordered every LAPD officer off the streets altogether. That proved to be an unwise decision because the groupings combined and grew, then migrated to the streets of South Normandie and West Florence Avenue, in the heart of South Central.

  On that corner, a white man driving an eighteen-wheeler was stopped, dragged out of his cab, and thrown onto the street. Six black men, all between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven, beat Reginald Denny with their hands, feet, and random objects they found on the ground. The final blow came from Damian “Football” Williams, a nineteen-year-old gang member who knocked the battered and bloody Denny unconscious with a slab of concrete, then did a jig over his body. Not a single officer came to Denny’s aid. He eventually came to, blood streaming down his face as he writhed in pain next to his red truck.

  A news helicopter caught the attack overhead and aired it live for the entire country to see. This was the flash point of the Los Angeles Riots.

  The court’s verdicts had come in just as my unit had been finishing roll call at our station next to the West Los Angeles Courthouse. When I heard that the officers had been acquitted, I knew there would be hard feelings in the community. I didn’t realize how bad it would get.

  My partner and I were scheduled to go out into Pacific Division that afternoon, and we started to drive down toward the Oakwood area to check on the Venice Shoreline Crips. I had no idea what was beginning to bubble over at the corner of West Florence and South Normandie, but all hell was about to break loose.

  My sergeant called for a Code Alpha at the nearby Wilshire Division’s parking lot, which meant my entire unit was ordered to meet up at that location and wait for further instructions. We congregated with our two sergeants, Chuck Wampler and J. P. Williams, and waited. From every direction we could hear shots ringing out.

  Soon a call came over the radio. “Officer needs help, shots fired.” The location was a block away at the Shell Station at Venice and South La Brea.

  We all jumped into our cars, but another order came over the radio from the area captain, J. I. Davis, which stopped us in our tracks: “Stay at the station. Do not respond to the call for help.”

  The order went against everything we’d ever been taught. When another officer’s call for help came, you dropped everything and went. This order just proved what I’d always thought: the command staff of the LAPD were cowards who would run and hide when the shit hit the fan.

  It took me and a few of the other officers about two seconds to make up our minds that we were going to disobey the command. It took Sgt. Williams about three seconds to officially order us to disobey and leave the parking lot. Within fifteen seconds, we were in vehicle pursuit of the suspects who’d been shooting at the officers at Venice and La Brea.

  The suspects shot back at us as they tried to escape into the School Yard area that the Crip gang had claimed as its turf. A shooting occurred shortly after as the suspects attempted to run from their vehicle. It was the first shooting I witnessed over the next six days, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  From that point on, I was out on the streets attempting to stop the bad people from hurting the good people. For me, it was as simple as that.

  It’s hard to explain what I saw in those next two days, but imagine a war breaking out in your neighborhood, where no home, store, building, or car is spared from senseless destruction at the hands of an endless, angry mob.

  It seemed everywhere I turned, buildings and cars were vandalized and on fire. The stench of burning buildings was heavy in the air. I could hear glass breaking as looters hurled garbage cans into storefront windows to gain entry and take merchandise they couldn’t possibly have any use for. Some of the overconfident looters pulled U-Haul trucks up to the exposed storefronts. In Koreatown, I watched store owners shoot at the ones who entered to rob them in plain sight.

  People randomly shot at us as we moved from situation to situation trying to regain some semblance of order. Shots were even being fired at firemen as we offered them extra body armor so they could save some of the buildings from burning down to their frames.

  Victims stood on the corners pleading for help, but there was just too much to respond to at once.

  I watched looters get run over by cars as they left a store across the street. Good, I thought. You deserve what you just got.

  The natural order of things was out of whack, and the police, of whom there weren’t nearly enough, had to adapt. We set up an abbreviated justice system in which normal procedure and paperwork went out the window. We stripped it down to the basics. Some of us took to the streets and apprehended lawbreakers, jammed them into police cars, vans, and buses, and sent them off to the stations where other officers would do the paperwork, book, and jail them. When one station radioed back that it was full and couldn’t possibly take another body, we took them on to the next station.

  At a Vons grocery store where the sprinklers had been triggered at full blast, we watched as shoplifters waded through several inches of water, sweeping items off shelves into big garbage bags. There were so many of them ignoring our commands that we finally stood at the entrance and clocked anyone trying to leave with anything more than the clothes on their backs.

