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

Chinatown, were being exploited by their own communities, and failed to report shakedowns and other crimes because they mistrusted the police.
    For all of these reasons, Mike Yamaki took his job as one of just five civilian police commissioners very seriously. And as he stepped out of his police vehicle and onto the grounds of the makeshift command center, he, like Charlie Beck, was immediately struck by the chaos of shouting men and idling vehicle engines around him.
    One conversation in particular caught his attention: a discussion among ranking LAPD officers about whether they should call the Los Angeles County sheriff for help. They wanted to ask the sheriff—who, in L.A. County, was the only law enforcement agent who could officially request outside assistance—to call in the California National Guard. In the end they decided not to. Because, as Yamaki later put it, “nobody in the LAPD wanted to have to kiss ass to anyone in the Sheriff’s Department.”
    Finally, officers from other local police agencies did start arriving, but nobody knew what to do with them, and they didn’t know where to go or even where they’d be housed. So, astoundingly, Yamaki—a defense attorney by trade, and a part-time, unpaid, civilian police commissioner working at Parker Center just one morning a week—agreed to make on-the-spotphone calls to local hotels requesting they house and feed the out-of-town cops.
    Meanwhile, Charlie Beck and his fellow sergeants continued standing around, leaders without troops, while lieutenants without personnel lists were trying to get some names down on paper. Beck had expected to see four-man squad cars going out with designated missions. Instead, nobody appeared to have a clue about how to even get officers out on the streets. Beck, a second-generation son of the LAPD, had never thought he’d beashamed of being a Los Angeles police officer. But that night he was.

Andre Christian, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, Riverside County; Jordan Downs Housing Project, Watts
    Switching on his television, Andre “Low Down” Christiansat down to catch some news of the acquittals. But his phone began ringing so incessantly that he found it impossible to focus.
    For Christian and his friends from back in Watts, the announcement of the acquittals was “the biggest let-down ever.” A veteran member of the Grape Street Crips, Christian, like Alfred Lomas, had firsthand experience of how the cops operated in Los Angeles. He had seen police beatings—and not just from the LAPD. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was bad too. Once he’d even gotten choked out just because he’d called a deputy “man” instead of “sir.” But the Rodney King beating—he’d never seen any police beating as bad as that. So when he received calls asking him to come into the city to do something about the injustice of those cops going free, he agreed.
    Hopping into his ’82 rust-colored Cadillac Coupe de Ville, Andre Christian took just over an hour to drive from his Riverside County home east of Los Angeles straight into Watts and the Jordan Downs housing project where he’d grown up.
    Christian had moved from Jordan Downs to Riverside County two years earlier, in 1990, when he was twenty-two. He’d always liked watching the local news, and one day he’d seen those big San Bernardino Mountains out east and thought them the perfect place to get away from the violence he’d been involved in since junior high school. His intent, Christian would later recall, was to get a job good enough to pay for rent, gas, food, and taking care of his baby-mama, who wasn’t working. But that didn’t happen, so he’d quickly fallen back on his second option.
    By 1990, the drug market in Watts and Jordan Downs was oversaturated with small and midlevel dealers fighting over too little business. But outside Watts, as Andre Christian saw it, lay opportunity, “all that open land that nobody was fighting over,” and the chance to