Free Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick Page A

Neighborhood Safety,” created an atmosphere of fear and permissiveness that led to more serious crimes. Therefore, cops needed to enforce laws prohibiting those actions as a way to modify behavioral norms in public spaces, in the same way that broken windows must be repaired or they’ll lead to a neighborhood’s gradual physical deterioration. Later, serious problems would emerge as a result of the rigid use of the tactic, and a powerful backlash would discredit the widespread, indiscriminate use of “stop-frisk” policing—another policy Bratton would implement in New York. But for the subways of New York in those pivotal initial years, those strategies were critical first steps in restoring a sense both of safety and of sanity in a crucial public space. At a time when crime was becoming America’s number one domestic obsession, Bratton proved on a national stage that smart, data-based policing could actually play a pivotal role in stemming crime and violence in big-city America. And in New York City circa 1992, that was a revelation.

Charlie Beck and Mike Yamaki, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, LAPD Command Post, South Los Angeles
    About forty minutes after leaving home,Charlie Beck pulled into the same crumbling Parker Center parking lot Daryl Gates had left an hour or so earlier. There, he mounted a bus with forty-nine other sergeants and headed to a makeshift command center in the heart of South Central.
    Riding down Western Avenue, Beck looked out, stunned. On bothsides of the wide-laned thoroughfare, apartment buildings; beauty salons; mini-marts; liquor, discount, and clothing shops; and storefront churches were going up in crackling fires. A major Los Angeles thoroughfare was being set ablaze while Beck’s LAPD continued to be locked in an incomprehensible paralysis. Buildings were burning and stores were already trashed and looted along the other multi-mile boulevards and avenues that snaked and crisscrossed South Los Angeles. “For 10 miles between Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and Manchester Boulevard in south Los Angeles,” as the L.A. Times reported, a vast section of the city “had become aholocaust of fire-gutted buildings and shattered glass.”
    The command post where Beck and his fellow sergeants arrived was a commandeered Metropolitan Transit Authority bus yard, chaotically overflowing with growing numbers of police and fire trucks and vehicles. Several motor homes had also arrived, presumably to serve as a central dispatch station. But no cops had been dispatched.
    Los Angeles police commissioner Mike Yamaki was greeted by the same scene when he arrived. Command-level officers from both the police and the fire departments were present, but no one appeared to be in charge. Moreover, the LAPD’s communication system, as he would soon discover, was unable to transmit to the fire department, the highway patrol, or any other agency.
    A taut, streetwise forty-three-year-old Japanese-American, Yamaki had recently becomeL.A.’s first Asian-American police commissioner. Hisparents had spent the Second World War in an internment camp, easy targets for rounding up and imprisonment because they were members of just another unwelcome, politically powerless minority race subject to legal abuse in the white America of 1941. Yamaki’s father emerged from the camp determined to change what he could by becoming integrated into the American mainstream both in his job in theinsurance industry and in his active participation in Los Angeles’s Democratic Party politics. He passed on the lessons he took away from the camp to his son, who, in turn, became a well-known, highly respected defense attorney. For many years Yamaki had worked to get astubbornly resistant LAPD to hire more Asian-American officers to join the handful of ten already on the force. As Yamaki saw it,hiring more Asians was not only a matter of fairness, it was also a part of smart basic policing. A lot of Asian immigrants, especially in