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created one of the longest-lived genres in television programming, the L.A. police drama, which has included, at various times,
The Mod Squad
,
Adam 12
,
Felony Squad
,
Blue Thunder
,
S.W.A.T.
,
Strike Force
,
Chopper One
,
The Rookies
,
Hunter
, and
T. J. Hooker
. As Joe Domanick wrote, “For twenty-five consecutive seasons at least one LAPD police show was being aired on network television.” They portrayed the LAPD in a manner that made Bill Parker proud.
    Parker and his wife never had children, and the chief remained aloof from most of his colleagues on the force. He did, however, take a special shine to the young officer who was assigned to be his personal chauffeur—Daryl Gates. Together the two men refined a theory of “proactive policing,” which featured relentless confrontations between heavily armed officers and the hostile populations they patrolled. Parker and Gates came of age in an era when white cops didn’t have to rein in their feelings about African-Americans. When Watts exploded in 1965—a rebellion set off by a confrontation between a black motorist and a uniformed officer of the California Highway Patrol—Parker compared the black rioters to “monkeys in a zoo.” A year later, a black man named Leonard Deadwyler was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital when he was stopped by police for speeding. In the ensuing confrontation, the unarmed Deadwyler was shot dead. “Police are not supposed to stand by and watch a car speeding down the street at eighty miles per hour,” Parker explained. “[The officer] did something he thought would successfully conclude a police action. All he is guilty of is trying to do his job.”
    True to the intent of the civil-service law, Parker served until he died, and Gates took over as chief in 1978. The selection process that led to Gates’s appointment seemed designed as a direct affront to the city’s black community: To head the internal review ofcandidates for the job, the LAPD brought in Curtis LeMay, the far-right-wing former air force general who had served as George Wallace’s running mate in 1968 and earlier had promised to bomb North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.”
    After Gates took over, the list of black victims of the LAPD grew ever longer. In 1979 Eulia Love, a thirty-nine-year-old black widow who was late in paying her gas bill, hit a meter reader on the arm with a garden shovel. The utility man summoned police officers, who, rather than defuse the situation, shot Love dead at pointblank range. In 1982, after a number of African-American men died from police choke holds, Gates observed that the deaths might have been caused by the distinctive physiology of the black victims: “We may be finding that in some blacks when [the choke hold] is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.” It mattered little that Los Angeles had had a black mayor, Tom Bradley, since 1973. The LAPD answered to no one.
    A raid on a suspected narcotics operation in August 1988 may have been the paradigmatic LAPD operation. About eighty police officers (and one helicopter) swooped in on four apartments in two small buildings at Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue, on the periphery of the South Central district. The officers, armed with shotguns and sledgehammers, barreled through the rooms. They tore plumbing out of the walls, ripped a stairway from its moorings, pulled carpet from the floor, destroyed furniture and appliances, and kicked and punched the stunned residents. For all the terror it unleashed, the raid netted only two minor drug arrests. Nevertheless, the officers on the scene did find reasons to take thirty-two residents of the complex back to the local precinct, where the captives were forced to whistle the theme song from the 1960s situation comedy
The Andy Griffith Show
. Before they left the Dalton homes, some officers had spray-painted the words LAPD RULES on the walls.
    Less than three years later, a