Joe Domanick > Quotes

“If anything, the LAPD had long and famously been guilty of overreaction, as they had shown, for example, during the infamous 1988 raid on two small, adjacent apartment buildings on South Central’s Dalton Avenue. There, eighty LAPD officers had stormed the buildings looking for drugs on a bullshit tip. After handcuffing the terrorized residents—including small children and their grandparents—they then spent the next several hours tearing all the toilets from the floors; smashing in walls, stairwells, bedroom sets, and televisions with sledgehammers; slashing open furniture; and then sending it all crashing through windows into the front yard and arresting anyone who happened by to watch. As they were leaving, the officers spray-painted a large board located down the street with some graffiti. “LAPD Rules,” read one message; “Rolling 30s Die” read another. So completely uninhabitable were the apartments rendered that the Red Cross had to provide the occupants with temporary shelter, as if some kind of natural disaster had occurred. No gang members lived there, no charges were ever filed. In the end, the city paid $3.8 million to the victims of the destruction. A report later written by LAPD assistant chief Robert Vernon called it “a poorly planned and executed field operation [that] involved . . . an improperly focused and supervised aggressive attitude of police officers, supervisors and managers toward being ‘at war’ with gang members.” The”
― Joe Domanick, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing

“The four officers had been zealous in their work, using their batons to break Rodney King’s cheekbone and ankle and eleven bones at the base of his skull, damaging his facial nerves and knocking the fillings out of his teeth. Each blow, said Rodney King, felt like “when you get up in the middle of the night and jam your toe on a piece of metal.” But the four cops were nonetheless now walking free. Freed by a jury in Ventura County, about an hour’s drive north of Florence and Normandie. Freed in Ventura’s Simi Valley, a then semirural, overwhelmingly white community, with a black population of 2 percent. Known as Cop Heaven by the cops themselves, Simi Valley, along with its sister city Thousand Oaks, had a population of about 4,000 active police officers, many of whom were part of the LAPD’s 7,900-member force. The”
― Joe Domanick, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing

“What emerged from the historic turmoil was a city where race and class tensions pervaded the atmosphere. The very rich were mostly walled off in hidden mansions, and much of the white middle class remained living in hyper-segregated neighborhoods. The brown, black, and immigrant working class and poor—who were becoming the bulk of the city’s ordinary people—were rarely seen by well-off, white L.A. unless they were cleaning houses, weeding gardens, working nonunion construction, driving buses, parking cars, stocking shelves in big-box factory stores, or cooking food and mopping floors in every restaurant in town. By”
― Joe Domanick, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing

“During a 1985 interview on CBS he lauded Philadelphia’s first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, as “an inspiration to the nation” after Goode had approved dropping a bomb from a helicopter onto a row house in a densely packed, black, residential Philadelphia neighborhood. The aerial bombing resulted in a massive wall of flames that caused the death of eleven residents, including five children, and the incineration of sixty-one surrounding homes. In response, a federal jury awarded over $12 million to the homeowners. Nevertheless, Gates told wide-eyed reporter Lesley Stahl that Wilson Goode had “jumped on [his] heroes list,” and “by golly,” he added, “that’s not a long list.” That”
― Joe Domanick, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing

“On the ground in L.A.’s black neighborhoods, the LAPD acted as if it were an army of occupation. L.A.’s black population had skyrocketed from 62,000 in 1940 to 170,000 by 1950. Just fifteen years later, as the Watts Riots shocked L.A., Bill Parker would make the case for his army on a local television show. “It is estimated that by 1970, 45 percent of Los Angeles will be Negro,” said Parker. “If you want any protection for your home and family . . . you’re going to have to support a strong police department. If you don’t, God help you.” The”
― Joe Domanick, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing

“They knew about L.A. cops, and they knew about ass-kicking, L.A. cop–style—which, as Alfred Lomas would later tell it, “basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious . . . punching, beating, kicking.” Several actions, if taken by anyone like Alfred Lomas, would essentially guarantee an ass-beating. One was talking back. Another, as Lomas put it, would be “if they had to get out of their patrol car, or if you crossed over into a white neighborhood—that was always a surefire ass-beating.”
― Joe Domanick, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing

“Named chief in 1978, Daryl Gates entered office with a choice: to buck the headwinds of America’s social revolution, or to try to accommodate it. His decision was never in doubt. The son of an alcoholic and absentee father, Gates was raised in abject poverty in Glendale—a small city adjacent to Los Angeles—during the 1930s and ’40s. It was a time when L.A., sans Hollywood, was still Peoria with Palms, still a city that billed itself as America’s pure “White Spot,” still a place where a mainstream mayoral candidate would proudly declare Los Angeles “the last stand of native-born Protestant Americans.” Though”
― Joe Domanick, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing

“Rumors would later abound in the black community that Gates and the LAPD had simply let the initial rioting explode so that, as Bill Parker had suggested twenty-seven years earlier, the white public would later get out and “support a strong police department.”
― Joe Domanick, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing