The Limits of Community Policing

Civilian Power and Police Accountability in Black and Brown Los Angeles

Luis Daniel Gascón, Aaron Roussell

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479807567
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

A critical look at the realities of community policing in South Los Angeles

The Limits of Community Policing addresses conflicts between police and communities. Luis Daniel Gascón and Aaron Roussell depart from traditional conceptions, arguing that community policing—popularized for decades as a racial panacea—is not the solution it seems to be.

Tracing this policy back to its origins, they focus on the Los Angeles Police Department, which first introduced community policing after the high-profile Rodney King riots. Drawing on over sixty interviews with officers, residents, and stakeholders in South LA’s “Lakeside” precinct, they show how police tactics amplified—rather than resolved—racial tensions, complicating partnership efforts, crime response and prevention, and accountability.

Gascón and Roussell shine a new light on the residents of this neighborhood to address the enduring—and frequently explosive—conflicts between police and communities. At a time when these issues have taken center stage, this volume offers a critical understanding of how community policing really works.

1

Roots, Rebellion, and Reform

Building trust and nurturing legitimacy on both sides of the police/citizen divide is the foundational principle underlying the nature of relations between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.… Law enforcement cannot build community trust if it is seen as an occupying force coming in from outside to impose control on the community.

—President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2015)

After the 2014 uprisings died down in Ferguson, Missouri, President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing identified what it considered to be the source of the problem: mutual distrust between police and civilians.1 Investigators from the US Department of Justice (2015) concluded the same. DOJ presented evidence that both police and city agencies had for years been systemically targeting Blacks in the poorest neighborhoods of Ferguson with increased police contact and court-imposed financial penalties for minor offenses. Such treatment, found throughout the suburbs and East St. Louis, effectively locked much of the Black community into a cycle of poverty and imprisonment. Young Black men like Michael Brown saw police as an “outside force” that both feared them and used them to extract scant resources, while police saw young men like Brown simply as criminals (Balko 2014). While DOJ investigated Ferguson, there were similar cases in large cities across the United States; Clevelanders shouted the name of Tamir Rice, New Yorkers rose for Eric Garner, and the people of Waller County stood up for Sandra Bland. Reactions coalesced into the Black Lives Matter movement, which identified the staggering numbers of Blacks killed by police; simultaneously, police and conservative commentators produced increasingly negative reactions to such public pressure. All of this attested to a widespread and deeply rooted mutual distrust (Taylor 2016).

Closely examining three of LA’s biggest violent disturbances—the 1943 Government Riot (popularly known as the Zoot Suit Riots), the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and the 1992 Rodney King Uprisings—reveals that government appeals to mutual trust and collaboration are among the most common post-disturbance police reforms. Each civil disturbance in LA motivated the creation of a state-organized commission to spearhead reforms that sought to rebuild the public’s confidence in the police. Building on Vitale’s (2017) examination of liberal police reforms in the United States, we look back at each commission report to understand the nature of their recommendations with respect to enhanced training, workforce diversity, and improved public accountability and community relations. From one commission to the next, report authors recommended that LAPD integrate additional training measures, such as cultural sensitivity or Spanish-language skills; they recommended the Department hire more officers of color; they recommended greater oversight by local government, greater sensitivity to the needs of communities of color, and the introduction of collaborative, non-enforcement-based strategies to reduce crime in strained areas of the city. Although the United States is well into the “community policing era,” it would seem that each of these landmark events in LA’s history produced a similar series of police and legal reforms that quieted public resentment. Subsequent uprisings, however, call their effectiveness into question.

To contextualize these reports, we look back at the preconditions of each disturbance and how these shaped LAPD’s post-disturbance reform agenda. Collective violence in LA repeatedly involved young men of color whom police and the press perceived as violent and dangerous criminals. From the 1960s onward, Black and Latin@ rage at structural conditions took the place of White hatred in motivating civil disturbances in LA (Abu-Lughod 2007; Valle and Torres 2000). Successive waves of new migration further destabilized LA’s social and racial order. Periods of economic growth lured new migrants to the city with the promise of greater opportunities, but these promises were seldom realized. LA made few accommodations for the rapidly expanding population, and subsequent economic downturns plunged many newcomers back into poverty. LAPD was intimately involved in such urban governance efforts, repeatedly organizing specialized units to criminalize priority enforcement targets as the public image of the criminal evolved from subversive labor union organizer to dangerous and drug-selling gang member—usually a young man of color (Abu-Lughod 2007).

