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Rodney King had gotten what he deserved. Of course, if you dwelt in a blue cocoon of cops in lily-white suburban enclaves like Simi Valley, how could you relate to the outrage others would feel at a “not guilty” verdict? Or as Police Commission president Stanley Sheinbaum put it, “I don’t think [Daryl Gates] understood the ramifications of acquittals, because he was so sympathetic to acquittals.”
    But it also had to do with how Parker’s legacy and Gates’s beliefs filtered down, operationally, on the street and at Parker Center. “The people who get promoted [within the LAPD] don’t have differing points of view,” Thomas Windham, Daryl Gates’s former chief of staff, once pointed out. “The department is very slow to change, and rank structure from top to bottom thinks along the same lines, no matter what the situation might be.” Or as former Police Commission president Stephen Reinhardt summed it up: in the LAPD “you can’t bring in new people and get a cross-fertilization. Everyone is trained by the last generation [and]a certain bunker mentality has resulted.”

Charlie Beck, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, Parker Center
    Charlie Beck finallyarrived back at Parker Center sometime in the early evening. Stopping first at his locker, he changed into his LAPD blues and then went upstairs to try to figure out what to do next.
    Much had happened since he’d left police headquarters that afternoon. A small crowd of demonstrators had morphed into a large enraged mob—many of them white, including contingents from the Progressive Labor and the Revolutionary Communist Parties. They’d massed in the heart of the city’s downtownCivic Center, a four- or five-block expanse that was home to both the midcentury Bauhaus box that was Parker Center and the Los Angeles Times ’s cement mausoleum of a headquarters. Across the street stood the majestic neoclassical city hall, and a short block away were Los Angeles’s principal Superior Court and District Attorney’s Office and various other criminal justice edifices.
    Soon, about three hundred of the protesters peeled away and strode down the Civic Center’s streets, chanting “No justice, no peace,” throwing rocks, rolling over and setting fire to an LAPD patrol car, demolishing a Rolls-Royce, and torching small, cheap coffee shops and taco stands. Nearby, they smashed display windows, looted a bridal shop and a Radio Shack, and shattered every ground-floor window of the Times ’s city-block-square building.
    Others remained atParker Center, facing off against a disciplined, stone-faced line of LAPD officers in riot gear, members of the department’s fearsome Metro Division—known as “the shake and bake boys” for their attacks on protesters for the slightest provocation.
    But not that evening. Demonstrators hurled eggs, bottles, and aluminum cans at the officers, who impassively held their positions as they were hit by the projectiles. Protesters screamed in their faces, and a kiosk in front of the entrance to Parker Center was set ablaze. One enraged young African-American mockingly denigrated a black cop in front of an LA Weekly reporter. “You should be out here with us throwing stones,” he told the officer. “You can’t hide your color behind that uniform. You take that off and you’re just another nigger to the LAPD.”
    Then an American flag was stomped on and burned, and as dusksettled in, protesters began heaving rocks through the windows above Parker Center’s entrance doors.
    Meanwhile, police commissioners Anthony De Los Reyes and Ann Reiss-Lane were passing by in an unmarked police car just as the kiosk outside Parker Center was going up in smoke. Deciding to play it safe, they headed to the mayor’s city hall office across the street. “It was,” recalls De Los Reyes, “the most sobering, somber experience I can ever remember.” Sitting there with Mayor Bradley, Lane, and a couple of other people, the silence was so complete,