Daryl Gates
Daryl Francis Gates was an American police officer who served as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from 1978 to 1992. His length of tenure in this position was second only to that of William H. Parker. Gates is often credited with the creation of police SWAT teams and also co-founded the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program.
After the arrest of Rodney King and the subsequent riots, Gates resigned from the LAPD. Much of the blame for the riots was attributed to him. According to one study, "scandalous racist violence... marked the LAPD under Gates's tempestuous leadership."
Early life and education
Gates was born in Glendale, California, to a Mormon mother and a Catholic father on August 30, 1926; he was raised in his mother's faith. He grew up in Glendale and Highland Park, in the northeastern part of Los Angeles. The Great Depression affected his early life: his father was an alcoholic, and frequently ended up in the custody of the Glendale police. Gates later wrote that he had a low opinion of the police due to their rough treatment of his father, and at age 16 Gates himself was arrested after punching an officer who manhandled his brother during a parking dispute.Gates graduated from Franklin High School in Highland Park and joined the U.S. Navy in time to see action in the Pacific Theater during World War II. After leaving the U.S. Navy, he attended Pasadena City College and married his first wife, Wanda Hawkins. He went on to take pre-law classes at the University of Southern California. After his wife became pregnant, a friend suggested that he join the LAPD, which was conducting a recruitment drive among former servicemen; Gates initially declined, then decided it was a good opportunity. Gates later finished his degree at USC.
Career
Gates joined the LAPD on September 16, 1949. Among his roles as an officer, he was picked to be the chauffeur for Chief William H. Parker. Gates often remarked that he gained many administrative and professional insights from Parker during the hours they spent together each day.Gates worked hard to prepare for his promotional exams, scoring first in the sergeant's exam and in every promotional exam thereafter. On his promotion to lieutenant, he rejoined Chief Parker as Parker's executive officer. He was promoted to captain, responsible for intelligence. By the time of the Watts riots in 1965, he was an inspector. By the time of the 1975 special investigation into the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, he was Assistant Chief of the department. On March 28, 1978, Gates became the 49th chief of the department.
SWAT
Gates established the specialized unit that became known as SWAT in order to deal with hostage rescue and extreme situations involving armed and dangerous suspects. Ordinary street officers, with light armament, limited weapons training, and little instruction on group fighting techniques, had shown to be ineffective in dealing with snipers, bank robberies carried out by heavily armed persons, and other high-intensity situations. In 1965, Officer John Nelson came up with an idea to form a specially trained and equipped unit to respond to and manage critical situations while minimizing police casualties.As an inspector, Gates approved this idea. He formed a small select group of volunteer officers. His first team was born LAPD SWAT, D-Platoon of the Metro Division. This unit initially comprised fifteen teams of four men each, for a total staff of sixty. These officers were given special status and benefits, but in return they had to attend monthly trainings and serve as security for police facilities during episodes of civil unrest. SWAT was copied almost immediately by many US police departments and is now used by law enforcement agencies throughout the world.
In Gates' autobiography, Chief: My Life in the LAPD, he explained that he developed neither SWAT tactics nor its distinctive equipment. He wrote that he supported the concept, tried to empower his people to develop the concept, and lent them moral support.
PDID
Gates made substantial use of the LAPD's Public Disorder Intelligence Division squad, even developing an international spying operation. The Coalition Against Police Abuse along with two dozen or so other plaintiffs, later sued the LAPD on First Amendment grounds in CAPA v. Gates. The lawsuit exposed the unlawful harassment, surveillance, and infiltration of the progressive movement in Los Angeles by LAPD agents. The lawsuit against Gates and the LAPD proved successful. The PDID was ordered to disband and did so in January 1983. In February 1984, an out-of-court settlement awarded $1.8 million to the named plaintiffs, individuals, and organizations who had sued the City of Los Angeles. The operations included the infiltration of classes at California State University, Northridge.D.A.R.E.
