CHAPTER 1 The Batterram
. In 1985, “Greg Mack” Macmillan was the most influential figure in Los Angeles radio. This was in spite of the fact that he worked for KDAY, a local AM station with a signal so weak it “wavered in a high wind.”1 From its hilltop location above Echo Park, the sounds of KDAY managed to spill southward. In the best of conditions, the station could reach audiences throughout the southern flatlands of Los Angeles County, from downtown LA to Compton, and Greg Mack made it his mission as music director to cater specifically to the young people of these mostly black communities. His unusual choice was to reject both the adult contemporary programming that had previously defined KDAY and the urban contemporary format embraced by most of the nation’s other black radio markets through the 1980s.2 Bucking all trends, Mack abandoned KDAY’s former reliance on mainstream jazz, Motown standards, and disco. Instead, he showcased a unique selection of bass-heavy music, including the up-tempo electro music called “freestyle,” and rap, the sound he heard blaring from car cassette decks from MacArthur Park to Venice Beach. Mack had embraced rap in particular from the moment he arrived at the station in 1983, a time when most popular black radio jocks were dismissing it as mere novelty. His choice to take cues directly from the kids he aimed to serve proved savvy. In just two years’ time, rap music had not only revitalized the struggling AM outlet but had thrust KDAY into the vanguard of black radio.3
To curate KDAY’s programming, Mack looked to hip-hop trends emanating from New York, the genre’s birthplace and its heartland through the mid-1980s. His success in the Los Angeles market, however, relied on more than his attention to trails blazed in the Northeast. He also drew on his experience hosting a Majic 102 show at KMJQ in Houston, Texas—another urban radio market embedded in a car culture like LA’s, with an African-American listenership that, in the early 1980s, favored funk from the West over disco from the East. In Los Angeles, KDAY’s young staffers, who served the station by day and danced to rap and freestyle at South Los Angeles parties by night, constituted Mack’s direct line to the station’s core audience. Plus, the young programmer kept his ears tuned to “all the booming systems” in his South Central neighborhood. Rather than chasing the older listeners his industry peers were delivering to their advertisers, Mack sought to corner the local urban radio market by catering to the tastes of black youths.4
It was with this in mind that in the summer of 1985 Greg Mack gave “Batterram,” a song made by a local rapper, its radio debut. Although KDAY’s program director, Jack Patterson, had encouraged his staff to showcase promising LA artists, Mack’s choice was still an intrepid one.5 No record label had produced “Batterram,” nor was it pressed on vinyl, virtually the only format used for promotional music distribution at the time. A Compton kid named Todd Howard, billing himself as “Toddy Tee,” had recorded the track in a crude home studio onto a cassette tape. And although the song borrowed the instrumental track of a New York rap hit—the Billboard-charting single “Rappin’ Duke”—its rhymes were in the local vernacular, focused on a problem not many outside LA even knew about. Toddy Tee’s dub was a cautionary tale about the newest weapon being deployed in the war on drugs: a six-ton armored vehicle outfitted with a fourteen-foot steel battering ram. The Los Angeles Police Department was using it to execute search warrants, and as the local rapper’s chorus warned, “You can’t stop it, baby / The Batterram.”6
Los Angeles County’s deployment of two V-100 military surplus vehicles marked a new phase in its approach to two related problems: gangs and rock cocaine. Rock, also known as “freebase” and later “crack”—first appeared on the streets of Los Angeles in 1983, the same year Greg Mack joined the staff at KDAY. Demand for the new street drug, a crystalized derivation of powder cocaine that provided users with a potent high for a minimal price, quickly eclipsed sales of all other narcotics. Local gang networks, already adept at dealing marijuana, PCP, powder cocaine, and other illegal substances, shifted to selling the new product, which was cheap to get, easy to manufacture, and unusually addictive.7 A sudden boom in the market for rock provided lucrative opportunities for the region’s black gangs, who profited handsomely by collaborating with drug traffickers and by building their own complex distribution networks. But as the area’s drug-dealing outfits—now linked to LA’s Crips and Bloods organizations—sought to expand sales and defend against competitors, they were compelled to fortify drug houses, arm themselves with military-grade guns, and engage in ever-more violent campaigns to control their markets.
The changes for Los Angeles were dramatic, even for those who had spent years investigating South LA’s metastasizing street gang problem. By the end of 1983, shortly after rock cocaine’s arrival, Los Angeles County officials testified before the United States Congress about an emerging crisis. To the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, LA County District Attorney Robert Philibosian characterized South Los Angeles as a warzone where “the sound of gunfire is so commonplace that law-abiding citizens no longer exhibit enough curiosity to go as far as their windows to see what is happening.” Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief James Bascue also offered testimony about the social impact of the horror, describing the citizens of his city as psychologically paralyzed. He told the subcommittee that rock cocaine had so exacerbated the gang wars and drug-related crimes of armed robbery, kidnapping, and murder that surrounding communities were permeated by violence and terror: “People can’t go to the store. People can’t enjoy parks.”8
The stakes of crime control were especially high in early 1984, as Los Angeles city leaders prepared to host the Summer Olympics. Press reports of “gang-related” homicides in the spring intensified pressures on Los Angeles officials to address the youth violence (and the homelessness, urban decay, and dysfunctional public transportation system) plaguing the central section of the city where athletes, spectators, celebrities, political figures, and the international press would convene in July and August.9 The coming of the Games heightened LAPD Chief Daryl Gates’s fervent devotion to get-tough policing, especially as it related to juvenile gangs. From Gates’s perspective, violent youths—particularly African-American boys—posed the greatest risk to his city because they were those most likely to be involved with gangs and to traffic in narcotics. Gates intended to sharpen the police department’s attacks on black youths who investigators tagged as criminals.10 At a time when Los Angeles was in the international spotlight, the chief vigorously defended his officers against charges of harassment, implicitly condoned racial profiling, and cited the “war” on gangs as justification for “novel” law enforcement measures that included extreme force.11 In spite of his aggressive leadership, and no doubt for some because of it, Gates remained popular among Los Angeles residents who were increasingly worried about violent crime. The public, including many black Angelenos, judged his department favorably through the early 1980s, supplying the chief with the mandate he needed to stay the course. Indeed, after the 1984 Olympic Games had ended, Gates saw an even broader groundswell of support, including from his sometime nemesis Mayor Tom Bradley.12
Faced with the unpredictable problem of gang violence and the vexing reality that his city had become a key battleground in America’s war on drugs, Mayor Bradley called a press conference in October 1984. Since the closing of the Summer Olympic Games, more than thirty people had been murdered in Los Angeles, most of them in the communities of South Central where, he informed reporters, gang members had become “drug assassins” who used military-grade weapons and distributed rock cocaine from “rock houses.” The mayor made the grim pronouncement that Los Angeles was under siege. His constituents were newly threatened by the Crips and the Bloods, gangs long known to be violent but who now moonlighted as drug traffickers, compounding the city’s growing crisis of addiction and blight. He called the problem “urban terrorism,” evoking LA’s feverish recent efforts to avert any act of foreign terrorism during the Olympics; this urban threat, the term implied, warranted the same fervor from regular citizens—“community leaders … the churches, the schools, the businesses … the parents”—to collaborate with police. Moreover, by rallying officials from across the city to come up with “an aggressive plan of action” to “purge our community of this violence,” Mayor Bradley gave Los Angeles law enforcement officials like Chief Daryl Gates the authorization to explore innovative, and even radical, solutions to gang-related crime.13 That is exactly what the LAPD did in 1985 when it introduced the battering ram.