  For two days it was absolute chaos, but they were the greatest two days I’d ever worked for the LAPD. I didn’t have to worry about use of force reports or paperwork or procedure. It was a free-for-all, and the world suddenly became clear to me. There were good people trying to save their businesses, homes, and families; they weren’t doing anything wrong. The rest of them, regardless of color or race, were animals.

&nbs
p; I was scared to death for Elaine, who’d just finished the day watch and was on her way home when the riots broke out. I’d called her and told her to not answer her phone when the department rang to ask her to come back in for duty. It was wrong of me, but I was afraid she’d get hurt. She did the right thing and went to work the next day when she was called. Her station assigned her to security on the rooftop with a shotgun. She completed her shifts there for the next two weeks.

  For two days, the LAPD used every resource it had to regain control of its hostile city. President George H. W. Bush even authorized and mobilized members of the National Guard before it started to calm down. By the sixth day, a citywide curfew was lifted, signaling the end of the riots. For the next two weeks, I and other officers stayed on the streets to make sure nothing flared up again.

  The riots left undeniable damage in their wake. It seemed as if every corner I turned on had buildings and cars gutted by fires. Graffiti and vandalism were also rampant. In the aftermath, 53 people had died, another 2,000 had been injured, 1,100 buildings had been destroyed by about 3,600 fires, and material damage to the city was estimated at somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion.

  What impacted me most was the feeling that the LAPD couldn’t handle a crisis of this proportion and our leadership was downright pathetic.

  Honestly, though, I don’t believe the riots themselves had anything to do with Rodney King, the police, or the perceived racism between them. Yes, there were people who were frustrated that the police were acquitted. But if you look at the case, including the missing moments of video when King attacked the officer, you can see why the jury came to their conclusion. It was hard to find the officers guilty based on the letter of the law.

  However, a lot of the black community honed in on four white officers beating on a black man and getting away with it. “That’s our lot in life,” they said. “This is the way we get treated, and we just got screwed again.” They were upset and felt cheated. I understood that. They were cheated in some ways, but it didn’t give anyone the right to harm others.

  And during the payback moments of taking or wiping out what others had, looters and vandals destroyed their own neighborhoods and belongings without even thinking about it. I looked at people differently after the riots, just as people had looked at officers differently after the King arrest.

  An officer couldn’t walk into a restaurant to pick up his dinner without hearing people whisper, “I wonder if he was one of them.” In their eyes, anyone who wore a uniform was guilty. Every time we’d go to do something, people would yell, “Rodney King! Rodney King!”

  I was never embarrassed to be a police officer, but I was embarrassed by the way people perceived what had happened when they didn’t really know anything about it. I also knew some people were looking for reasons, contrived or not, to blow the whistle on police officers. Videotaping became a big trend, so officers had to be smarter about how they went about their work on the streets. I changed the kind of police officer I was; I didn’t go about being as free-willed as I’d been when I went after suspects. As a result, I didn’t put as many bad guys in jail.

  The LAPD had been forced on the defensive.

  About four months after the Rodney King beating, the Christopher Commission report was released. Chaired by attorney Warren Christopher, who later became the secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, the commission had been formed in 1988 to identify officers who were considered heavy-handed.

  The commission came up with a list of forty-four repeat offenders, officers who had received six or more allegations of excessive force between 1986 and 1990. However, the screening process was flawed because they looked only at police reports, and officers’ definitions of use of force varied. While one might write up a report for grabbing a suspect’s wrist, another wouldn’t consider that worth reporting at all. Some who made the list were clearly not offenders.

  I wasn’t on it, but one of my partners from Southwest made number one. He was strict about the way he did his police work, but I never saw him use force when he shouldn’t have. He was a great cop who just got caught up in the political game and didn’t survive it.

  I didn’t need the Christopher Commission report to tell me what had gone wrong during the Rodney King incident, the first falling domino that had set a string of destructive events in motion. The problem was that too many limitations were being placed on officers in the heat of the moment and they didn’t know how to react. For instance, we had been told we couldn’t use chokes on suspects. In fact, the officers’ unofficial slogan in 1984 had been “Smoke ‘em, don’t choke ‘em.” The academy’s take on chokes was much the same as uninformed people’s perceptions of chokes in MMA today. They didn’t understand them, and the general consensus was that if you choked someone, they would die.

