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remembers De Los Reyes, that he could hear the air-conditioning system humming and smell the smoke from the burning kiosk outside.

Daryl Gates, Wednesday, April 29, 1992, Brentwood, California
    Just as the downtown protest crowd was exploding, sixty-five-year-old LAPD chief Daryl Francis Gates, looking trim and tan, had slipped out of a rear basement door of Parker Center and emerged into the building’s tumbledown parking lot. He was headed to a fund-raiser inBrentwood, a Beverly Hills–style west L.A. community of multimillion-dollar homes located far from the escalating riots.
    The event was to help defeat a forthcoming city charter ballotamendment to limit an LAPD chief’s lifetime tenure and make it easier to replace him—reforms that had specifically been recommended by the Christopher Commission the year before.
    It would say an enormous amount about Daryl Gates, a forty-three-year veteran of the LAPD, that he chose to attend the gathering rather than stay at the helm and direct his department at such a fraught moment in the history of Los Angeles.
    Nevertheless, his decision at least had the logic of self-preservation. Daryl Gates was in trouble. Following the King beating, the Christopher Commission had bluntlycalled on him to resign, as had Mayor Bradley, the Los Angeles Times , La Opinion , the Los Angeles Daily News , the local CBS television affiliate, then U.S. Senate Judiciary chair JosephBiden, three of L.A.’s most powerful U.S. congressmen, California senator Diane Feinstein, the UCLA Law School faculty, and Gates’s favorite columnist, George Will.
    Meanwhile, the Congressional Black Caucus; California’s African-American assembly speaker, Willie Brown; the NAACP; the Urban League; Jessie Jackson; and a coalition of black churches and ministries were all pressuring Mayor Bradley to encourage his police commissioners to at least suspend Gates while figuring out a way to permanently get rid of him—an action that even two years earlier would have been unthinkable.
    Ever since Bill Parker was named chief in 1950, L.A. mayors had come and gone, but its police chiefs had remained as long as they wished. “I don’t want to be mayor of Los Angeles,” Gates’s predecessor as chief, the bombastic Ed “Crazy Ed” Davis had once famously said. “I already have more power than the mayor.”
    But now, with the fallout from the King beating and a riot gathering steam, Gates could sense that power slipping away. This Christopher Commission charter-amendment proposal was the first step in that process. Heading to Brentwood, Gates rightly understood that he was in the fight of his professional life.
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    Daryl Gates’s tumultuous reign as chief had begun in 1978, when Los Angeles was still deep in the throes of a second remarkable demographic and generational shift that would utterly transform the social and political architecture of the city, along with its ethnic and racial composition, size, culture, and sophistication.
    The first had begun with a trickle in the 1920s and ’30s, before exploding during and after World War II, when hundreds of thousands of migrating black, Jewish, and various other white Americans joined the relatively small numbers of Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican minorities already in Los Angeles. Together, they would form the backbone of the coalition that would elect Tom Bradley as L.A.’s Democratic mayor.
    Unfortunately for L.A.’s African-Americans, just as they were seeing a black man in charge in city hall, their fortunes in other ways werefast declining as America’s corporate titans began shutting down their unionized factories with their well-paying jobs in the 1960s. By the mid-eighties they’d completed their task, setting up their production facilities in the sweatshops of Mexico and South Asia, and sending black unemployment soaring as the Bloods and Crips were birthed and the city’s crack wars ignited.
    Meanwhile, a second extraordinary new wave of