After reading a slew of news stories last week marking the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King incident, out of curiosity I began hauled out the Christopher Commission report and began leafing through its 297 pages.
I’d forgotten how blunt and clear-headed the report was. Reading it, reminded me that I’d attended some of the hearings the commission held in the Spring of ’91 in order to gather information for the report, and knew several of the east side community members who testified. What was striking then, and still is striking now all these years later, is the seriousness and gravity with which Christopher and his committee members regarded the opinions and experiences of the ordinary people who testified.
All this, in turn, got me to thinking about how much things have changed at the Los Angeles Police Department in the past two decades. There are still problems, sure. But, under the last two chiefs in particular—Bratton and now Beck— the cultural transformation thus far has been, in so many ways, remarkable.
The report also reminded me that there are things in certain pockets of Los Angeles law enforcement that have yet to make some of the most fundamental changes that are needed.
I’m thinking specifically of the LA County jail system. In reading the report, now, its conclusions sound eerily like what the ACLU and other say about Men’s Central Jail and the Twin Towers facility—with little effect.
I’ll explain more about that in a minute, but first let’s revisit the context in which the Christopher Commission was formed.
RODNEY KING AND THE AFTERMATH
On March 3, 1991, twenty years ago last Thursday, drunken motorist Rodney King led LAPD officers on a high speed chase before finally being apprehended. During the course of the arrest, four officers struck King more than 50 times with their batons and shocked him with an electric stun gun. When the officers finished and King was taken into custody—and then to the hospital—three surgeons operated for five hours to begin to repair the damage done by the officers’ blows.
In the eyes of some, the incident was not an unusual one, but mirrored the kind of use of force that residents of LA’s lower income minority communities had been complaining about in increasing numbers for years prior to Rodney King. But the complaints fell on unreceptive ears inside the Los Angeles Police Department, whose command staff simply denied such things were happening.
For example, in January of 1991, in the Pico Aliso Housing Projects of Boyle Heights, where I was then reporting, a group of more than 100 community mothers demanded and finally got a public meeting with the captain of Hollenbeck division of the LAPD, where they told the captain and his upper division officers about the brutality their community was experiencing from certain patrol officers, pleading with him to institute a more lawful policy. The Captain, whose name was Medina, listened with a stony expression. But nothing changed.
Then three months, the Rodney King incident occurred, albeit with a difference.
A local man named George Holliday was jolted from sleep by the commotion followed by the sounds of police sirens outside his apartment in the Lake View Terrace section of Los Angeles. Holliday grabbed his Sony Handycam, stepped out on his balcony, saw the officers and the man on the ground, focused his camera the best he could—and started rolling.
In the week that followed, from the 12-minute grainy video ran repeatedly on every news station in the nation.
And everything changed.
“See, that’s what we were talking about,” members of minority communities all over Los Angeles said to anyone who would listen.
In April of 1991, Mayor Tom Bradley—who had been hearing the community complaints for years but got no traction on the matter with then LAPD chief, Darryl Gates—appointed the Christopher Commission, headed by Warren Christopher (who would later be come Bill Clinton’s Secretary of state), to investigate police department practices and then to make recommendations.
The Christopher Commission report—formally known as Report by the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department—was published in July of 1991.
Here’s a brief excerpt to give you some of the flavor of the thing:
This is a blunt report. We have received impressive cooperation from the LAPD as well as other agencies in the Los Angeles and national law enforcement communities. We seek to respond to this cooperation by being
plainspoken.The Commission found that there is a significant number of officers in the
LAPD who repetitively use excessive force against the public and persistently ignore the written guidelines of the Department regarding force. This finding is documented and confirmed, from several perspectives, by the detailed analyses of documents and statistics performed by the Commission. Our computerized study of the complaints filed in recent years shows a strong
concentration of allegations against a problem group of officers. A comparable study of the use of force reports reveals a similar concentration. Graphic confirmation of improper attitudes and practices is provided by the brazen and extensive references to beatings and other excessive uses of force in the MDTs.The Commission also found that the problem of excessive force is aggravated by racism and bias, again strikingly revealed in the MDTs.
The failure to control these officers is a management issue that is at the heart of the problem. The documents and data that we have analyzed have all been available to the Department; indeed, most of this information came from that source. The LAPD’s failure to analyze and act upon these revealing data evidences a significant breakdown in the management and leadership of the Department. The Police Commission, lacking investigators or other resources, failed in its duty to monitor the Department in this sensitive use of force area. The Department not only failed to deal with the problem group of officers but it often rewarded them with positive evaluations and promotion….
WHAT ABOUT THE JAILS?
In reading those words and more in the report, I see—as we all do—how much the Los Angeles Police Department has changed.
But do those same words—once true of our police department—now apply to our county’s jails? In May of 2010 the Southern California ACLU released a 64-page report charging that Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail was fostering what they described as a “culture of violence and fear,” in which certain guards routinely beat and otherwise physically abused prisoners— sometimes to the point of severe injury. If inmates tried to report the mistreatment, said the ACLU report, those same deputies threatened them with physical harm.
Plus there are years and years of anecdotal reports by prisoners and their families.
But there are no videos. No independent witnesses.
At least until now, when ACLU jails monitor Esther Lim witnessed an (alleged) beating.
In an ideal world, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department would call for a Christopher-like commission to look at what is going on inside Men’s Central Jail and the Twin Towers—and the whole system, really—and then to make recommendations.
Of course the real change at the LAPD didn’t occur until the Rampart scandal blew up, followed by the institution of the federal consent decree.
But Warren Christopher and his commission got the ball rolling.
Now it’s the LA County jails that need some comparable changes.