As Bradley explained, police task forces had to contend with a new obstacle in their efforts to halt the spread of rock cocaine: rock houses. Sometimes masquerading as single-family homes, apartments, or small business storefronts, rock houses functioned as centers for the production, distribution, and consumption of rock. Thus, a warranted police raid on any one rock house could lead to the confiscation of drugs, drug paraphernalia, cash, and weapons, along with scores of arrests of both users and dealers. Having positively identified some three hundred of these structures across the residential landscape of South Los Angeles, operating near homes, schools, churches, community centers, and playgrounds, police had the clear data and the moral incentive to pick them off, one by one.14
The problem, however, was that drug dealers understood this and prepared for it. After a few failed attempts in 1983 and 1984 to execute search warrants at suspected rock houses, police investigators discovered at these locations sophisticated fortifications designed to prevent theft, shield those inside from drive-by shootings, and thwart police. Leaders of SWAT teams (so-called for their use of “special weapons and tactics”) reported encountering steel doors, iron bars covering windows, and, most remarkably, metal cages flanked with electronically controlled doors, in which entering and exiting visitors could be detained if necessary. By design, these extras turned rock houses into fortresses that could withstand a police onslaught or at least frustrate tactical teams. As Gates recalled, his men would arrive “with a tow truck and a cable, lock onto the front door or a window” and yank off what they could to create an opening. This highly visible, time-consuming work, while it eventually delivered police access to the premises, destroyed the element of surprise that was essential to any successful drug raid: “By the time we [got inside], the sellers would have taken the drugs into a bathroom—which would have a steel door—and flush them down the toilet.” Dope dealers and users could escape all charges if they managed to hide or destroy incriminating stock and supplies before cops gained entry. And usually they did. “Without the drugs as evidence,” the chief lamented, “we couldn’t make an arrest that would result in a conviction.”15 When this happened, Toddy Tee’s “Batterram” tells us, the hustlers celebrated, “jumpin’ up and down ’cause it ain’t no case.”16
The SWAT leaders advised Chief Gates that they needed a strategy for conducting more effective rock house busts. His solution came in the form of a couple of V-100 armored vehicles borrowed from the US Department of Energy. The US Army had first used the two tank-like personnel carriers in the Vietnam War and, later, for security at a nuclear facility. By the early 1980s, they were out of commission, which created an opportunity for Los Angeles. The LAPD first acquired the six-ton armored vehicles as part of its crisis readiness in case of terrorism during the 1984 Olympics. Once the Games had closed, the US Government expressed no interest in reclaiming the twenty-year-old V-100s, and so they sat in storage for several months until someone in the LAPD’s gang and drug tactical units proposed using them in rock house raids. To that end, they suggested a few basic modifications: paint them a dark blue color to mask the military camouflage and to better represent the city agency; label them with the Los Angeles city seal and the words “L.A.P.D. Rescue Vehicle” (because, as Gates argued, rock house busts aimed to rescue communities from drug dealers); and, most importantly, outfit each of them with a steel battering ram.17 The idea was simple: a fourteen-foot steel ram, with six tons of bulk behind it, would be a “precision” tool for forced entry. As Toddy Tee rapped, the LAPD was “sick and tired of snatchin’ down bars” with cables and tow trucks.18 Here was a new weapon that vested raid teams with the power to roll up to the front of a rock house and, in seconds, punch a hole in the building large enough to allow police to rush in, expeditiously locate drug evidence, and make arrests.19
Chief Gates approved the proposal, and when the first “battering ram” vehicle was complete, he organized test runs in demolition zones along the path of the planned Century Freeway. Seeing the ease with which the V-100 punctured dilapidated houses marked for removal, Gates predicted that his department would, at last, gain the upper hand in its battle with cocaine traffickers. The chief understood there would be public outcry, and he anticipated some legal challenges to a municipal police force’s use of a mechanism of war to carry out search warrants—a first in history for any American law enforcement agency. In his mind, the potential benefits outweighed the risks, and it was also possible that the LAPD would be lauded as a model for others on the front lines of the nation’s war on drugs. So confident was Gates in the success of the battering ram, in fact, that he invited photographers and reporters from the Los Angeles press to witness its maiden run.20
On February 6, 1985, Gates stood in front of the refurbished “rescue vehicle” facing a crowd of media observers. The plan was for a SWAT team to put it on the streets of LA that evening, using it for the first time in the field, to execute a search warrant on a suspected rock house in Pacoima. The chief conveyed optimism about the mission and christened the first voyage of the battering ram by cracking a bottle of Thunderbird wine on its port side. Then, with Gates riding in the passenger seat, the massive vehicle growled down Louvre Street, press vans in tow. As it rolled over the front lawn of the target residence, a neighbor screamed at the police to stop. The ram charged forward nonetheless. As intended, it demolished a front wall within seconds of impact, affording the raid team immediate access to the home’s living room (Fig. 1.1).21
Inside the Pacoima house, the SWAT team discovered not a bevy of drug dealers and users but, instead, resident Linda Johnson, her small son, Marquez, and another woman visiting with her two children, all of whom were eating ice cream when the ram smashed through the wall. The ordinary domestic scene stunned investigators, including the chief, and the fruitless hunt that followed dismayed those who expected to discover a fully functioning rock cocaine enterprise. Police found no weapons, no conspicuous stacks of cash, and only a trace amount of cocaine, less than a tenth of a gram, an amount so insignificant that the LA district attorney refused to consider filing charges. Linda Johnson and her husband (who returned moments after the raid) were arrested on site and their child was placed in protective custody. But without sufficient evidence of any wrongdoing, the couple was released and reunited with their boy the next day. Attorney Johnnie Cochran, who immediately filed a claim against the city on behalf of the Johnsons, publicly condemned the Los Angeles Police Department for “negligence, violation of civil rights, intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, battery and damaging property.” The children in particular, Cochran noted, suffered from trauma as a result of the battering ram. “They have trouble sleeping at night. They cannot get it out of their mind. They see a police car and they remember it.”22
Fig 1.1 On February 6, 1985, the Los Angeles Police Department debuted its armored V-100 “Rescue Vehicle,” fitted with a steel battering ram. Los Angeles Times Photographic Archives, Library Special Collections, UCLA Library.
In response to the debacle in Pacoima, the San Fernando Valley chapter of the NAACP, a group of Pacoima ministers, and the ACLU sought to block further police use of the V-100 vehicle. Its deployment had proven to critics that the Los Angeles Police Department planned to conduct drug raids as if it operated in a war zone, without regard for the safety of bystanders, with little concern for those living in the surrounding neighborhoods, and with disdain for the civil rights of private citizens. “These weapons may be appropriate for a battlefield,” an attorney for the ACLU told the Los Angeles Times, “but not to serve an arrest warrant.” Reverend Jeffrey Joseph, Sr., a Pacoima minister and a witness to the maiden run of the ram, denounced the LAPD for using his community for target practice. “We don’t need new weapons to be tried out on us,” he seethed, reminding reporters that three small children under the age of ten had been inside the home, in the direct path of the vehicle’s destruction.23
The protests in Los Angeles over the use of the battering ram echoed decades of challenges leveled by black Angelenos against the police. In the 1960s, after the black uprising in South Los Angeles that came to be known as the Watts Riots, state and federal leaders conducted hearings on racial discrimination in policing, and national civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr. and NAACP director Roy Wilkins called for greater scrutiny of police practices and of Police Chief William H. Parker’s leadership. In that same decade, Muhammad Speaks—the firebrand weekly paper of the Nation of Islam—provided a steady stream of evidence to black Angelenos of all creeds linking law enforcement to white supremacy. By the end of the decade, the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party was functioning as a police watch organization, as well as galvanizing hundreds of young black militants with its armed resistance programs.24 These were a few of the reasons why, by the opening of the 1970s, LA had secured its position as the primary battleground for the national conflict between urban black communities and police. Although much Black Power activism ebbed in the early 1970s, especially in the wake of coordinated federal crackdowns on black radicalism, LA’s African-American communities remained acutely aware of police authority and intent on checking it. The concerted challenges to law enforcement endured. In fact, the grassroots campaign to establish true checks on police power gained its greatest momentum much later in the late 1970s, when Daryl Gates, Chief Parker’s dutiful protégé, became the city’s newest, most notorious top cop.