LA’s history of violent disturbances reveals that community governance discourse is a public confidence-building project. The rhetoric each time of rebuilding strained relationships between police and communities of color was a misstatement of the problem—there is no period of tranquility and harmony to which relations can return. Prior to 1992, post-disturbance reforms could not reorient police priorities or make police more responsible to the most heavily policed communities because the relationship between communities of color and the state remained (and remains) one of oppression and exploitation. To maintain and reinforce this dynamic without invoking violent resistance, LAPD officials in the wake of each of these disturbances found just cause to strengthen and expand their policing capacity. As the twentieth century wore on, LAPD became a leader in militarized domestic police operations, even after officially adopting community governance strategies. Police created inroads into poor Black and Brown communities and became more thoroughly integrated into community life, facilitating the criminalization of those groups in the process (Murakawa 2014; J. Simon 2007).

Government Riot

Early in June 1943, ten drunken Navy servicemen stumbled, beaten, back to Chavez Ravine where they were stationed. A naval commander at the time claimed that several “pachucos,” an umbrella term for those perceived to be Mexican American gang members, blindsided his men in an alley. Later, naval commanders discovered that another group of White servicemen and civilians were the real culprits (Escobar 1999). Angered by the incident, other Navy servicemen took matters into their own hands and set off what would later be called the Zoot Suit Riots. Mirandé (1987), however, recognizing that this blames the victims of the violence, refers to it as a “government riot.” Between June 3 and 10, more than two hundred Navy servicemen and off-duty police officers conspired to commit acts of vigilante violence. They descended into Mexican barrios in a fleet of rented taxis and pulled young Chican@s from bars, restaurants, theaters, and dance halls, exacting their revenge. After harassing and beating young Chican@s, they ritually stripped them of their zoot suits and left them bloodied in the street. Police sanctioned these attacks. While some participated in the violence directly, most on-duty police purposely arrived late to the scenes, ultimately arresting six hundred Chican@ (and some Black) victims on suspicion of robbery and assault. Taking their cue from police, newspapers also blamed the victims for the violence and claimed this incident was proof of a Mexican “crime wave” (Escobar 1999).2

Henry “Hank” Leyvas, a Mexican American teenager from East LA, was at the center of the city’s growing anti-Mexican hysteria during World War II. A year prior to the outbreak of the Government Riot, “pachuco madness” caught fire. Police arrested Hank and seventeen other Mexican American teenagers for involvement in the homicide of Jose Diaz, a Chican@ teenager from another barrio. They dubbed the group the 38th Street Gang and fingered Hank as the leader. LA County Judge Charles C. Fricke charged the gang with murder and conspiracy (Mirandé 1987). Anti-Mexican attitudes among LA’s law enforcement community were laid bare throughout the trial. Police-Chican@ conflict was particularly intense given the rookie status of most line officers, who had been forced onto the streets when LAPD’s most experienced officers went off to war. Police, the larger White community, and LA’s media all believed the youngsters were guilty prior to the trial, with the latter circulating “zoot-suit gangster” and “pachuco killer” headlines (Escobar 1999).

The emergence of zoot-suit culture was a direct response to police brutality but also to the larger racism of White society embodied in the war effort. The zoot-suit style was seen as un-American. In 1942 the War Production Bureau imposed fabric rations and specifically forbade their manufacture and sale, so when White serviceman saw young men of color wearing zoot suits, they took grave exception. Whites and servicemen perceived young men of color as draft dodgers, purposely avoiding a “White man’s war,” which further justified their resentment (Kelley 1996). Zoot suits, car clubs, and street gangs became primary cultural expressions for marginalized, alienated, and oppressed youth of color.

