The culture of the LAPD back then was “quasi-military,” recalled Poole, who liked it that way. Every day began with a three-mile run that ended with alternating sets of pull-ups and push-ups, followed by wind sprints. “I went into the Academy at a pretty solid 185 pounds and finished at a little over 165,” he recalled. “But you learned pretty fast that physical ability wasn’t the point—character was. They wanted to see whether you would drop out or keep trying. Would you quit if you got cramps while you were running, or would you grind it out, cry it out, gut it out. A lot of the women in the class impressed me in that way.”
Only about a year after Poole graduated, though, a series of lawsuits forced the Academy to make failure all but obsolete. “After that, if you were lousy or wouldn’t try hard enough, they’d pat you on the back and say, ‘It’s okay, we have remedial classes you can take,’” Poole recalled. “They’d get you counseling. They also started lowering the standards on written tests, in order to encourage diversity and avoid controversy.”
Poole didn’t think the department was doing its new recruits any favors. “When you get out on the streets, nobody’s going to baby you there,” he explained. “You are going to be caught in situations where all you can do is survive.”
The more harrowing the circumstance, the more intense the experience of connection to one’s fellow officers, as Poole discovered soon after his assignment to patrol duty in South Central L.A. “What I remember most about those early days was how it felt to stop a car and approach it from the rear,” Poole recalled. “The whole key was to stay alert, but not come on aggressive. On patrol, you had to be ready for anything. You might go through a whole day totally bored, then plunge into an experience of complete terror fifteen minutes before the end of your shift.”
The most feared part of Southwest Division was an area called the Jungle, a collection of apartment buildings along Martin Luther King Boulevard between Crenshaw and LaBrea that was surrounded by huge, droopy eucalyptus trees. All that low-hanging foliage was what made the Jungle so dangerous, along with an unusual layout of buildings that created a lot of places where a suspect could hide until an officer was almost on top of him. “Anytime we went in there, the only color we saw when we looked at each other was the blue of our uniforms,” Poole recalled.
Before crack cocaine, PCP was the street drug of choice in the ghetto, and Poole had never been more frightened than the first time he was attacked by a suspect high on horse tranquilizer. “I had dropped my guard because at first he appeared to be friendly—’Hi, officer, how you doin’?’—but when he got close he grabbed for my throat,” Poole recalled. “My first instinct was to throw out my hands to push his face back, but he caught my left forefinger in his mouth and bit it all the way down to the bone. My partner was trying to hit him upside the head to get him to release, and finally he did, but we went to the ground and the guy was spitting and scratching and punching and kicking. He was shredding our shirts and uniforms, scratching our arms and faces. I had deep cuts all over my face and so did my partner. Blood was everywhere and my finger was dangling, barely attached.
“Pretty soon we were surrounded by this big crowd of people, all black, and this was very scary for me, because I was fairly new and had never been in a situation like that. We didn’t have handheld radios back then, so I looked up at this one older black man and said, ‘Please get on that radio and request help.’ I didn’t want to draw my gun so I took out my sap and hit the guy across the forehead. It didn’t even faze him. So I hit him a second time, as hard as I could, and that split his head open. Right about then I started hearing those faint sirens from far away, gradually getting louder and louder. Nothing ever sounded better to me. And in a couple of minutes there were like twenty LAPD patrol cars on the scene, with cops of all colors, and the crowd was breaking up. I remember thinking, ‘This is what they meant by backing each other up and being there when another officer needs you.’ It made me feel really good to be part of this organization filled with people I could count on, no matter where they came from.”
One of Poole’s first mentors was a black training officer named Richard Lett, “a shy, nice man who had about fifteen years on the job.” During the entire time they worked together, Poole recalled, the two of them never spoke once about communicating across racial lines. “He saw that I take people as they come, and so he really didn’t think it was necessary,” Poole recalled. “I was making friends of all races and I felt this was my education in life. My time as a patrol officer taught me how to connect with people from very different backgrounds, and I learned not to make general assumptions about anyone.”
Back in those days, the LAPD talked about itself as a family, Poole recalled: “We greeted each other with hugs, brother officer, sister officer, civilian employees.” The only discordant note was sounded at roll calls, where black officers invariably sat in a section of the room separate from the white and Hispanic officers, who tended to intermingle. “But nobody ever talked about it,” Poole remembered.
Everything changed in 1991, though, when the videotaped beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers at the end of a vehicle pursuit was broadcast on local television. Poole was at home ironing a shirt the first time he saw it: “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, shit, I wonder how many times they’re gonna play that?’ I never imagined it would be hundreds and hundreds. That wasn’t the LAPD I knew, but it became the LAPD to the rest of the world, and that was awful to live with. It created terrible tensions within the department. Getting along with both civilians and your fellow officers along racial lines suddenly became a lot more difficult. Even people you thought were friends weren’t saying ‘Hi’ when you passed them in the hallway.”
