Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing (13 page)

When he was seventeen, an LAPD patrol car slowly cruised by Curtis Woodle’s house as he and his younger brother were fixing Woodle’s car in the driveway. The vehicle’s rear end was slightly extended out to the sidewalk, and when the white cop asked if he wanted a ticket, Woodle replied, “No, do you?” Jumping out of his black-and-white, the officer responded immediately by beating Woodle’s much smaller younger brother—who had said not one word—with his billy club and chasing him into the house, where he’d fled to escape, knocking down the boys’ mother in the process. Meanwhile the cop’s partner shoved the barrel of his gun into Woodle’s face and ordered him not to move.

The incident left a deep impression on Curtis Woodle. He would vow to join the LAPD one day and work from within to change a department that was producing officers who would terrorize a law-abiding family over a three-word comment, without any fear of being held accountable.

Which didn’t mean that Curtis Woodle, once in the department, hadn’t sipped from the cup of the LAPD’s special Kool-Aid. There was a difference, as he saw it, between the cop who’d billy-clubbed his brother and those who’d assaulted
Rodney King. His brother had done nothing wrong. There was a right way, a courteous way to deal with people you stopped to “interview” on the street or who had committed minor infractions. Rodney King, on the other hand, “had just led officers on a high-speed chase, had been breaking laws, not truly following orders, probably had alcohol in his system, wouldn’t go down, and was on his knees, which meant he still had some control of the situation.” It was the
tactics
that the officers used, Woodle felt, that were wrong. What he would have done instead was “
choke him out and try to stop the situation quickly.”

But in 1982 LAPD officers, never trained for doing things halfway, had essentially been
banned from using their baton or forearm in a choke hold technique that cut off oxygen to a suspect’s carotid artery until he passed out.
Departments in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Dallas had also been using the hold in dangerous and violent situations, and had recorded one choke hold death each during the period
from 1975 to 1982. The LAPD, whose policy was to routinely use the hold, had racked up fifteen such deaths in the same time frame, causing such an uproar that the Police Commission finally forbade the choke hold’s use. The ban, as Curtis Woodle saw it, left officers with little option but to use their batons in other ways, a bad alternative, because a baton beating “looked so terrible, so crazy.” The King beating being a prime example. “Yet even that, years ago,
would have been okay, because it was done all the time,” thought Woodle. Now, however “people just weren’t willing to put up with that kind of stuff anymore.”

The cadet class Curtis Woodle had been teaching had just graduated that past Friday, and many had already been deployed into the riot zones. But not Woodle.

The afternoon before, after finishing work at about 3 p.m., Woodle was driving home in his burgundy four-door Coupe de Ville, when he tuned in to a local black talk-radio show. Blaring forth was an astounding, unbroken string of callers responding to the Simi Valley “not guilty” verdicts. They were ferocious in their reaction and sometimes tongue-tied
in their indignation. Woodle immediately understood that, unlike previous LAPD scandals, this one wasn’t simply going to blow over. In fact, the more he listened to the outrage of his fellow black Angelenos on his long drive home to the secluded, overwhelmingly white suburb of Walnut, the more he became convinced that the ramifications were going to be far worse than he’d ever imagined.

Back at his house, he’d waited for instructions from the department about what to do, where to report. But nobody called. Finally he fell asleep on his living room sofa, watching the scene at Florence and Normandie. At about 9 p.m. he awoke to the streets of L.A. going up in flames, shut off the TV, and went to bed.

Now, arriving back at the academy for his morning shift, he quickly realized neither he nor the rest of the training staff was on anybody’s radar screen, let alone detail roster, and that they weren’t going to be ordered to report anywhere. So they simply sat around for the rest of the day talking about the chaos that was exploding live on television while doing nothing about it. Periodically they’d break from their bull sessions to pass out shotguns and ammo to patrol cars coming in. That was their workday. At about two-thirty in the afternoon, Woodle clocked out and drove home, disgusted.

That Thursday evening, as the second day of the riots drew to a close, Woodle
watched on his TV screen as an L.A. County Sheriff’s Department bus pulled up to a grocery store that was being looted. About twenty deputies piled out and ordered fifty or sixty looters on the ground and then handcuffed them, arrested them, and loaded them onto the bus. The LAPD wasn’t doing that. The LAPD, as Woodle saw it, was sitting on its hands, and he—like the rest of the department—wasn’t doing any policing. That, he decided, at least for him, was going to change.