Donning zoot suits was a cultural awakening for Chican@ Angelenos who increasingly saw themselves as “Mexican Americans.”3 Many were war veterans who rejected the labels of “foreigner” and “illegal alien,” and refused to accept the second-class citizenship and the conditions of Jim Crow LA (Escobar 1999). Emboldened by the antisegregation movement, which eventually led to such legal cases as Brown v. Board in 1954, zoot-suiters rejected a subservient role in society and embraced a subversive culture (Kelley 1996). The suit embodied their nonconformity and resistance (Kun and Pulido 2014). Their desire to integrate into public spaces made them vulnerable to White hatred and precipitated violent police encounters. Zoot-suiters soon began countering police aggression by mouthing off, resisting arrest, and fighting with officers (Escobar 1999).

The Brown Scare

White hatred toward Chican@s increased as the population grew between the two world wars. Just over fifty thousand in 1890, the Mexican population in LA jumped to over five hundred thousand within thirty years and grew by two million more when Mexican rural peasants migrated to the city, fleeing the violence and economic dislocation of the Mexican Revolution (Escobar 1999; Vigil 2002). Since the 1930s, the second largest Mexican population outside of Mexico City has resided in LA, and this remains true today. Whites at the time viewed all “foreigners” with intense suspicion, but particularly Mexicans, who were seen as German allies. White fears encompassed proximity to the border, the growing population, and the belief that socialist revolutionary rhetoric was spreading among Mexican Angelenos. Later, due to the heavy participation of Chican@s in the labor movement, the nationwide Red Scare merged with anti-Mexican sentiment to become the Brown Scare in LA (Escobar 1999).

LA’s White power structure had taken shape decades before when White industrialists, local police, and the local news media forged an alliance. Most White immigrants were foreign-born Europeans. The disappearance of adobe structures and replacement with Protestant churches in the aftermath of the Mexican-US War signaled a shift in LA’s racial order. In the 1920s the city’s economy became heavily dependent on manufacturing, which was concentrated along Central Avenue in South LA. City governors, trying to tempt new industrialists, labeled the city the “citadel of the open shop” and promised to maintain this antiunion reputation. Business associations formed to combat the growing labor union activity and sought help from the LAPD to ensure city officials fulfilled their promises. News accounts condemned Mexicans as drunk, volatile, and irresponsible and condemned labor unions as communist recruiters. They also called for organized vigilantism and the formation of a “safety committee” composed of business owners who would advise the chief of police on the handling of Mexican unionists (Escobar 1999).

Jim Crow laws restricted almost every aspect of Mexican social life and were resisted by the Mexican American community. Segregationist policies and White intimidation confined Mexicans to either “Sonoratown”—the city’s original town plaza—or the neighborhoods east of the LA River. But they also crowded around “company towns” in smaller pockets along Central Avenue, in Watts, and in the Harbor area. Living conditions in these barrios were among the worst in California. Neighborhoods were overcrowded. Houses were dirty, cramped, and dilapidated. Children suffered malnutrition and respiratory problems. White teachers prohibited Chican@ students from speaking Spanish in schools and “tracked” them into remedial classes purportedly due to their lesser abilities (Vigil 2002). Discriminatory hiring practices restricted Mexican employment. Mexicans were significantly underemployed and unemployed when compared to other racial groups. Openings tended to be for work that Whites refused: seasonal, menial, and low wage. Homelessness and hunger meant that many Mexicans depended upon government food trucks for sustenance during the Great Depression (Escobar 1999).

Mexican labor leaders fought back against their economic and racial oppression and developed a sophisticated radical movement that integrated churches, mutual aid organizations, businesses, and neighborhood associations (Vigil 2002). Civil rights groups joined in the struggle against discriminatory and exploitative labor practices. When these groups organized strikes, there were few victories due to the relationship between police and local industrialists. Civil rights groups charged the LAPD with being anti-Mexican and practicing acts of misconduct and abuse, ranging from the use of racial slurs to sexually harassing and groping women and arbitrary field searches and brutality. Mexicans distrusted police and saw them, accurately, as the violent enforcers of Jim Crow segregation (Escobar 1999).

