ICE Crackdown Backfires Like Daryl Gates’ LAPD Era

I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and as I became aware of the city’s politics, I learned of an ongoing debate among Angelenos about policing. On one hand, many residents were quite upset about Los Angeles’s crime problem—the gang wars that made certain areas uninhabitable, the homeless who were encamped on the streets of Downtown, the drug dealing, the murders, and the muggings. On the other hand, other residents were telling a story in which the police were the outlaws, pulling over drivers because they were black, stopping and frisking youths of colour for no reason, and delivering beatings—and occasionally shootings—to anyone who gave them lip or otherwise defied their authority.

These debates had started long before I was even born—I heard stories about the Zoot Suit Riots of the 1940s, and the inquest into the death of Leonard Deadwyler, who was shot and killed by an LAPD officer in 1966 after being pulled over while taking his wife to the hospital, a year after the Watts Riots. The Los Angeles police chief in my youth was a man named Daryl Gates, who stubbornly refused to admit that his officers had done anything wrong even when they had. Policing LA, he believed, was like fighting a war. He pioneered the use of a tank with a battering ram to enter properties where suspected criminal activity was taking place, and he infamously declared that “casual drug users should be taken out and shot.”

California’s politics back then were not nearly as liberal as they are now; we were, after all, the state that produced Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Republicans who both ran on a tough-on-crime platform. So Gates enjoyed a lot of support. And yet, one night in March 1991, we would find out that maybe there was more agreement between the two sides of that endless debate about Los Angeles policing than was previously believed.

Nobody really doubts that 25-year-old Rodney King was no angel. He was a convicted felon, having served a year in prison for assaulting and robbing a Korean grocer. He had fathered three children by three different women. And on the night of 3 March 1991, he was severely intoxicated behind the wheel of his Hyundai. When highway-patrol officers turned on their lights and sirens, rather than pulling over, King led them on a high-speed chase, reaching speeds of 117 miles per hour on the freeway and eighty miles per hour on city streets. He was endangering innocent people. This attracted additional law enforcement, and when he exited the freeway, he entered the jurisdiction of the LAPD’s Foothill Division. Several police units eventually cornered King, and he had no choice but to stop. The chase was over, but his ordeal had only begun.