In 1969, Edward Davis became Police Chief of the LAPD. He would serve until 1978. He significantly reformed the LAPD, introducing better equipment, special units (like SWAT units), and significant community policing operations, where officers were expected to integrate into communities to better serve them. This was incredibly effective and he leveraged this effectiveness to be tough on crimes.
Davis, in particular, sought to deal with gangs and vice crimes (including, notably, anti-gay statutes). This included, at one point, raiding a charity bachelor auction and charging the people there in engaging in human trafficking. He also stopped referring to gangs as gangs, instead calling them 'hoodlums'. And he attempted to create a universal database of criminals to track them down and keep an eye on them. The police quickly became overzealous and overreaching and were slapped down several times by the state government or the courts. Nevertheless, they remained overall popular. Stories of, say, the police dangling people over cliffs to sniff out a pedophile became the stuff of legend. While activists, particularly gay and minority but including whites concerned with justice reform, complained, they didn't get much attention.
Then in 1978, Davis resigned shortly before Prop 13 passes, reducing government revenue substantially. The LAPD budget was cut and they were forced to cut down to less than 7,000 officers for a city of almost three million people. Many police officers were let go, many leave to other counties with better promotion prospects or salaries. The police no longer had the resources to maintain community policing. So what does the incoming police chief, Daryl Gates, do? He prioritizes the elite units and doubles down on zealous enforcement. This effectively kills community policing and makes the most effective tool in the Police Chief's arsenal SWAT teams, anti-gang teams, and that sort. Meanwhile, gang activity sees a sharp uptick. This is, to some degree, a national trend, but it takes particular hold in Los Angeles.
The police try to stop it but don't really succeed. And they alienate poor and minority communities in the process. They are disproportionately targeted and tend to receive the least policing resources. Just as gang violence is rising, police response times into inner-city areas are often hours long. When they do arrive, they tend to arrest widely and let the courts sort them out. And they are not shy about using militarized tactics against even relatively soft targets. Suddenly the complaints about, say, threatening to kill someone if he doesn't give up an alleged pedophile are joined by many, many more. And it's not so admirable when it's happening in your community. In addition, it happens more often as police officers are underpaid and usually not the best of the force, since the best could leave to elsewhere. Add in the tactic of gang sweeps, where the police come in and arrest anyone they think might be in a gang and let the courts sort it out, and minority communities become very hostile to the police. The rhetoric of Civil Rights is quickly added when the gang sweeps are tied to big budget, affluent initiatives like the 1984 Olympics.
Police brutality cases went up 33% in the '80s, which is remarkable when you consider the number of officers shrunk during that time. It's even more remarkable considering the culture of cover ups and retaliation we now know about. And keep in mind, these are only reported cases.
It's now the 90's. Minority communities don't like or trust the police. The police don't serve high risk minority communities. The police are heavily militarized and accustomed to heavy handed tactics. And they are failing to permanently decrease gang activity, at best decreasing it with sweeps only for it to resurge once they leave. A motorist named Rodney King is driving intoxicated. The police attempt to pull him over. He makes a run for it. The police catch him and brutally beat him in a well-publicized incident. (Some of his defenders claim he was innocent and it was a routine traffic stop at first. Rodney King later admits he was intoxicated and did run.) The police officers are charged and found innocent.
Riots erupt. Minority communities, community activists and organizers, and gangs all riot to express their rage at the police. The police focus on securing limited areas, abandoning many communities entirely. While some of this was reforming zeal or anger at abusive policing, racist attacks on other communities take place, along with several gang killings. Eventually the National Guard and elements of the military have to be called in to restore order. In the aftermath, the Christopher Commission Report points out several causes but mainly blames the police and local government. In response, the head of the LAPD resigns and the city council appoints an outside policeman (and African American), Willie Williams. The police stop some of their more abusive policies but remain underfunded. This is most dramatically shown in the 1997 North Hollywood shootout, when some robbers with second hand military equipment were able to shoot twelve officers and were only subdued with great difficulty.
Bernard Parks became commissioner in 1997. He was shortly rocked by the Rampart scandal. Frank Lyga, an undercover LAPD officer, was pulled over by Officer Gaines, a member of CRASH (the anti-gang unit). Gaines threatened Lyga pulled his gun, and made signs later determined to be gang signs. Lyga shot him in self defense. At the time, several African American community activists condemned the shooting, claiming that Lyga (who was white) had shot Gaines (who was black) for racial reasons. The city settled, largely because several LA politicians didn't want a racially charged case near an election year. But the ensuing corruption investigation implicated several police officers in CRASH as basically being gang plants. As the scandal unraveled, it went beyond community organizers' wildest dreams, both in revealing the evil they had fought and in the strength of the response.
If that was all the investigators found was a compromised police officer, this would be a footnote. (Interestingly, probably one related to rap music: Suge Knight was heavily involved.) Instead, they found that CRASH in particular, and to a lesser extent all LA police, had been involved in a culture of cover ups, brutality, planting evidence, illegal shootings, and a raft of other offenses. They also revealed dangerous attitudes, such as going to bars to celebrate shootings and dehumanization of the communities they policed. Cooperation with gangs was relatively rare (only about 70 officers) but virtually the entire CRASH unit and the majority of LA police officers could be implicated with the culture of violence and hostility to the communities they were meant to protect. The City of Los Angeles settles and the police department then became a political football, as almost a fifth of its force leaves when the force can least afford it. (And these officers, by and large, were the better ones, since they could find other departments willing to take them.)
Eventually, a massive reform program, several hard-fought court cases, some high profiling firings and replacements, federal intervention (most notably the Consent Decree) and a huge bond program to fund the police helped the LAPD reform by 2002. But significant damage was done. In some ways we are still recovering. The LAPD still has community trust issues. The late Obama era migrant crisis had roots in LA gangs. Drug problems in LA are still bad.
So just how corrupt was the LAPD in the 90's? Well, it depends on your definition of corruption. Very few of the officers took bribes. Very few were involved in aiding or abetting criminal activity. Most were enforcing real laws. Indeed, most were, if anything, far too overzealous in their attempts to do so to the point of criminality. But virtually the whole of CRASH, which was in every police unit, and the majority of the rest were involved in a culture of brutality, cover ups, planting evidence, false statements, and protecting each other. They did so while involved in increasingly harsh, militarized policing that led to the alienation of the communities they were supposed to protect and serve. They systemically ignored or underserved certain communities. They did so while pioneering problematic tactics meant to act where they felt the justice system or government could not, which is a clear violation of the intention of policing. As a result, the communities, especially the marginalized communities, they policed were hostile to them. And West Coast Rappers expressed the decades old hostility and learned mistrust of the police in their music.
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