In 1975, three South Los Angeles social justice advocates resurrected the idea of police watch groups touted in the late 1960s by the radicalized men and women of the Los Angeles Black Panthers. Anthony Thigpenn, Kwaku Duren, and Michael Zinzun had worked as community organizers in the early 1970s, speaking with victims of police abuse and providing assistance for those who sought to file complaints. Zinzun, who had spent two years as a member of the LA Panthers, was particularly troubled by the “epidemic” of police violence that had only worsened since the decline of Black Power. His concern was that as the war on crime replaced the war on poverty, African-American people nationwide, but especially in poverty-stricken places like South Los Angeles, would become increasingly vulnerable to modern policing methods designed not to protect but to attack.25 In response to a flurry of violent police-involved incidents—among them, the killing of sixteen-year-old Barry Evans in a shootout with the LAPD, and the killing of Betty Scott, mother of four, by California Highway Patrol officers—Zinzun and his fellow activists sought to form an organization of like-minded people committed to curtailing what had become the LAPD’s new “reign of terror.”26 “Unity is the only way,” Zinzun told the Los Angeles Sentinel, “to stop police killings and instances of police abuse.”27
Their organization, the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), was created with the express goal of gathering and publicizing information about abuses committed by officers of the law. As the group’s original statement of purpose declared, the time had come “to let the authorities know that we will no longer tolerate the senseless harassment, injury and murder of community people by the police, and that we have resolved as our main purpose to organize and mobilize the masses … against police terrorism in our communities.”28 To these ends, CAPA sponsored public demonstrations, including picket lines meant to obstruct the daily operations at police precincts and the district attorney’s offices. Its members distributed proposals for community action and offered workshops inside South LA community centers. One South Central “Organizing Against Police Brutality” event, held in December 1976 at Fremont High School, featured Black Panther royalty Ericka Huggins along with Larry Williams of the Greater Watts Justice Center, a legal-aid organization founded in the wake of the 1965 Los Angeles uprising. At what the Sentinel called CAPA’s “cop abuse seminar,” Huggins issued to the packed hall a directive about police misconduct. “Publicize any and everything that occurs in your community,” she said, imploring her audience to remember “the Martin Luther Kings, Fred Hamptons, Malcolm Xs.” California State University Northridge journalism student Dwayne Waheeb Williams endorsed Huggins’s message, and reminded the room that many others—not only lauded movement leaders—had also fallen victim to violent oppression. In fact, when it came to law enforcement abuses, every member of the black community was at risk. With camera in hand, Williams testified about his own violent confrontations with the police and proposed photography as one form of resistance. One could take photos, tell the press, take a complaint directly to the police department, or seek support from organizations like CAPA, Williams said: “The only way to alleviate police abuse is to report it. Make it known, whether it is a small complaint or a large one.”29
When veteran LAPD officer Daryl Gates began his tenure as chief in early 1978, his department and the county sheriff’s were straining to withstand pressures applied by CAPA and its partners. Pickets, marches, and protest rallies stymied operations at police precincts and sheriff’s patrol stations throughout South Los Angeles. Thanks to the combined work of CAPA, South Central’s New Mount Pleasant Baptist Church, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Greater Watts Justice Center, and the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the LAPD faced a major lawsuit for “falsifying police reports, battering citizens, unlawfully discharging weapons, committing unprosecuted crimes and destroying records.”30 City Councilman David Cunningham, meanwhile, with the support of African-American California State Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, had expanded a campaign to create a citizen panel to supervise police shooting investigations, rejecting the LAPD’s and district attorney’s long tradition of internal reviews with little or no oversight. Adding to the department’s challenges, Gates was forced in his first months in office to respond to charges of illegal spying. Gates was personally named in a civil suit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court accusing LAPD leadership of planting undercover officers inside CAPA and other police watch groups.31
Gates had reason to be concerned. Beyond organized protest, CAPA had a core mission: to expose abuses of police power to the public. In the years before Gates took office, CAPA conducted research into the unique sovereignty of LA’s chief of police. Unlike chiefs in other major urban centers, including New York, LA’s top cop was an appointee of a police commission rather than the mayor—and thus, did not answer directly to City Hall. Nor was the position subject to term limits. This had been the case since the late 1930s, when the Los Angeles City Charter was amended to remove the direct link between the mayor’s office and the office of the chief; the thinking had been that this move would shield the police department from political pressure and corruption.32 By the 1940s, the chief of the LAPD was more than the highest-ranking police officer in the department. He was an unusually independent political player, free to make decisions about his force without concern for the mayor, the mayor’s approval ratings, or municipal elections. That meant that through the long and tumultuous tenures of William Parker (1950–1966) and Edward Davis (1969–1978), some viewed the chief of the LAPD as a beacon of integrity and stability in the midst of political turmoil. For others, especially leaders in City Hall, these freewheeling chiefs reeked of arrogance, and the “mentality” of the office too often empowered them to defy the mayor and, by extension, the people of the city.33
By the first months of Chief Gates’s administration, CAPA secured court orders to obtain LAPD documents, including evidence showing the department’s concerted move toward militarization—the steps that would lead to the battering ram. The group also got its hands on training bulletins, which were as much a window into the culture of the department as a detailed description of police procedures. One bulletin, among the first that Gates approved, revealed that LAPD policies for justifiable homicide were quite flexible. First, it listed protocols for using “deadly force,” acknowledging a precedent set by recent court cases making homicide defensible only in action against “violent felons.” The bulletin went on, however, to provide police with useful loopholes. If acting in “self-defense,” for instance, an officer had broad latitude to decide what constituted “an immediate threat” of death or serious injury. The license to use deadly force, it explained, was an entitlement granted to those whose job demanded rapid response. If presented with immediate life-threatening danger, “it is not in the public’s interest, the Department’s interest, nor the officer’s interest for an officer to hesitate and become ambivalent.” Similarly, the bulletin outlined standards for shooting “fleeing felons” versus “fleeing misdemeanants.” In the case of a felon, the officer was permitted to fire if that person had committed a violent crime and his escape would “constitute a threat to the welfare and safety of the community.” In a case of misdemeanor offense, it noted that deadly force was “never employed”; nevertheless, it could be warranted in self-defense. This was the kind of fuzzy clause CAPA saw as designed to provide cover for overzealous cops.34
Then, it happened. On January 3, 1979, two LAPD patrolmen confronted Eula Love outside of her South Central home as she yelled at two representatives from Southern California Gas Company, waving a kitchen knife in her hand. Earlier that day, she had assaulted another man from the utility, hitting him with a shovel after he tried to collect her overdue payment. With her twelve- and fifteen-year-old daughters just inside, Love warned the officers to leave. Witnesses said she was poised on the walkway, thrusting a boning knife in the men’s direction, reportedly angry at the utility’s threat to shut off her gas unless she made a minimum payment of $22.35 Yelling obscenities, the thirty-nine-year-old mother ignored the officers’ demands to drop the knife, and the men fired their service weapons multiple times, killing her instantly. Hazel Blue, a neighbor on the scene, described it as “a nightmare.”36
In the days following the shooting, Chief Gates set about explaining his officers’ actions to the press, hoping to limit what was sure to become a public-relations mess for his department. He told reporters that when the two policemen emerged from their patrol car and approached Love’s residence, they observed the woman “flailing her knife” with “froth coming out of her mouth.” (The “froth” observation had actually been made by the gas company employee assaulted earlier.) He said the officers perceived a mortal danger when she made a move to throw her weapon. Gates stressed that Love died because “she decided to solve her problem with a knife. That’s why it happened.”37 The chief relayed details from an internal investigation, including portions of testimony from Lloyd O’Callaghan and Edward Hopson, the officers involved. Presumably trying to head off charges of racism, Gates was careful to note that, although Love was black, so was patrolman Hopson. The official account from the police was, in sum, that two LAPD patrolmen acted in self-defense, and thus their use of deadly force was justified.38