  Previously, there’d also been some choke-related deaths when officers had tried to apprehend suspects who were on PCP. The drug was especially popular in South Central Los Angeles at the time, and users were typically easy to spot, often found talking to someone they alone could hear and naked because they felt like they were burning up. They weren’t able to engage in rational conversation, and any stimulus could set them off. They didn’t feel pain and seemed to have superhuman strength, which made it difficult for officers to control them. They wouldn’t quit fighting or attempting to flee.

  During struggles with officers, some suspects’ tracheas were crushed, although I believe it had more to do with the execution of the technique than its appropriateness. Still, many on the force questioned why an officer would attempt to use a choke hold on a suspect who was trying to cause him serious bodily harm when it would probably be much more effective to shoot the aggressor instead.

  I thought this way of thinking was ridiculous and went looking for my own answers. What I discovered was that Sgt. Greg Dossey, who had once run the PT Self-Defense Unit, had studied and categorized the instances of use of force within the LAPD in 1988 and again in 1992. Both years, he determined that two-thirds of the altercations had ended on the ground with the officer applying a joint lock and handcuffing the suspect. I thought Dossey’s research could point us all in the right direction. If so many altercations ended on the ground, why weren’t we focusing on training officers there?

  At the time, my knowledge of ground tactics was minimal. I’d wrestled and boxed, but my best friend, Joe Hamilton, also an officer, had studied karate and judo. Joe, a few other officers, and I exercised together regularly. During one workout, Joe mentioned some South American brothers who had their own ground art he thought I’d love. Joe couldn’t remember the family’s name, but I’d later come to know them as the Gracies.

  I didn’t seek out the Gracies, but we all found each other eventually. In the wake of the Rodney King incident and the riots, the LAPD organized a Civilian Martial Arts Advisory Panel led by Sgt. Dossey, to come up with new tactics an officer could use in apprehending a violent suspect. Because I had a great interest in combat sports, I was asked to join to represent the police force. Aside from me, the panel included a who’s who of martial arts figures in Southern California, from kickboxer Benny “The Jet” Urquidez to judo expert Gene LeBell to the determined-looking Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt Rorion Gracie.

  The panel, which started meeting about once a week, was a mess from the get-go. There was no way these practitioners, all experts in their chosen arts, would agree on doing something one way. Each one thought his art was superior to the other’s.

  For the first few meetings, I sat quietly and watched them demonstrate their disciplines on dummies or assistants they’d brought. They’d throw the dummies around or subdue the assistants, and I have to admit they all looked great doing it.

  However, it wasn’t realistic to think what they were demonstrating could be used by an officer on the street. After a few meetings, I decided to speak up. “I mean no disrespect, but your techniques work on your subjects because they’re letting you do it. On the s
treets, a suspect will put up a fight. They’re not just going to let you do it.”

  The expert du jour said, “Do you want to come try being my subject?”

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said, “but I’m not going to just stand there.”

  The martial artist, who’d incidentally been on the cover of Black Belt magazine a few times, went to grab me, and I took him down, sat on his chest, and trapped his arm around his neck. I’m not sure what overcame me, but I started to slap him lightly across the face with my free hand. “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

  I looked up at the rest of the congregated experts and realized I should get up. I hadn’t meant to make the man look bad, but my frustrations with the panel had overtaken me. I’d made a mistake, and Sgt. Dossey wasn’t happy. But Rorion Gracie, who usually yawned out loud at the demonstrations, seemed rather pleased.

  Afterward, Rorion invited me to his academy to experience his art, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, firsthand.

  At the Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy in Torrance, California, Rorion introduced me to his skinny younger brother, Royce, who would demonstrate. Rorion’s family preferred to call the art Gracie Jiu-Jitsu because they’d perfected their own variation that utilized positioning and leverage to overcome strength once a fight hit the ground. I was impressed immediately with Rorion’s confidence. If you wanted to fight, the Gracies were ready to fight, and that said everything to me.

  Usually, when I’d tried out other martial arts, I was told I couldn’t do this or that because I could get hurt. Rorion placed only one restriction on me during Royce’s demonstration: no biting. Otherwise, I could do anything I wanted: punch, kick, or tackle. At any point, we could stop if I tapped out by slapping any part of Royce’s body or the mat. We decided this time we’d grapple without punches or kicks.

  I grabbed Royce’s legs and lifted him off the mat fairly easily—he must have been 100 pounds lighter than me—then took him down onto the mat. I didn’t realize I’d landed in his half guard, with one of my legs laced between both of his and my other leg on the outside of his. While I tried to crush him on the mat with my body weight, he started breathing in short, focused spurts. I actually thought I was doing well.