The riots that followed the acquittal of the four officers accused in the Rodney King beating at their first trial in Simi Valley only increased racial divisions within the LAPD. The department maintained a mobilization plan for such emergencies, but for some reason it wasn’t implemented. Chief Daryl Gates had been relieved of duty (by the first black president of the Los Angeles Police Commission), and then reinstated, but his position was weakened. “Everybody wanted to be the new chief,” Poole recalled. “All these deputy chiefs were practically begging Gates to retire so they could take over, and the early response to the riots was controlled by some of these same people, who really didn’t mind if the LAPD looked bad, because it would make Chief Gates look bad. We had subcommanders pulling units out of the area around Florence and Normandie when they should have been pouring in.”
When Gates, who had been attending a function in Mandeville Canyon, finally arrived at the LAPD Command Post in the bus depot at 54th and Van Ness, he was astonished to find captains and lieutenants standing around in groups. When a black captain approached him carrying a coffee cup, Gates slapped the cup out of the man’s hands and shouted, “What the fuck is happening? Why aren’t my men out there deployed?”
Even before the rioting stopped, word of this incident had spread through the department, “and people of different races were even more uncomfortable with each other,” Poole remembered. By the time Gates was replaced by the LAPD’s first black chief, Willie Williams, an import from Philadelphia, the department had become an institution seething with thinly veiled resentments. White offi-cers did not doubt that Williams had won the job with the color of his skin, while black officers wondered why the position hadn’t gone to the LAPD’s highest-ranking African American, Assistant Chief Bernard Parks.
To a lot of people, and for the longest time, it had looked as if Bernie Parks might be the one man who could reconcile the contradictory legacies that he had inherited from his two most notable predecessors, William H. Parker and Homer Broome. During the 1930s and ‘40s, Parker had occupied the unenviable position of a clean cop in a dirty department. The LAPD of that period was almost astonishingly corrupt; Los Angeles’s mayor sold hiring and promotion exams out of his office in City Hall, while vice officers earned the bulk of their income by pr
otecting prostitutes, pimps, and pornographers. At one point, the LAPD’s head of intelligence was sent to San Quentin for bombing the car of an investigator who had been hired by civic reformers to ferret out crooked cops. When Parker was appointed Los Angeles Police Chief in 1950, conditions within the department changed dramatically. Parker’s insistence on integrity was so adamant that he fired officers for the sort of infractions that wouldn’t have resulted in an admonishment a few years earlier. The LAPD’s new chief even demanded that his officers pay for their own coffee. Parker, who coined the phrase “thin blue line,” also made the LAPD over into an ultra-efficient police force renowned for the discipline, mobility, and aggressiveness that allowed it to cover the enormous geographical area of Los Angeles with fewer than one-fifth the number of officers employed by the New York Police Department. By the early 1960s, LAPD officers believed that they belonged to the best police department in the world, and by most measures they were right.
Racial sensitivity was not a theme that resonated particularly well with Chief Parker, however. Parker was no racist, but the mission he gave LAPD officers to “stop crime before it happens” inevitably led to a concentration of police forces in South Central Los Angeles. Then, as now, black males committed a hugely disproportionate amount of crime in Los Angeles and across the country. For the LAPD of William Parker, that was the essential point, and the chief was not particularly interested in complaints against white cops who beat the black suspects they had charged with “contempt of officer.”
The black LAPD officer who most successfully challenged the petty injustices of the period was Commander Homer Broome. He had joined the LAPD in 1954, the same year the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the concept of “separate but equal,” and rose steadily through the ranks for the next quarter-century. Broome would be best remembered, however, for his very last appearance in an LAPD uniform. This was at his retirement dinner in the Ambassador Hotel during February of 1979. Los Angeles’s mayor and police chief were in attendance, along with dozens of local politicans, all there to take advantage of an occasion when the observation of one man’s success could be made into a milestone of community progress. Broome was “living proof,” one speaker observed, that color was no obstacle to success in Los Angeles.
The audience naturally was shocked when the guest of honor rode a wave of applause to the microphone and, instead of responding with the thanks that were expected, chose to remind his listeners of some unpleasant facts. Although the LAPD had employed black officers since 1886, Broome began, it was not until 1969, when he was promoted to captain, that one had occupied a command position within the department. Those who knew the LAPD’s history did not want to be reminded that during the 1920s Chief Louis Oaks had been a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, or that in the years before World War II the department had restricted black officers almost entirely to foot-traffic beats along Alameda Avenue, permitting just a few of them to patrol in jitney cars, and then only between the hours of 2 A.M. and 6 A.M., when they were not likely to be noticed.
When the LAPD appointed its first two black watch commanders in 1940, Broome recalled, the move was heralded as a huge leap forward, but the backsliding began almost immediately. To prevent the two new lieutenants from commanding white personnel, an all-black morning watch was established. And department administrators soon decided that two black lieutenants were one too many. After learning of his demotion from an article in the Evening Herald, Earl Broady needed another three years just to regain the rank of sergeant. When he failed repeatedly to win a second promotion to lieutenant, Broady resigned from the department and enrolled in law school. Eventually he became a Superior Court judge of Los Angeles County. His experience was repeated again and again; the LAPD’s refusal to promote black officers to command rank had resulted in the resignations or early retirements of men who had become city councilmen, municipal court judges, Los Angeles Port warden, and the city’s first black mayor, Tom Bradley.