Eyewitnesses complicated this narrative. Neighbor Hazel Blue saw one officer knock the weapon out of Love’s hand before any shots came. (The officers said the same, but claimed she promptly snatched it back up.) It was when Love got back to her feet that she was “shot down cold blooded,” Blue said. Sheila Love, Eula Love’s teenage daughter, said that her mother was on her knees when the shots came, and testimony from one of the gas company employees present that afternoon seemed to corroborate that account. “She never got up,” the serviceman told reporters. “She was down on her knees all the time.” Love’s youngest daughter testified that Love was unarmed and retreating backward when the cops began shooting.39 When the Los Angeles district attorney interviewed witnesses, two said that Hopson “fooled” or “fumbled” with the knife after the shooting. Although one later recanted and the other was unable to articulate what he had seen, it hinted at an extremely serious allegation, that the police officer had tampered with evidence. A month later, the magazine Jet made a further claim: “A neighbor reported that one of the officers kicked the knife across the street.”40
Through the fog of conflicting accounts, one fact remained clear: a woman was dead, shot eight times by uniformed police officers. Word of Love’s death spread quickly throughout South Los Angeles, and so did rumors about a police conspiracy to cover up wrongdoing. Black locals, already suspicious of the LAPD, expressed anger, frustration, and a renewed sense of dread about the continuing disintegration of community-police relations. One South Central resident, Marion Singleton, told a Los Angeles Times reporter that he and his neighbors spent their days “talking about the shooting” and discussing their fears. More than anything else, he said, “people are afraid nothing will be done about it.”41 Other residents and community leaders, many of whom knew Love personally, crowded into city council meetings to express their outrage at the LAPD and demand compensation for the victim’s orphaned daughters. Many spoke of their own confrontations with violent and verbally abusive police, and described officers riding into their communities with guns blazing.42 The local chapter of the NAACP, the National Human Rights Coalition (NHRC), and CAPA joined forces with Love’s South Central neighbors to petition Los Angeles City Hall for a grand jury investigation into the shooting.43
South Central church and civic leaders also clamored for action against Gates and his agency’s policies, which more often than not supported discrimination against their constituents. For instance, Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, a vocal critic of police strip-searches and choke-hold tactics—maneuvers used most brazenly against African-American men—went to the press. She blasted the police, claiming they were routinely “trained to be tough with blacks, and because of that they come into our communities thinking that all blacks carry guns and knives.” State Senator Diane Watson called for “checks and balances,” noting that “for too long, the police have felt they were above the law [and] have never been made accountable for their actions.”44 The city’s most prominent African-American ministers publicly proclaimed that the Eula Love case was “bigger than Love’s death” alone. Reverend Milton M. Merriweather, an outspoken critic of Police Chief Gates, called for City Hall to see that justice was done, for not only Love but all black folks in Los Angeles. He predicted mass uprisings if Officers Hopson and O’Callaghan were not punished for their actions, and reiterated this warning during a pastors’ march following Love’s funeral.45
The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner helped sow anxiety about the growing power of the LAPD. Day after day, it printed front-page, above-the-fold features on the shooting and the investigations that followed. Under provocative headlines like “The $22.09 Gas Bill Tragedy,” the paper focused on the most macabre details, particularly the haste with which the police officers drew their weapons, the number of shots fired, and where the bullets entered Love’s body. Herald-Examiner editors also railed against Chief Gates, his deadly-force policies, and his police-protecting processes, voicing serious doubts that any internal investigations into police misconduct could be fair. So scathing were the paper’s criticisms that the chief issued a veiled threat to its editors. “Maybe you can get away with this kind of journalism in New York,” he warned in a press conference, “but you can’t in Los Angeles.”46
Unfortunately for Gates, that kind of journalism circulated widely. Police brutality in Los Angeles was national news by March, when Esquire ran a feature on Love’s death. The popular magazine posed provocative questions about whether the Los Angeles Police Department, the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country, protected and served black citizens with the same care and civility it did whites. The Los Angeles Times, which had not yet devoted much ink to a story that its rival the Herald-Examiner was reporting avidly, jumped in after this, reminding readers that the awful shooting of Eula Love was in no way the first incident in which Los Angeles police had used excessive violence against a black or brown suspect. It profiled several other recent cases of abuse under investigation by the LA District Attorney, including the case of James Richardson, an unarmed nineteen-year-old shot and killed by a patrolman who mistook the black teen for a robbery suspect, a shooting that occurred just two weeks after Love’s death. Shortly thereafter, as the newspaper reported, three plainclothes LAPD officers fired at Cornelius Tatum, an African-American gas station employee, when they misidentified him as a burglar. It was Tatum’s first day on the job at the Vermont Avenue business, and because he was aware that it was on one of South Central’s most dangerous blocks, he was armed with a shotgun. Witnesses said that the officers, who were working undercover for the department’s gang unit, failed to identify themselves as policemen when they confronted Tatum with their guns drawn. Tatum, perhaps mistaking it for an armed robbery, drew his own weapon, and the officers fired, leaving Tatum with eleven gunshot wounds and permanent paralysis.47 The Los Angeles Times coverage of cases like these suggested, first, that the use of excessive force was standard practice for the LAPD, and, second, that victims of police brutality were disproportionately black. Without immediate intervention, the newspaper warned, an unbridled culture of racism and violence inside the LAPD was certain to result in more tragedy, and it would be a pox on the city. LA’s reputation as one of the nation’s most progressive societies was at stake.48
For the Coalition Against Police Abuse, these cases, among others, only reinforced what members already knew to be true: that Los Angeles police flagrantly abused their authority and did so, all too often, with tragic results. Having spent nearly five years collecting reports from local citizens, CAPA had the evidence that Love’s wrongful death was no anomaly. Nor were black residents surprised. John McKnight, an appliance deliveryman and father living in the Watts Nickerson Gardens housing project, complained that the police were turning neighborhoods like his into war zones. McKnight recalled half a dozen police shootings in 1979 alone, and countless violent arrests. Those who carry the badge, he said, “think a black man’s always dangerous until he’s handcuffed and laying on the ground.”49 Local teachers, pastors, councilmembers, and the black press heard testimony from McKnight and other community members, young and old, who had experienced frightening encounters with law enforcement. As the Los Angeles Sentinel put it, citizens told their own harrowing stories in “meetings, demonstrations, rallies and clandestine rap sessions.”50 “We have lost too many of our citizens at the hands of police officers,” an editorial in the paper declared, “and it must come to an immediate end.”51 Meanwhile, Maxine Waters took it upon herself to remind the white public that police violence against black victims was “not unusual.” Then in May, in the midst of a concerted campaign to raise consciousness about police misconduct, cops shot Carlos Washington, another South Central resident. The fifteen-year-old black boy was gunned down while scaling a fence, fleeing from officers who suspected him of stealing a car.52 As the Sentinel noted, Washington was an innocent young boy, a “typical junior high student” who followed the rules and generally steered clear of “trouble.” He was the twenty-third person shot by Los Angeles police in a four-month period.53