Alfred Lomas, Thursday, April 30, 1992, Florencia 13 Crack House

Thursday night, back at the dope house, Alfred Lomas
felt like he was at a swap meet, what with all the addicts bringing in their Payless shoes,
televisions, appliances, and every other kind of stolen good to trade or to sell for crack.

Lomas himself was a self-described “
fearsome dope fiend,” addicted not only to crack but also to alcohol and pills, so much so that blacking out had become a standard part of getting wasted. He’d begun smoking joints with his cousins when he was nine, and drinking not long afterward. He started getting arrested and serving time for shoplifting, commercial burglaries, assaults, and petty thefts. Nevertheless, in between stints in jail and prison, he still managed to function as a valued gang member. Born into a family of alcoholics and criminals, Lomas was a fourth-generation Mexican-American from San Antonio, Texas, who’d moved with his family into the Maravilla housing project in East Los Angeles in 1965, when he was one year old.

The
Maravilla Projects were to impoverished Mexicans what Jordan Downs was to blacks: a vast expanse of about five hundred apartment units ruled by some of L.A.’s most notorious gangs—Lopez Maravilla, Lota Maravilla, Arroyo Maravilla. Lomas’s mother found employment cleaning houses and supported the family, while his father, a serious alcoholic who came from a long line of hard drinkers, stayed drunk and didn’t work—which, says Lomas, “was considered just normal Maravilla behavior back then.”

Lomas, it turned out, also came from what would become a long line of murderers. One of his father’s brothers, as Lomas tells it, was convicted of murder in a fight in downtown L.A. in the late sixties; one of his cousins committed an execution-style murder at the age of fifteen; and three others ambushed and killed one of his uncles over a drug dispute.

In 1969, his family moved from the Maravilla Projects to the seedy, run-down sliver of Huntington Park where Mexicans were permitted to live. Located just one block away from South Central’s black ghetto, it too was saturated with gangs. No more than twenty feet from Lomas’s new Huntington Park home was a deadly gang clique—kids fifteen or sixteen who would grow first into gang heavy-hitters and then into California prison lifers, or corpses.

Lomas’s story from that point on was as standard as a slice of American apple
pie—an uncanny echo of the Irish gangs of New York in the nineteenth century and the Italian and Jewish gangs that followed in the early twentieth century and grew into the powerful organized-crime syndicates that flourished during and after Prohibition.

By the early 1980s, when Alfred Lomas was coming of age, Los Angeles’s Mexican street gangs were primed to move on from warring over territory, insults, and heroin distribution to dealing crack cocaine. They’d been part of the city’s landscape since at least the 1920s, and for young kids like Lomas their violent machismo culture offered status in a world in which they otherwise felt frightened, marginalized, and powerless. It was therefore nearly preordained that when some older gangsters in an apartment building next door invited him to join Florencia 13 at the age of thirteen, he jumped at the chance.

One of the largest and most notorious gangs in L.A., Florencia 13 had a reputation as a treacherous street-fighting organization dating back to the 1940s, and was far better organized than black gangs like the Grape Street Crips. Lomas thought then and still does now that it “
was an honor just to be a member.” Becoming part of some other, smaller local street gang, as Lomas later analogized it, would be like “getting an A in a class at a small community college,” whereas being a Florencia gangster was akin to “
earning a Harvard MBA with honors.”

Florencia was later labeled a “
super” or “regional” gang by the U.S. Justice Department. Its territory was huge, covering the entire east side of South Central Los Angeles and flowing into L.A. County. Its numbers would eventually grow to three or four thousand, but no one really knew the gang’s exact population—not the feds, not the local cops, not the academics, not even the gang members themselves. Like Jordan Downs and Watts, much of Florencia’s territory, unsurprisingly, was an epicenter of the riots.