It was Bradley who had made the first attempt to integrate the LAPD. In 1960 Bradley, only the third black lieutenant in the department’s history, found three white officers who were willing to share a single patrol car with black partners in separate shifts. When word leaked out, however, the white officers began to absorb a barrage of abuse from their cohorts, and each of the three eventually explained to Bradley that he would have to withdraw from the “experiment.” William Parker would, to his credit, issue an order to fully integrate the LAPD in 1963, but by then Tom Bradley was gone, having submitted his resignation one year earlier.
The indignities and abuses that had become a fundamental condition of relations between white police officers and black citizens in Los Angeles would explode during the late summer of 1965 into the most destructive display of civil disobedience in modern U.S. history. It began when a black teenager was arrested for drunk driving by a white motorcycle officer on the evening of August 11. By the time it was over, battles between police and more than 10,000 black civilians had raged for six days across an area of 46.5 square miles, leaving 34 persons dead, 1,032 injured, and more than 600 buildings burned and looted.
Homer Broome was promoted to lieutenant one year later, replacing Tom Bradley as the LAPD’s single black watch commander. Over the next ten years, twelve more blacks were promoted to lieutenant, with five rising to captain and two to commander. There were mutterings, however, that LAPD administrators had chosen only the most compliant of black officers, and were moving them from job to job, so that they could boast about breaking the race barrier in this position or that one. The sole black commander who achieved exemption from such complaints was Bernard Parks. His ability to win the trust and admiration of white superiors without being labeled a lackey by black peers was what made Parks’s advance through the ranks of the LAPD so remarkable.
Parks had been negotiating such difficult passages since his senior year in high school, when he was elected president of a nearly all-white class. As a young LAPD officer, he was singled out for special attention by Chief Ed Davis, who made Parks first his driver then his protégé. Daryl Gates, despite a reputation as a man who was not particularly fond of people with dark complexions, had promoted Parks from lieutenant to captain to commander to deputy chief to assistant chief, making him the number-two man in the department. Parks, though, was devastated when the Los Angeles City Council chose Willie Williams as the LAPD’s first black chief.
The job of police chief in Los Angeles was not quite what it had once been, of course. In the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, a commission headed by former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher had created the office of a civilian “Inspector General” to oversee the police department, while LAPD chiefs were limited to five-year terms. It did not help that Willie Williams became, by virtually every account, the worst LAPD chief of the modern era.
Labeled a bungler within a few months of taking the job, Williams destroyed any hope for political survival when he demoted Bernie Parks to deputy chief. Williams’s decision to advise the news media of the demotion before personally informing Parks made him look especially despicable. Only through the intervention of the City Council did Parks obtain the plum assignment of Operations Bureau, a job that gave him control over the most politically powerful division of the LAPD, Internal Affairs. Embittered, Parks dug in until he became the immovable object that blocked the eminently resistable force of Willie Williams, who would spend his last three years in Los Angeles as, essentially, the lame duck chief of a police department that many felt was falling apart all around him. Senior police officials soon began to complain openly that departmental standards had virtually collapsed, and that the Los Angeles City Council’s cure for the LAPD’s racial ills might be worse than the disease itself. The written examinations that long had been the great equalizer for LAPD officers seeking promotion were steadily discounted because black candidates, in general, did far more poorly on them than did white candidates. Background checks became increasingly c
ursory, while minor crimes or a juvenile record no longer barred applicants from gaining admission to the Los Angeles Police Academy, because liberals had successfully argued that this limited the number of blacks and Hispanics who could join the LAPD. Behavior by a police officer that would have resulted in immediate dismissal only a decade earlier now was either overlooked or met with requests that the offending officer seek counseling.
“I don’t think Willie Williams was personally corrupt,” Russell Poole said, “but his command staff definitely was, and a lot of the best captains and lieutenants in the LAPD either retired or refused to seek promotions while he was chief. They didn’t want to be part of what was going on in Parker Center. And meanwhile, Chief Williams made enemies of people who were in positions where they could hurt him.”
Williams’s appointment as LAPD chief produced at least some improvement in relations between the department’s black and white officers, “but then along came the O.J. Simpson case,” Poole recalled, “and suddenly racial tensions were inflamed again. A lot of the black officers said they thought Simpson was innocent, and that was just an outrage to the rest of us, because it was so obvious that he was guilty. So suddenly you not only had black officers angry at white officers, but also white officers angry at black officers. That situation got a lot worse when the Mark Fuhrman tapes came out, and people heard this white detective saying nigger-this and nigger-that. Fuhrman was just an arrogant fool shooting off his mouth to impress a woman, but he did so much damage.” So did the subsequent spectacle of black citizens in the streets of Los Angeles cheering the acquittal of a man who had gotten away with murder.
By early 1997, most LAPD officers knew that Willie Williams would not be rehired as chief when his five-year term expired that August. A huge majority of the department’s rank-and-file officers endorsed the appointment of Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker as Williams’s replacement, but the powers that be seemed to be leaning toward the man favored by the LAPD’s black cops, Bernie Parks.
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