In response to the May shooting incident, the Los Angeles Sentinel printed a two-part exposé on violence and bigotry in the Los Angeles Police Department. In the report, former LAPD officer Glen Wood told the Sentinel that racial biases pervaded police training, police policies, and police practices out in the field. Wood, whom the paper identified as white, noted the frequent use of the term “nigger” among his fellow officers, and he described a hypermasculine culture in which his coworkers frequently bragged about “kicking ass” and firing at suspects. He recalled one time when his partner, while they were patrolling South Central, got aggravated when he spotted a young black man washing his car in front of his home. The officer ordered the man inside, telling him, “Get out of the street, nigger, you don’t own it yet.” On another occasion, Wood witnessed a fellow patrolman pull alongside a car full of black youths, with windows down and bass thumping loudly from the speakers. The officer warned the driver, “Turn that f——jungle-bunny music down, nigger. Everybody don’t want to hear that shit.”54
Black boys and young men attested to being marks for hot-tempered cops. “General” Robert Lee, founder of the LA Brim Blood Army gang, an early incarnation of the Bloods, was thirteen when a Los Angeles patrol officer first threatened to kill him. In 1969, he and his friends were pulled over while cruising slowly in the Vermont Harbor area just west of South Central. As the cops questioned the passengers and Lee began laughing nervously, one angry patrolman demanded silence by shoving his shotgun in Lee’s mouth and daring him to “smile now, nigger.” Jimel Barnes, a Crip, summing up his similar encounters with the police, said, “I was treated … just like I wasn’t human.” He described being pulled over and hearing from a cop, “We’re going to play this game.… Watch this.” Then the officer would take an unregistered “throwaway gun” out of his boot, load a bullet in the chamber, and “put it to my head and burn the trigger.”55 Both Lee and Barnes learned in childhood to be wary of the police; Lee believed “the police started killing ten- and eleven-year-old young brothers; they were blowing their heads off.” They and their peers feared the LAPD as if it were just as ruthless as any street gang, and more sinister, to boot. “When the devil pulled up,” Lee said of the LAPD’s frequent unwelcomed visits to social gatherings in his neighborhood, “brothers that didn’t even do a thing were breaking their legs, tearing their pants, and jumping over cars to run away.”56
Even those young people who made it a point to avoid associating with local gangs complained of racial profiling, brutality, and harassment. O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson learned at a very early age to fear men in blue uniforms. He said that even as a little boy, the police accosted him regularly, teaching him contempt for those who patrolled his stomping grounds. “When you in the hood, they get you early,” Ice Cube explained of his memories growing up in LA in the late 1970s. “They’ll pull you off your bike, make you put your hands on the hood. You’ll be sitting on the grass, just played football, and these motherfuckers swoop up and fuck with you.” From Ice Cube’s perspective, the police neither protected nor served any purpose other than terror, and they treated all black boys the same: “Fucking with you if you’re bad, fucking with you if you’re good—don’t matter.”57
In the wake of the Eula Love killing, efforts to shine a spotlight on rampant police misconduct caused black Angelenos, who had generally approved of the manner in which the Los Angeles police enforced the law, to lose faith. A citywide poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times in 1978, the year prior to Love’s death, had revealed that most African Americans viewed the LAPD as an institution that functioned to safeguard their lives and their property. By the end of 1979, however, similar polls showed that the vast majority of black respondents had concluded that the force did not operate to improve their quality of life, but instead degraded their community by prejudicially abusing its members. Latinos polled in late 1979 expressed similar views, with two-thirds citing the Love shooting as a clear act of brutality and 40 percent agreeing that African Americans in the city bore the heavy weight of police misconduct. Even white residents asked to reflect on the honor and integrity of the LAPD began to grow skeptical.58
At the tail end of his second term, Mayor Tom Bradley offered a careful statement acknowledging the public’s growing misgivings about local law enforcement: “There is widespread feeling—which I share—that the [Love] shooting might have been avoided.”59 Bradley promised to have the Los Angeles Police Commission, a five-member board he appointed himself, review police policies and procedures.60 For a growing chorus of police-reform activists, who demanded that citizens rather than bureaucrats guide oversight, this was a meager effort to effect change. Worse, it was a gesture undermined by the mayor’s declaration of full support for Police Chief Gates amid calls for his dismissal. In defense of Gates’s leadership, Bradley cautioned his critics against inflaming tensions between the police and the black community. One minister responded by accusing the city’s first African-American mayor of having an “LAPD mentality.”61
Eula Love had become a cause célèbre for police-watch advocates in Los Angeles. For organizations like CAPA, it seemed this one tragedy on South Orchard Avenue would catalyze the creation of city-sanctioned citizen police-review boards—precisely the kind of change that had eluded civil rights groups and black revolutionaries in the 1960s and 1970s and that might facilitate real, systemic improvements in criminal justice. As Paul Hudson, president of the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP, said, “I think that this very well may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”62
Rather than pressure the police department, as groups representing Puerto Ricans and African Americans in New York City had done with little success, and rather than entrust Mayor Bradley or the Police Commission to curb misconduct, activists focused their efforts on the 1980 election.63 The Campaign for a Citizens’ Police Review Board (CCPRB) set out to collect the 150,000 signatures needed to place an initiative on the ballot that would amend the Los Angeles City Charter to require the creation of such a board. In addition to CAPA, which did much to spearhead the campaign for a citizen police review board, CCPRB included dozens of progressive groups, including activists from the Campaign for Economic Democracy, the NAACP, and the ACLU. As the CCPRB ramped up its petition drive in the spring of 1980, the Economist reported on California’s “gathering storm of protest” aimed at restraining “the enormous power of the Los Angeles police.”64
But the campaign failed. Deep divisions within the CCPRB grew over the organizational details of the proposed board, including its planned budget, salaries for appointees, and needs for administrative staff. As a result, some allies withdrew their support, while others abandoned the drive to collect signatures. A fractured CCPRB was ultimately unable to meet its summer deadline and the initiative did not appear before voters that fall. While activists agreed that the defeat was a result of infighting, some suspected the LAPD of helping to sow the discord. Long after the summer deadline for qualifying the initiative had come and gone, advocates for CAPA and the ACLU uncovered evidence suggesting that undercover police officers had infiltrated the CCPRB and stoked internal divisions. By some accounts, police spies had also stolen scores of collected signatures. Chief Gates called all accusations of dirty policing and election meddling “garbage,” even as discovered documents revealed that the LAPD’s Public Disorder Intelligence Division had spied on an extraordinary array of city and state officials, including Los Angeles City Council members, Mayor Bradley, the state’s attorney general, and Governor Jerry Brown.65
Thanks to an expensive and highly effective public relations campaign, Chief Gates and his police department emerged from the tumultuous events of 1979, 1980, and 1981 reinvigorated and emboldened. By the early 1980s, the Los Angeles Police Department under Gates had demonstrated how impervious it was to crisis, and, more importantly, how resistant it could be to any storm of protest. Local police-watch advocates, including CAPA, remained vigilant, but the broadly organized movement that had churned in South Los Angeles began to dissipate as the Reagan era opened.66
In the midst of the controversy surrounding the police shooting of Eula Love, Chief Gates told a meeting of Los Angeles County Bar Association members that tragic incidents like Love’s death were “inevitable.” South Los Angeles was, he reasoned, plagued by urban crime and bloodshed, and budget issues had forced a reduction in the number of uniformed officers: “In that kind of climate, where there is that much violence, you are going to have police violence.”67 Not long after the failed review board movement of 1980, many in South Los Angeles, including some who had been outraged by Gates’s flippant rationalizations for his officers’ use of fatal force in the Love case, began to agree with him. A broad coalition of activists had stood in opposition to the most powerful law enforcement agency in the nation, revitalizing a long tradition of protest against policing in South Los Angeles. But within just a few years, many of those same leaders were encouraging their communities to “stand behind” the police department.68 Vociferous cries about abuse of authority, and uncompromising demands for community-centered solutions to counter bad policing, gave way to pleas for tougher cops and more of them.