Judge Fricke and the Red Squad

The prosecution of Hank Leyvas and the other youth of the so-called 38th Street Gang in 1942 was known as the Sleepy Lagoon Trial. Steeped in controversy, the trial exposed systemic anti-Mexican racism. Judge Fricke was widely known as both anti-Mexican and a proponent of law and order. He refused to allow defendants to change out of their clothes or to confer with their defense attorney throughout the trail. Defendants wore their zoot suits—by the time they got to court, their clothes were dirty, scuffed, and bloody, after the violence meted out on the streets and the LAPD beatings administered during their interrogations (Escobar 1999). Prosecutors argued that the defendants’ distinctive clothing was important evidence in this case, while critics pointed to this as an attempt to bias the jury. Police testimony revealed the extent of their anti-Mexican beliefs as well: police viewed Mexicans as poor, lazy, and immoral troublemakers, whose violence was rooted in their “Aztec heritage” (Mirandé 1987). The courts accepted these views and convicted the group. In 1944, while Leyvas and others were serving prison sentences in San Quentin, California’s Second District Appeals Court overturned all seventeen convictions due to a lack of evidence and charged Judge Fricke with “severe misconduct” (Escobar 1999).

In the years leading up to the Sleepy Lagoon Trial, LA’s Chiefs of Police cycled in and out, forced to resign mainly as a result of corruption and brutality scandals that reflected the pervasive violence of White racism in law enforcement. In 1923, for example, city officials discovered that LAPD’s Chief was an active Ku Klux Klan (KKK) member, which came to light only because several other officers and Klansmen had been killed while conducting an unsanctioned vice raid (Sides 2003). Police also worked directly with business owners to maintain union-free “open shops” for unrestricted labor exploitation, practices resisted by unions (K. Williams 2007). Another Chief accepted increased departmental funds from beet growers in exchange for breaking farmworker strikes—an institutional rather than personal quid pro quo (Escobar 1999). The creation of LAPD, meant to curb the violent vigilantism of the LA Rangers police-militia in the post–Mexican-US War era, in some ways institutionalized and amplified the danger posed to non-Whites and the working class.4

Reflecting national trends in police expansion, LAPD began developing specialized police units specifically to counter Mexican radicalism (Escobar 1999; Sides 2003; K. Williams 2007). Buoyed by federal anticommunist laws, LAPD’s Red Squad worked to quell radicalism after union organizers, frustrated by the LA business community’s ruthless antiunionism, bombed the LA Times building in 1910. The Red Squad disrupted union activity through surveillance, investigation, and arrest, as well as espionage, sabotage, strike breaking, intimidation, harassment, physical violence, and their own bombings. LAPD imposed a gun and liquor embargo on Mexicans and, in its first efforts at diversity, set up a “special police force” mainly composed of Mexican officers to infiltrate, surveil, and suppress criminal and radical activity in Sonoratown. City officials also enacted “sumptuary laws” to reduce vice, targeting Mexicans disproportionately for alcohol consumption, prostitution, and gambling, producing further racial exclusion (Escobar 1999). Police also performed dragnet operations, wherein hundreds of officers would walk block by block arresting “suspicious characters” for minor offenses (Domanick 2016). Several “riots” erupted after the Red Squad responded to labor disputes with force (Escobar 1999).5

Other government agencies enhanced their exclusion of the Mexican population in the early 1930s. The Great Depression prompted the federal government to create general relief programs, but racial preferences in many programs resulted in what Katznelson (2006) refers to as “welfare for Whites.” In rhetoric recognizable today, Anglos saw Mexican migrants as scapegoats, perceiving them as economic competitors and an overall drain on the US economy (Balderrama and Rodriguez 2006). California state law expanded its efforts to prohibit companies from hiring “foreign” and “alien” workers in an effort to stem White unemployment while at the same time...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Roots, Rebellion, and Reform
• 2. The Making of Lakeside
• 3. Organizing the Division
• 4. Complaint Encounters
• 5. No Place for the Mom-and-Pops
• 6. The Politics of Partnership
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Methodological Appendix: On Police and Partner Ethnography
• Participant Appendix: Who’s Who in the Text
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Authors