In collaboration with the Rotary Club of Los Angeles, Gates founded D.A.R.E., a backronym for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, a program designed to educate students and children about the dangers of drug abuse. DARE has become a worldwide organization, with programs in schools across the globe. However, despite the program's wide use, peer-reviewed government-sponsored scientific research has discredited DARE's claimed effectiveness in reducing alcohol or drug use, and the program has seen a 73% reduction in taxpayer funding as a result.CRASH
Gates's appointment as chief roughly coincided with the intensification of the war on drugs. A drug-related issue that had also come to the forefront at the time was gang violence, which paralyzed many of the neighborhoods in which gangs held sway. In response, the LAPD set up specialist gang units which gathered intelligence on and ran operations against gangs. These units were called Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums. Allegations of false arrest and a general LAPD disdain for young Black and Latino men were made.Gates himself became a byword among some for excessive use of force by anti-gang units and became a favorite lyrical target for gang-connected urban black rappers, notably Ice Cube. Nevertheless, CRASH's approach appeared successful and remained in widespread use until the Rampart Division scandal of 1999 drew attention to abuses that threatened to undo hundreds of criminal convictions.
Force enlargement
Gates became LAPD chief a little over two months before the enactment of California's Proposition 13, during a time of tremendous change in California politics. While the LAPD traditionally had been a "lean and mean" department compared with other American police forces, traffic congestion and continually decreasing officer-to-resident ratios diminished the effectiveness of LAPD's prized mobility. Gates was eager to take more recruits, particularly for CRASH units, when the city made funds available.Gates later claimed that many officers recruited in the 1980s—a period in which the LAPD was subject to a consent decree which set minimum quotas for hiring of women and minorities—were substandard, remarking:
... f you don't have all of those quotas, you can't hire all the people you need. So, you've got to make all of those quotas. And when that happens, you get somebody who is on the borderline, you'd say "Yes, he's black, or he's Hispanic, or it's a female, but we want to bring in these additional people when we have the opportunity. So, we'll err on the side of, 'We'll take them and hope it works out. And we made some mistakes. No question about it, we have made some mistakes.
Special Order 40
In 1979 Gates helped craft and implement Special Order 40, a mandate that prohibits police officers from stopping people for the sole purpose of obtaining immigration status. The mandate was created in an effort to encourage residents to report crimes without the fear of intimidation or deportation.Administrative style and personality
Like his mentor Parker, Gates publicly questioned the effectiveness of community policing, usually electing not to work with community activists and prominent persons in communities in which the LAPD was conducting major anti-gang operations. At the time of the Rodney King beating, Gates was at a community policing conference. This tendency, a logical extension of the policies implemented by Parker that discouraged LAPD officers from becoming too enmeshed in the communities in which they served, did not serve him well politically: allegations of arrogance and racism plagued the department throughout his tenure, surfacing most strongly in the Christopher Commission report.Operation Hammer
Many commentators criticized Gates for Operation Hammer, a policing operation conducted by the LAPD in South Central Los Angeles. After eight people were murdered at a birthday party in a drive-by shooting in 1987, Gates responded with an extremely aggressive sweep of South Los Angeles that involved 1,000 officers at any given time.The operation lasted several years, with multiple sweeps, and resulted in over 25,000 arrests. This was not unprecedented: during the run-up to the 1984 Olympic Games, Mayor Tom Bradley empowered Gates to take all of the city's gang members—known and suspected—into custody, where they remained until shortly after the Games' conclusion. In the years after the Olympic games Gates, Mayor Bradley, and city council officials found a way to continue the sweeping policies initially meant for the duration of the Olympic games by reviving old, anti-syndicalist laws to jail predominantly black and Latino youth, even though the overwhelming numbers of people arrested were never charged.
As a vast majority of those arrested were never charged, Operation Hammer was roundly criticized as a harassment operation whose chief goal was to intimidate young black and Hispanic men. In a PBS interview, when asked whether the local people in the minority areas expressed thanks to the police for their actions, Gates responded:
A similar operation was conducted in 1988 after a drive-by shooting took the life of Karen Toshima in Westwood Village.