The early 1980s saw a shift in the consensus about juvenile crime. For over two decades before that, black communities housing active street gangs had refused to be complicit in what former Los Angeles police chief William Parker defined as the city’s “war on juvenile delinquency.” Through the 1950s, the LAPD had launched a series of outreach programs designed to enlist the support of black Angelenos in the department’s campaign against “unbridled hoodlumism.”69 Its professed dedication to “housecleaning” and “fairness to minorities”—for instance, Parker vowed to punish corrupt officers and promote black patrolmen—warmed some black citizens to the idea of assisting law enforcement in its efforts to stem the tide of juvenile crime. But even through the 1960s, as violent incidents blamed on black car clubs and gangs became the “major problem” about which the Sentinel warned, the onus had remained on the police to answer for its excessive use of force within these neighborhoods.70
In the years before and after the 1965 Los Angeles uprising, local black leaders conceded, and even lamented, that there were wayward teens in their communities, but still cited discrimination rather than delinquency as the critical public safety issue.71 Black juvenile crime may have been on the rise, but even LAPD officials admitted that this reflected a spike in crime across the city. African-American youth advocates particularly took note of the racial disparities in policing. After three violent confrontations between citizens and police in a predominantly black area of town, an administrator from the neighborhood’s Manual Arts High School offered an explanation: “The climate of today is an explosive one. The [community] knows that vice, prostitution and gambling are participated in by other communities which are overlooked by the police. [So] they respond explosively when the vice squad raids Central Los Angeles.”72
In the 1970s, youth crime had become more brazen, and citizens of the communities of South Central, Watts, and Compton started to cooperate more with those possessing the tools and the authority to keep that crime in check. The flashpoint was bus violence. As reports issued by the Southern California Rapid Transit District (SCRTD) laid bare, bus drivers and passengers navigated virtual combat zones on downtown Los Angeles routes, and while traveling through the Central Avenue corridor just west of the Harbor Freeway and running from South Central to Compton. A slew of witnesses identified “Male Negro juveniles” as perpetrators of property destruction, theft, and violence against drivers and passengers. Some hurled rocks and “missiles” at bus windows; others robbed drivers of transfers and fares; women riders endured verbal harassment and sexual assault; and victims, young and old, came forward with harrowing stories of “unprovoked attacks.”73 In response, SCRTD installed silent alarms, hired undercover security agents to ride the buses, and improved radio transmitters for drivers to communicate with law enforcement. In 1976, a suggestion that SCRTD partner with the LAPD was met with enthusiasm from bus patrons, the majority of them black residents of South Los Angeles neighborhoods who had to travel outside of the community for work and city services. SCRTD’s manager of operations applauded this partnership, predicting a new era of cooperation between city agencies and the people of South Los Angeles. It was a pairing he suggested might be “the answer to eradicating … criminal activities.”74
By the end of the decade, even as a chorus of local African-American activists demanded justice for Eula Love and a say in police reform, LA’s black “gang problem”—a phrase that had once reflected only distorted fears of benign school rivalries and teen car clubs—had become quite real. County officials determined that, over the last few years of the 1970s, gang participation in Los Angeles had snowballed. By the early 1980s, the region housed more than fifty thousand gang members sorted into as many as four hundred sets and subdivisions, tripling the highest estimates recorded in any decade prior.75 The chance for local notoriety, the promise of fellowship, and access to material and social resources were powerful incentives for new gang recruits, particularly as youth employment opportunities and recreational programs tied to diminished federal funding were shuttered. Recruits also sought the protection street organizations offered, a critical benefit particularly as the underground market in narcotics and guns emboldened neighborhood gangs to stake claim to turf and then to defend it with lethal force. As the Los Angeles Times reported in 1980, gang-related killings had doubled within just three years. This unprecedented and “staggering” crisis prompted California state legislators to pass a bill funding a Gang Violence Suppression Program in 1981. The alarming spike in violence, those officials recognized, was only fueling gang recruiting, as young people living in the ganglands felt compelled to join or otherwise pledge loyalty to neighborhood cliques for self-preservation.76
Along with gang membership growth came the proliferation of satellite networks of young people who were not “active” in gangs but who “affiliated” or “associated” themselves with local gang sets. Once a street gang embedded itself in a neighborhood or school—through a process that sociologist Steven Cureton calls “gangster colonization”—it began absorbing unpledged peers who promised to respect its authority.77 These gang-adjacent youths enjoyed the privileges of gang protection as well as the social benefits of fellowship, yet they avoided the drug running and violent crime typically demanded of full-fledged members, or “bangers.” As a Pueblo Blood member explained, those who merely associated with gangs greatly outnumbered bangers: “If there are one hundred people in a so-called gang, you may only have five of them that are really gang bangers. I mean really active. The other ninety-five will just be kickin’ it with the crew.”78 Whether “really active” or just “kickin’ it,” these young men were viewed by police, prosecutors, judges, wardens, school administrators, and community leaders as hoodlums, just the same. This conflation of active gangbangers with the people who socialized with them likely had a number of consequences, by bloating the county’s gang-member tallies, and recasting almost all black juvenile transgressions as “gang-related” crime. Even more generally, by the 1980s, it meant that all young black Angelenos, whether involved with local gangs or not, bore the racialized stigma of the “gangster.”
With gangs multiplying and violent crime surging, black youths—the most common victims of police abuse—earned less and less empathy, even from those with a history of protesting civil rights violations. When, in 1980, LAPD officers shot two black teens suspected in a robbery, the incident failed to stir much concern in the local black press about overly aggressive police procedures and instead served as a reminder about the “crisis” of gang-related crime. The editors of the historically progressive Sentinel, while emphasizing that “community residents will not tolerate shootings like Eula Love,” allowed that they were “up in arms about the hoodlums running rampage [sic] in our community making it unsafe for our women, children and businesses.” In this case, the paper argued, the police were surely justified; officers should continue to crack down on such youths. “Don’t give them an even break.”79
At one time, the deployment in South Central of police strike forces, as in the Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) program, might have provoked organized protests about systematic racial discrimination and harassment. But with narcotics and military-grade weapons flooding the region, driving a disturbing rise in “drive-by” shootings and other grisly killings, many in gang-controlled communities welcomed the expanded police presence. Some even welcomed militarization, if that is what it would take to rid communities of “hoodlums and thugs.” Seeing city and county law enforcement agencies invest heavily in a new, more aggressive war against juvenile gangs came as a relief to black business owners, homeowners, school administrators and staff, church leaders, social workers, parents, and others. While many black residents continued to harbor distrust and even contempt for Los Angeles law enforcement, their fears of “youthful criminals … murderers and felons” caused them to accept a form of police occupation. In a choice between two evils, as the Sentinel described it, it was clear that gang violence posed the greatest threat.80 Juvenile gangs had to be driven out of the African-American communities of Los Angeles, the paper proclaimed, “while there is still a community for which to fight.”81
Through the 1970s, South Los Angeles residents had been frustrated by the effects of gang-related crime on their day-to-day lives, their businesses, their home values, their schools, and the lives of their children. What was already considered a crisis came to a head in the early 1980s, with the arrival of rock cocaine on the streets. Still, community support for what promised to be a protracted war against local gangs came with reservations. Undoubtedly, many remained unenthusiastic about cooperating with police, and many worried about the price they might pay if gang members perceived them doing so. Most, however, put aside their apprehensions and elected to align themselves with LA’s oldest “gang in blue” to gain protection from the others.82 They found themselves clamoring for more beat cops, for neighborhood patrols, and even for the establishment of police-enforced curfews to curb juvenile delinquency.83 “There was a time when Black people said there were too many police officers in this community,” a Los Angeles Sentinel editorial noted. “But the simple facts of the matter are that only the criminals who wish for their crimes to go undetected are saying there are too many police officers in South Central Los Angeles.”84
CAPA chafed against this new alliance between the black community and law enforcement in Los Angeles. The group continued to demand checks on specific police procedures that, it argued, were unnecessarily brutal and put lives at risk. Most notably, CAPA collected data on the “control holds”—the “bar-arm” and the “carotid” hold—routinely used by LAPD officers on suspects resisting arrest. CAPA discovered that both kinds of choke holds, by cutting off the flow of blood to the brain, had on multiple occasions proved lethal. Between 1975 and 1982, LAPD choke holds were to blame for the deaths of fifteen people in police custody, eleven of them black. (Of the other large urban police departments that employed the choke hold, including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Dallas, each reported only one death over the same period.)85 After one of his officers choked twenty-year-old James Mincey, Jr. to death during a traffic stop, Chief Gates responded indelicately. At a hearing called by Mayor Tom Bradley to address concerns about a spate of bar-arm choke-hold deaths, the question was posed of why most of the victims were African American. The chief shared his “hunch”: “We may be finding that in some blacks when it is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.”86 With the Los Angeles branch of the Urban League calling for Chief Gates’s suspension over that remark, CAPA successfully pressured the police commission not only to ban the use of the bar-arm hold altogether, but to forbid the use of all choke holds in “any situation other than one in which the use of deadly force is authorized.”87
It was a win for police-reform advocates intent on protecting the lives of young men, which included those targeted by gang task forces. Like the Los Angeles Black Panther Party before it, CAPA pursued checks on police practices to improve the well-being of all black citizens, but especially those young people most likely to be casualties of police brutality. Through the early 1980s, when the consensus around juvenile crime shifted, CAPA remained committed to this cause. The problem for groups like CAPA, however, was that their ability to succeed in putting checks on the police, establishing new review mechanisms, and reining in the power of the chief hinged on public outrage. Because the case of Eula Love generated so much of that, it brought civil rights leaders, labor leaders, political leaders, the press, and South Los Angeles residents together in a concerted effort to amend the City Charter and enfranchise citizens in the process of police oversight.