Charlie Beck, Thursday, April 30, 1992, Los Angeles Coliseum

Thursday night Charlie Beck reported back to the operations center at the Los Angeles Coliseum for his second
twelve-hour midnight shift.
That morning, LAPD patrol cars had begun escorting fire trucks into riot areas. Yet they were still ignoring the looting. At the shopping center at Western Avenue and 17th Street, looting was brazenly, festively under way as two hook-and-ladder fire engines guarded by four LAPD police cars—each packed with five officers in riot gear—pulled into the parking lot. The twenty officers never got out of their patrol cars. The firefighters quickly looked around, saw no fires had been set, and pulled back out as the looting continued unabated.

Tom Bradley, Thursday, April 30, 1992, Los Angeles

After conferring with Mayor Bradley overnight, California governor Pete Wilson requested that President George H. W. Bush send
federal troops into Los Angeles. Soon
three thousand soldiers and fifteen hundred U.S. Marines began arriving. They would join the two thousand National Guard soldiers already deployed and three thousand more recently activated by Wilson. Dressed in full combat gear and hard-plastic face shields, and armed with M16s and other weapons, they rolled out to riot hotspots in armored personnel carriers. Many were accompanied by law enforcement agents from throughout California, as well as
one thousand FBI agents, U.S. Marshals, and border patrol agents from as far away as Texas.

Meanwhile, a nervous, almost trembling Rodney King was holding a press conference for about a hundred reporters outside his lawyer’s office in Beverly Hills. It was painful to behold. There stood Rodney King, emotionally spent and naked before the world, forcing himself to speak, and managing nevertheless to deliver what the
Los Angeles Times
would later correctly describe as “
a halting plea for peace that, in its rambling, elliptical, tragic quality, became one the most memorable moments in the Los Angeles Riots.” “Can we get along? ” King famously asked. “I mean, please, we can get along here. . . . We’ve just got to, just got to. We’re all stuck here for a while. . . . Let’s try to work it out. Let’s [just] try to work it out.”

In the end, it would take more than twenty thousand police and soldiers
enforcing a stringent dusk-to-dawn curfew that night to get it, if only temporarily, worked out, and finally finished by Friday’s end.

Andre Christian, Saturday, May 2, 1992, Jordan Downs

On Saturday morning, Andre Christian
pulled his car into Jordan Downs. For much of the city
it was cleanup time, an event recorded in the media with pictures of people sweeping up with brooms and shoveling debris into wheelbarrows, with a smiling Mayor Bradley looking on. But in Jordan Downs it was
self-congratulation time, party time.

Everyone from Watts and the surrounding area was joining together with the Grape for a gigantic block party. Bloods, Crips, the 8 Treys, and the Rolling 60s were all mingling together, drinking, laughing, and getting high. To Christian it was a strange scene. People who a week before would have killed each other had they met were now celebrating the destruction of their own neighborhoods. They reveled in the afterglow of closed stores, shut-off phone lines and electricity, suspended mail delivery, and broken telephone poles and trees, which had been used as fuel for raging fires that incinerated their local strip malls. Throughout Los Angeles, in fact, rioters just like them had caused the shutting down of schools, libraries, banks, courthouses, shopping malls, and train and bus service—the very services on which they and the rest of the city relied.

But as many of the people of Jordan Downs and much of black L.A. saw it, it was more than worth the cost. They’d finally fought back against a racist, stacked-deck system brutally enforced by the LAPD. It was a great day, full of joy, full of satisfaction, full of promise. And now, thanks to the LAPD and that clueless Simi Valley jury that had inadvertently laid the groundwork, their gangs were in a position to become even more powerful.

Curtis Woodle, Saturday, May 2, 1992, Florence and Normandie

The festivities in Jordan Downs were just heating up when Curtis Woodle wheeled his black-and-white
through the intersection of Florence and Normandie—the very spot where it had all started—and came to an abrupt stop. With him in the patrol car were three California state prison guards, part of the contingent of sworn California peace officers brought in to help halt the riots.

Woodle hated
what he saw at the intersection. The city may have been beginning its cleanup, but the corner of Florence and Normandie was still a quasi–hot spot. A homeless guy, clearly intoxicated, with wild hair and filthy, ragged clothing, was directing traffic in the center of the intersection, wielding a shovel, as Woodle later related, like a conductor’s baton. On the corner, six or seven LAPD officers were standing around, watching.