The Los Angeles Police Department, the second largest police department in the United States, is responsible for providing police service to four million residents in an area encompassing some 467 square miles. The department is organized around eighteen broadly defined community areas in Los Angeles and is a full-service department providing marine, air, and terrorism responses as well as basic patrol and investigations services. A Board of Police Commissioners oversees all operations of the LAPD.
The department has had a complicated history and has been seen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a corrupt agency, but it is emerging in the twenty-first century as a ”model” of police professionalism. Rocked by a series of scandals including the Rodney King incident of 1991 and the Rampart Division corruption scandal of 1999, the LAPD continues to work to assure safety and security to Los Angelinos, while at the same time rebuilding public trust and confidence in the police.
History—The Early Years
California was admitted into the Union in 1850, the same year that Los Angeles was incorporated as a city. From its founding in 1850 until 1853, crime and order issues in the city of Los Angeles were the province of an elected sheriff, who ”policed” Los Angeles and environs, generally with deputized assistants, whenever a show of force was necessary.
In its early years Los Angeles became a scene of considerable turbulence and bloodshed, a condition that lasted many years. This lawlessness developed as a major social problem in Los Angeles beginning in the ”gold rush era” where a thirst for quick wealth brought many to California. Those seeking wealth from the mining of gold in California were often followed by an array of cheats, thieves, prostitutes, and others who worked to separate the miners from their newly found wealth. These conditions set the stage for a long era of corruption and violence in the ”City of Angels.”
In 1853 then-City Marshall Whaling was assassinated in broad daylight, prompting in June of that year the creation of a ”police force” comprised of one hundred volunteers, authorized by the common council. This first police force was called the Los Angeles Rangers; they were identified by a white ribbon that proclaimed ”City Police—Authorized by the Council of Los Angeles.”
In March 1855 the Los Angeles City Guards emerged as Los Angeles’ police force. The guards were the first uniformed police in the city charged with preserving law and order, and they focused on patrolling the numerous saloons and gambling halls scattered throughout the city. This force, like the rangers, was composed of volunteers. In 1869 the police force shifted from being voluntary to being a paid force, and an ordinance created the Board of Police Commissioners to oversee the police.
Despite its paid police force, Los Angeles remained a ”wide-open” city throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Violence was rampant, vigilantism practiced with impunity, and racial discrimination commonplace. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, Los Angeles had become the intersection of several migrations—blacks from the South, Asians from China, and Native persons all migrated to California, with each group being systematically discriminated against, both in law and in its administration. The city and its police force condoned such behavior.
During the early 1900s the police in Los Angeles struggled to cover a sprawling land area, with continuing problems of lawlessness, corruption, and graft that took on more institutional forms in the 1920s and 1930s. Los Angeles in the early 1900s was a ”machine politic” city. Political parties and ”bossism” governed the city, and the appointment of police chiefs was at the whim of politicians. Political processes were in a constant state of turmoil resulting in the appointment of sixteen chiefs between 1900 and 1923. Despite such overt political interference, a civil service system was started in 1903, and the police force was increased to two hundred men. Gambling and vice prevailed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and while periodically challenged by reformers of the time, rarely was affected in any meaningful way by such challenges.
Beginning in 1920 and for the two decades to follow, corruption of local government and the department continued unrestrained. This was the Prohibition Era and Los Angeles, known for its openness to vice and other forms of corruption, attracted all who would profit from such a wide-open city. Vice and other corrupt behavior flourished in large measure in the absence of legal action taken against such offenders.
Between 1919 and 1923, there were eight different police chiefs for the city of Los Angeles. Each of these chiefs faced a politically corrupt government and clear resistance to reform. After years of leadership turnover and a loosely knit organization August Vollmer, chief of the Berkeley (California) Police Department, agreed to serve for one year as the Los Angeles chief. Vollmer reorganized the department emphasizing efficient administration and scientific investigation. He required that professional officers be completely free of political influence, and he wanted to obtain the most intelligent, dedicated individuals available. Vollmer accomplished many things during his brief tenure as chief. Working conditions were improved, professional standards were established, and division of the city into major police areas was accomplished, thereby organizing police services under one command in several areas of the city. Unfortunately, when his year was up, politics again took over and remained a dominating influence until 1938 and a series of major reforms were instituted. Nonetheless, in one short year Vollmer had placed the LAPD on the road to professionalism.
James E. Davis followed Vollmer as chief of police in 1926, reinforcing the course of the department set by Vollmer, by emphasizing marksmanship, traffic enforcement, tracking down wanted criminals (known as the Dragnet system), emphasizing professionalism in police behavior, and, in his return to the role of chief of police in Los Angeles after a brief hiatus, focusing the department on the ”Red Menace,” communism. In this latter activity, Davis’ LAPD returned to using highly questionable practices. Davis ultimately fell victim to corruption within and outside of the department, and was demoted to deputy chief in charge of traffic.
In the decade between the late 1930s and late 1940s, the LAPD continued to struggle with corruption and with the shifting social times characterized by World War II, labor strife, and the beginning of urban riots. Several chiefs came and went, but the department was being primed for a major reform, led by Chief William H. Parker.