Love was something of an anomaly; as a middle-aged woman and a mother, she was not representative of Los Angeles police abuse victims in general. The tragedy of Love’s shooting, however, presented an opportunity to advocate for all victims—at least, as long as her story remained in the news. CAPA founder Michael Zinzun had learned that he could not count on enduring support from more mainstream black leaders for his fight against police abuse. Years later he would tell the Los Angeles Times that, up until 1992, “you couldn’t even get them on the phone.”88
In early 1985, Chief Gates and the LAPD faced what was, by then, a familiar problem: the threat of a public relations disaster connected to its overuse of force. The first voyage of the department’s battering ram, in an African-American neighborhood in Pacoima, was a failure that resulted in several wrongful arrests, three traumatized children, protests, and a stack of lawsuits. In an effort to deflect public outrage—especially as news outlets reported that there had been kids eating ice cream in the house when the ram plowed into it—police officials worked to cast the February 6 raid as a mere misstep that revealed, more than anything else, how wily rock dealers could be. The chief, perhaps annoyed by what he viewed as naive complaints, noted that the house was outfitted with steel bars and a set of double steel front doors. Police Captain Noel Cunningham suggested that “there might be a strategy to put children and women in these locations to make us act a little more civilized, so to speak.” A department spokesperson offered assurance that “knowing that children are in the house will not necessarily preclude us from making a safe entry.” Gates elaborated on the point. “We strongly believe,” he said, “that if dope dealers get the impression that you can make a rock house into a sanctuary by having children inside, you can then be assured that children will be inside every one of them.”89
In spite of the protests following early reports of the Pacoima debacle, there was not, in fact, consensus among black citizens in Los Angeles against the battering ram and what promised to be a more militaristic approach to future policing in their communities. Chief Gates and his captains were able to exploit that ambivalence. Department officials were well aware of amplified concerns about gangs and gang-related violence, in part because citizen demands for more patrols and better solutions to youth crime in gang-controlled neighborhoods flooded LAPD offices in 1983 and 1984. They had also seen the Sentinel, the most prominent voice of black Los Angeles and a paper that had in the past condemned the police, again and again, for discrimination and abuse, calling vigorously for more cooperation by African-American citizens with law enforcement and more adequate policing of crime-heavy places like South Central (Fig. 1.2). Quite aware of the growing approval for his force among black Angelenos, Gates spoke over his critics. As he and his surrogates stressed, law enforcement was at war, defending the very fabric of Los Angeles society. The same LAPD spokesman who had expressed willingness to ram houses with children in them warned that if the police were not able to use the tactics they saw fit, “rock houses will be in every neighborhood. Not only will they be in the south-central area of Los Angeles and in Pacoima, but they will be in your neighborhood and my neighborhood.”90 Local black leaders Leon and Ruth Washington echoed the urgency in the spokesman’s prediction in a public statement to their fellow concerned citizens (a statement Gates would praise as an example of “community introspection and wisdom”):
If we are to sustain any kind of a livable society, we are going to have to get the drugs out of our midst, and while the battering ram has become an instrument of controversy, when used properly, no one can dispute its effectiveness.… Let us be mindful that unless something of substance is done, we will have to turn over the reins of our community to the young drug dealers.91
Gates had the public mandate he sought. Rather than yield to a handful of lawyers and activists who would have liked to see the chief immediately retire the battering ram and admit wrongdoing, he could double down. A comment he made after Pacoima made that clear: “This was just the beginning.”92
By the summer of 1985, the LAPD had used the infamous blue battering ram a total of four times. This included its ignominious debut in Pacoima and three additional runs in South Central, including one in late April that was considered a significant victory in LA’s drug war. In marked contrast to the outcry in Pacoima in February, the Sentinel reported popular support for the April raid, which targeted a “blatantly conspicuous” rock house located near a school. Parents of students at Jefferson High School and residents in the surrounding neighborhoods watched with “expressed delight” as the ram smashed down a drug operation that had reportedly recruited local children as drug runners.93
Fig I.2 A series of cartoons in the Los Angeles Sentinel in 1984 illustrated shifting ideas about crime and policing in South Central LA. An accompanying editorial statement advised: “This is our community and we are responsible for what happens to us.” Reproduced from California State Library.
After the April tour de force, however, the battering ram remained eerily absent from police raids around the city. The LAPD disputed rumors that it had buckled under legal pressures stemming from the Pacoima blunder. Although lawsuits indeed remained to be settled, the battering ram was, as the captain of the department’s Narcotics Task Force said, “simply the victim of its own success.” The vehicle was a display of military-level power, designed to literally raze the lives of rock dealers who had, until the introduction of the ram, managed to successfully adapt their operations to elude arrest. Within one year of its dramatic debut, Chief Gates’s LAPD boasted that it had generated widespread “fear of the ram” so effectively that “police don’t need to use the ram. It’s gotten the message across.”94
In late 1985, the LAPD announced it had retired its modified V-100, the first military armored vehicle to be used by an American police force for routine crime enforcement. In its three-month campaign against LA’s rock houses, the battering ram had elicited harsh criticism. As with the deadly force used against Eula Love in 1979, Angelenos leery of discriminatory law enforcement viewed it as setting a dangerous precedent for the militarized policing of their communities. But the ram also drew widespread support within these same neighborhoods, especially among those concerned about an escalating gang crisis. Growing support for Chief Gates and the LAPD in the early 1980s, however surprising, ruptured what had historically been a broad consensus among black Angelenos with regard to police brutality. It may have been a flashpoint for some civil rights organizations like CAPA and the ACLU, but the LAPD’s battering ram was roundly embraced by citizens inside South Los Angeles who saw in it hope to save their city from “urban terrorism.”95
When Toddy Tee recorded his “Batterram” rap, he said he had one key objective. He wanted to make music “about what was going on” in Los Angeles from his perspective as a Compton teen, and to deliver those stories via “the hardest street tape” LA had ever heard. His goal was to connect with all his peers looking on, like him, as the war on drugs rolled across their television screens and into their communities. The Los Angeles Police Department’s battering ram was the ideal medium for achieving that end, embodying as it did both the ravages of rock cocaine and the oppression of militarized policing in South Los Angeles. Add to that, too, the mystery of where it and the SWAT unit would strike next—a constant topic of rumors, anxiety, and intrigue among young people not much older than the three children who had watched it smash into the Pacoima home. In the spring of 1985, Toddy Tee’s “Batterram” street tape, which opened with a sample of a rumbling engine and a hushed warning—“It’s coming!”—captivated local listeners with allusions both awful and familiar.96
Making “the hardest street tape” was about tapping into raw controversy linked to drug violence and police brutality, but it was also about gaining approval within an emerging regional rap scene. Toddy Tee craved local fame, something that had mostly eluded him in his role as the lesser-known half of a Compton DJ duo. He and his partner, Frank “Mixmaster Spade” Williams, a mix DJ who cut his teeth in New York’s hip-hop circles in the early 1980s, played music for South Los Angeles house parties. As a small, mobile DJ outfit, Spade and Toddy Tee were part of a youth-based “mobile dance scene” or “street scene.” This predominantly black subculture was driven by entrepreneurial mix DJs who depended upon access to rentable venues and their own (or their parents’) record collections. It rested on the patronage of young local partygoers and support from KDAY radio. And it also depended, for better or worse, upon young financiers, promoters, and talented artists linked to local gangs and drug-trafficking enterprises.
