Let’s Get It On! (13 page)

As she went out on patrol in Hollywood and began to see the sad and sickening situations I’d been exposed to a few years earlier, she began to understand the gravity of it all. It wasn’t an easy time for me either. I was afraid for her.

Every time I was in Hollywood, I’d have one ear to my CRASH radio and the other to Hollywood’s frequency. She’d get a call, and I’d go spy on her. That was the only way I could make sure she was safe on the job.

Elaine was a police officer for the next three years and patrolled the streets for about a year and half of them. Those were years I really had to stay on my toes, and what monumental years they’d be for me.

Posing for a picture in Hollywood, California

Visiting my dad when he worked for the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Gaithersburg, Maryland

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

—George Moore

I suspect you can recall where you were on September 11, 2001, when two commercial airliners crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. Your life and how you looked at it may have changed after that day. Maybe you reevaluated your priorities. Drastic events can lead to dramatic change.

For me, one of those life-altering events happened on April 29, 1992, when four LAPD officers were acquitted of the charges brought against them for the beating of Rodney King. Nearly fourteen months before, in the early hours of March 3, 1991, they had pursued and then pulled over King during a high-speed chase.

The morning after King’s arrest, my dad called me from Gaithersburg, Maryland, where he was living and working for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “What the fuck are you guys doing out there?” he asked.

I had just woken up, so I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

“Turn on the TV,” he said. “Any station.”

I did, and that’s when I first saw the dark, grainy images that would become the centerpiece of most newscasts the world over for months. An amateur cameraman had been woken by the sounds of sirens and had captured the video of a black man on all fours surrounded by four white policemen beating him repeatedly with their batons. King attempted to rise as the officers continued to take swings at him. One officer then began to stomp King’s body, while another group of officers not involved in the actual apprehension watched a few feet away.

I didn’t recognize the suspect, but I was pretty sure I could pick out two of the officers right away. One had worked in CRASH with me until he’d taken an opportunity to become a temporary P3, or training officer, at Foothill Division. I’d had my opinions about this officer. He wasn’t a bad guy, but I thought he was a putz who couldn’t fight his way out of a wet sack. With the badge on, sometimes he’d act much tougher than he really was. I’d told my supervisors, “You need to set him straight. He’s going to get himself in trouble.” But then he’d left the unit before anything had been done about it.

You can imagine the irony of it all when I watched the video and wondered if he was the one beating King. I thought,
Well, if that were me getting hit all those times, I’d want it to be him holding the baton. He can’t hit that hard.

There was more to this story, a longer version of the video that the masses didn’t see. The beginning of the encounter between King and the police had been cut out of the version that looped over and over on the nightly news. Additional footage showed King going after the officer before it got rough. Of course, the edited version made for a much juicier story, so that’s what the networks aired.

In the unedited video, King was pulled over in his Hyundai with two other male, black passengers. These men did what they were told and were taken into custody without incident. However, King, in whatever drug- or alcohol-induced state he was possibly in, decided he didn’t want to follow the program.

When he came after the officer, he was met with a baton and then a Taser, which slowed but didn’t stop him.

The officers wanted to get King into a certain position: proned out, or lying on his stomach, arms out, palms up, legs spread. King wouldn’t comply, so they used the batons to make him, but it went too far. There’s no doubt it went beyond the type of force that should have been used in the situation.

When the four officers were arrested and charged with using excessive force, their fates became a national obsession, just as the trial of O. J. Simpson would a few years later.

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.