Read Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing for Free Online Page B

immigration was erupting. Starting in the early 1970s and running well through the 1990s, abouteight hundred thousand immigrants from the developing world would pour into the city from Mexico and Central America above all, but from Thailand, Taiwan, Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Israel, and other parts of the Middle East as well.By 1990, 87 percent of Los Angeles City’s public school students were Latinos and/or other minorities.
    Desperately poor rural Mexicans moved into low-income and working class neighborhoods throughout the city, searching for jobs and scratching out a living doing L.A.’s service work.By the late eighties Latinos would comprise a rapidly accelerating 40 percent of the city’s population.
    Simultaneously, just west of downtown, the district known as Pico-Union began overflowing with tens of thousands of equally impoverished Salvadorans and Guatemalans crammed together in substandard pre–World War II apartment buildings. Farther west, in the historic Mid-Wilshire district, Koreans were also arriving in numbers so high that a large section of the area would later be officially christened “Koreatown.”
    Concurrently, a generational revolution was also hurtling forward, one that began in the mid-1960s. Initially it featured civil rights and antiwar marchers and skinny college students with radical hair throwing off the corseted social constraints imposed by aging white men with beer guts and buzz cuts. By the early 1990s those students were middle-aged and now part of a social revolution being spearheaded by a new generation of Latinos, blacks, women, gays, and political and social liberals demanding equal rights, opportunities, and the right to be free of police repression.
    At the same time, older white, conservative supporters of the LAPD were continuing to beat a rapid retreat from the city that had begun soon after the Watts riots.
    What emerged from the historic turmoil was a city where race and class tensions pervaded the atmosphere. The very rich were mostly walled off in hidden mansions, and much of the white middle class remained living in hyper-segregated neighborhoods. The brown, black, and immigrant working class and poor—who were becoming the bulk of the city’s ordinary people—were rarely seen by well-off, white L.A. unless they were cleaning houses, weeding gardens, working nonunion construction, driving buses, parking cars, stocking shelves in big-box factory stores, or cooking food and mopping floors in every restaurant in town.
    By the early nineties L.A. was still being billed, along with New York, as the capital of American style and glamour. But in reality, over the last two decades of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was a city awash in crisis, led by people without answers, and filled with residents suffering the consequences.
    Disastrously, no organization was less prepared or less willing to adjust to this transformation than was the LAPD and its leader, Daryl Gates.
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    Named chief in 1978, Daryl Gates entered office with a choice: to buck the headwinds of America’s social revolution, or to try to accommodate it. His decision was never in doubt.
    Theson of an alcoholic and absentee father,Gates was raised in abject poverty in Glendale—a small city adjacent to Los Angeles—during the 1930s and ’40s. It was a time when L.A., sans Hollywood, was still Peoria with Palms, still a city that billed itself as America’s pure “White Spot,” still a place where a mainstream mayoral candidate would proudly declare Los Angeles “the last stand of native-born Protestant Americans.”
    Though shaped by the legacy of that time and place, Daryl Gates would be required to police a new Los Angeles whose residents were demanding dramatic change in its institutions.
    First and foremost that included an LAPD that was so notoriously racist and homophobic that it would take a court-mandated federal consent decree to force the department to start hiring more than a