This social network was emerging alongside the very “gangster” entities that both police and community leaders viewed as contemptible. Within the fellowship of the scene, however, there was no shame in welcoming those, like Spade, who lent time, money, and talent to the game. Indeed, the music, in its production and distribution, often leveraged those illicit relationships. Mixmaster Spade and Toddy Tee were regular performers in the dance party circuit, but it was Spade’s side hustle that drew the most attention. In part to promote his mobile DJ business, Spade recorded “practice” mixes at home, featuring songs popular with neighborhood party crowds dubbed and blended together. He gave these “street tapes” out free to friends, who in turn helped generate the buzz that drew customers willing to pay cash for them on the street. In Los Angeles in the early 1980s, Mixmaster Spade later recalled, “everybody was on the corner making them dollars.” He would set out with shoeboxes full of cassettes and soon they would be gone, all sold to people who knew him from the local dance scene, many of them gang members and dope dealers operating on the same turf. “So I was with them,” he said of Compton’s outlaw salesmen, “making them dollars too.” His homemade tapes, which could sell for as much as $20 per unit, provided Mixmaster Spade with cash to supplement the income he and Toddy Tee made entertaining party audiences.97 More importantly, street tape sales earned him name recognition, transforming him into a celebrity among his peers. “Everybody had Spade tapes in Compton, just everybody,” Toddy Tee remembered.98
Piggybacking on Spade’s following, Toddy Tee put his rhyme talent to work, crafting a song mix of his own with locally inspired content that might appeal to the same customers. Choosing as his instrumental tracks three recognizable hip-hop hits, he delivered his own rhymes in a cadence and tone that mimicked the song’s original vocals—essentially the same template used by pop parodists like “Weird Al” Yankovic and KDAY’s own funnyman Russ Parr. Toddy Tee transformed UTFO’s hit “Roxanne, Roxanne,” a favorite in the Los Angeles freestyle scene, into a lyrical drama about rock cocaine dealers called “Rockman, Rockman.”99 Over Whodini’s 1984 single “Freaks Come Out at Night,” he recorded “The Clucks Come Out at Night,” another comical, expletive-laced tale told from the perspective of a womanizing dope dealer. To the tune of a lesser-known East Coast release, “Rappin’ Duke”—a satirical anthem about a hip-hop cowboy—he delivered “Batterram.”100
By the time KDAY’s music director, Greg Mack, got hold of a “Batterram” tape in the summer of 1985, Toddy Tee had already achieved the local celebrity he coveted. The cassettes he hawked from the trunk of his car had earned for him what his partner Spade had: brand loyalty. That spring, Mack remembers, he fielded a flood of requests from young people on air and at KDAY-sponsored dances: “The kids at every school that KDAY did events at were all asking me, ‘How come y’all don’t play that Toddy Tee?’ ” From those teen audiences he learned that “every kid in LA already had a tape of ‘Batterram,’ ”—and that he, a programmer revered for breaking new music, was behind the curve. Determined to seize on a trend catching the interest of the very listeners he targeted at KDAY, he tracked down the Compton rapper and asked for a version of “Batterram” clean enough for radio play. Toddy Tee provided him with a copy free of expletives, and Mack put the track into heavy rotation. As the fans promised, it was an instant hit for the station.101
Through the summer of 1985, as some local black community members and leaders formed a complicated partnership with the LAPD in its fight against gangs, the region’s youth embraced one Compton rapper’s defiant narrative about the police department’s most notorious weapon. Young listeners flooded KDAY’s call lines with requests, elevating Toddy Tee’s rap song to a street anthem. It “exploded on the airwaves,” remembered Robin D. G. Kelley, a UCLA historian who “rocked to the rhythm” of KDAY.102 As Compton native and rapper Aaron “MC Eiht” Tyler noted, Toddy Tee enjoyed a special status in South LA’s ganglands, as a “neighborhood favorite” among those most affected by street gang culture and the police surveillance it drew.103 Using the same kind of portable recording technology and cheap blank cassette tapes Spade and Toddy Tee relied on to make their music, fans disseminated dubbed copies of “Batterram” and taped recordings of KDAY radio shows throughout Los Angeles County. Among the many kids hearing it booming out of cars rolling through their neighborhoods was a Long Beach thirteen-year-old named Calvin Broadus, Jr.—later to become famous as Snoop Dogg. As a product of another gang stronghold and a frequent target of police harassment, Snoop Dogg was inspired to hear a Compton kid deliver “an LAPD takedown.”104 For those who understood that in Los Angeles one’s associations with gangs and dope dealers were not always the result of bad choices but sometimes just a by-product of where one resided or attended school, Toddy Tee’s music was a rare reflection of their lived reality. For those who appreciated that anti-gang crusaders targeted all South LA black youths, regardless of whether one was “active” in a gang or simply grew up around one, the “Batterram” tape provided an early soundtrack for resistance.
Toddy Tee Howard and the young fans that made his “Batterram” song a summer hit recognized a crisis in Los Angeles, in which the police, not black kids, wreaked real havoc. The battering ram was only the most obvious demonstration of that. Using it as a metaphor for extraordinary police power, Toddy Tee’s rapped lines articulated how ominous the threat was for black poor and working-class neighborhoods throughout the county: “The Chief of Police says he just might / Flatten out every house he sees on sight.” His lyrics denounced not only Chief Daryl Gates for deploying the battering ram but also the most powerful black political leader in LA, Mayor Tom Bradley, who “musta been crazy or half-way wack / To legalize somethin’ that works like that.” In verse, he urged the archetypal dope dealer “Mister Rockman” to give up his trade lest he be forced to reckon with the six-ton hellhound on his trail, and, as the song’s innocent bystander who becomes a victim of the battering ram himself, Toddy Tee delivered a cautionary tale for all those in the path of the beast because of their race alone. In rhyme, he contended, “We all look the same” to the LAPD, but “I’m not the one slingin’ ’caine / I work nine to five and ain’t a damn thing changed.” When, in the summer of 1985, the LAPD announced that the blue armored vehicle would be decommissioned after getting “the message across,” Toddy Tee’s street anthem continued to resonate, warning of the eventual return of the sleeping giant: “And if you didn’t see the Batterram cross your line / Honey boon, I’m telling you—give it time.”105
Through the 1970s and the early 1980s, a growing body of evidence—including police choke-hold deaths, high-profile police shootings, the LAPD’s infiltration of a citizen-led police reform movement, the introduction of tools of war for the purposes of civilian policing, and the success of an expensive public relations campaign designed to justify misconduct—added up to a picture of a Los Angeles Police Department with vast, impenetrable power. By the time Daryl Gates debuted the battering ram in 1985, his LAPD was the most notorious law enforcement agency in the nation. As Robert Lee of South LA’s Brim Blood Army put it, the police were “the biggest gang”—the Crips and Bloods networks were no match for their rivals in blue.106 In the early 1980s, even communities that had long organized against over-policing were beginning to forge a precarious new partnership with law enforcement to combat the growth of gangs and gang violence close to home. Black Angelenos remained vigilant in calling out police abuses, with CAPA as the most prominent example of enduring activism. The voices of traditional leaders, however, especially in the Los Angeles black press, demanded greater protection against the gangs who, they argued, terrorized their neighborhoods and threatened the future of black LA.
This meant that black youths in LA were doubly marginalized. Toddy Tee’s “Batterram” spoke to the young Angelenos—especially black teens—who were most vulnerable to police violence. Whether they were directly involved with a gang, peripherally affiliated, or altogether detached from gang activity, they were subject to it. Forsaken by many traditional activists, yet buoyed by rap music and elaborate social networks tied to dance parties, young people developed their own methods for addressing LA’s urban crises. “Batterram” and the enthusiasm for it anticipated the growth of a regional music aesthetic dependent on two things: recognition of LA’s unique gang culture and direct engagement with police power. In other words, “Batterram” foretold the future of Los Angeles gangsta rap.