The LAPD in Modern Times
William H. Parker took office during the city’s centennial in 1950. He remained chief until his death sixteen years later, longer than any chief in the history of the LAPD. His tenure and leadership brought him and the LAPD international renown. Parker’s innovations were many: He streamlined the LAPD to increase accountability and efficiency, rigidly enforced civil service procedures to ensure that ability and not political connections were the basis of promotions, insisted that the public be kept informed of department activities, demanded discipline, eliminated wasteful spending, and pioneered narcotics and civil rights enforcement. Governments throughout the world sought him out for his expertise and administrative acumen. For many, he remains the prototype of the quintessential professional police chief. His death in 1966 ended an era, perhaps the most productive and renowned in the history of American municipal law enforcement. Another tough-minded chief, Ed Davis, succeeded Chief Parker.
Chief Ed Davis was one of the department’s more flamboyant and outspoken chiefs, frequently being quoted in the news media for various ”outrageous” statements. A strong, no-nonsense leader, he once confided that to be a good chief in Los Angeles, ”You had to be a tough son of a bitch.” He implemented the basic car plan concept, bringing the police officer and the community closer together. An officer was no longer subject to a rapid succession of reassignments. Instead, he was assigned to the same area day in and out, creating a “territorial imperative,” or officer ownership of the community policed. Chief Davis inaugurated the management principles, which continue to guide the department. These twenty principles stress the importance of public participation in crime prevention, of friendly enforcement, and the police-community partnership. Upon retiring from the police service, Chief Davis entered politics as a state senator.
Daryl F. Gates succeeded Chief Ed Davis in 1978. Gates inherited adversity—reduced resources due to the passage of Proposition 13 and increased demand for police services. He faced a court-ordered hiring injunction and a debilitated pension system. At that time massive tax cuts severely limited money for improvements. As a result, LAPD morale—which had increased during Parker and Davis eras—declined. Doing more with less became mandatory at a time when the city’s population surpassed Chicago’s to become the nation’s second largest, and when His-panics and Asians by the hundreds of thousands were relocating to Los Angeles.
Chief Gates was known for his Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program, focused on educational interventions with youth to prevent their drug involvement. He was also instrumental in creating and elaborating on SWAT—the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams. The SWAT model has been adopted throughout the world. Gates also continued in some of the work of his predecessors, implementing the Emergency Command Control Communications System (ECCCS), which placed computers in patrol vehicles.
The highly publicized Rodney King incident in 1991, in which LAPD officers beat a motorist who resisted arrest by taking the police on a dangerous high-speed pursuit, reflected badly on Chief Gates and almost obliterated any accomplishments he claimed. The King incident and the riots that followed the court decisions that involved officers who participated in King’s beating sparked a national debate about police in Los Angeles and their relationships, particularly in minority communities. The Christopher Commission in investigating the LAPD portrayed the department as a “cowboy” organization that routinely violated citizen rights, and called for sweeping changes in oversight of the LAPD. The Christopher Commission called for Gates’ resignation, and he retired in the summer of 1992.
With the retirement of Chief Gates, Chief Willie L. Williams became the fiftieth chief of police and the first African American and the first chief in more than forty years from outside the department to command the LAPD. Williams focused on changing the department by rebuilding the patrol force, rejuvenating the basic car plan, and restoring public confidence in the police department.
Williams’ efforts produced some modest changes in the LAPD, but ultimately his leadership was challenged internally and he fell victim to the LAPD culture. Williams left the LAPD in 1997 and was replaced by Deputy Chief Bernard C. Parks, who was a long-standing LAPD insider.
Between 1997 and 2002 Chief Parks oversaw continued improvements in the LAPD, including a reorganization of the department and the creation of a command accountability philosophy that hearkened back to the Ed Davis management principles era, which by then had lost its internal appeal. Parks was ultimately undone by a scandal that emerged in the Rampart Division of the LAPD, where officers assigned to that division were found responsible for criminality, the planting of evidence, and intimidation of witnesses and those thought to be criminal. The Rampart incident resulted in a federal consent decree being entered into by the city of Los Angeles and the U.S. Department of Justice. The Rampart incident revealed a series of unfolding events and discoveries of police misconduct inside the LAPD. The scandal began with one LAPD officer, Rafael Perez, who charged that dozens of his fellow officers regularly were involved in making false arrests, giving perjured testimony, and framing innocent people. In the end Perez implicated about seventy LAPD officers, and the scandal then turned to LAPD leadership knowledge of actions of officers. This was a low ebb for the LAPD, emerging in the aftermath of the Rodney King incident.
Chief William H. Bratton was appointed as the fifty-fourth Los Angeles police chief on October 27, 2002. Bratton, a firebrand chief of police who had made an international reputation for reforming the New York City Police Department, was brought to Los Angeles to gain control over a department that was seen by many as “rogue.”
Bratton’s efforts have been aimed at accelerating recruitment into the LAPD, increasing force size, and implementing reforms outlined in the federal consent decree. An advocate of no-nonsense management and command accountability, Bratton is moving the department toward greater area decentralization while at the same time increasing accountability of the police to their local communities. Using programs such as COMPSTAT, which Bratton made famous in New York, he is trying to return the LAPD to its claim of a high level of police professionalism.
