How the late-20th-century battles over race and policing in Los Angeles foreshadowed the Trump era.
Worth a thousand words: A still from the video of the 1992 police beating of Rodney King. The enforcer: LAPD chief Daryl Gates defended the department’s racist police regime until he was forced out in the wake of King’s beating.(Left: Los Angeles Herald Examiner Collection / Los Angeles Public Library)
This article is part of a special Nation package devoted to LA’s bold stand against the Trump administration’s assaults on the city.
On the afternoon of March 3, 1991, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates was at the White House, where President George H.W. Bush called him an “all-American hero.” That evening, in the Lake View Terrace section of LA, a plumber named George Holliday was awakened by the sound of a police helicopter flying over his apartment building. From his window, he saw several policemen surrounding a Black man. Holliday reached for his recently acquired camcorder and videotaped four Los Angeles Police Department officers as they beat the unarmed Rodney King, hitting him 56 times with metal batons and kicking him as he writhed on the ground in pain while 23 other cops looked on.
The fillings were knocked out of King’s teeth, and he sustained a crushed right eye socket, a broken cheekbone, 11 fractured bones at the base of his skull, and a shattered ankle. He was not charged with a crime. The night after the beating, an 82-second excerpt of Holliday’s video was broadcast on KTLA, a Los Angeles TV channel. CNN aired it the following morning, and over the next 24 hours it appeared on virtually every national TV news show. In the eyes of millions of viewers, Rodney King posed no plausible threat to the officers, and the ferocious beating had no legitimate law enforcement purpose. It was sadistic street justice, and few believed that a white man arrested under similar circumstances would have been treated the same way.
Despite dramatic changes in politics and technology since the 1990s, many of the psychological and political factors connected to the King beating and its aftermath are eerily relevant in the America of the 2020s. The intersection of race, politics, and policing is still a source of painful headlines. That decade’s struggle for democracy between a multiracial majority and a powerful conservative minority foreshadowed many of the struggles of the Donald Trump era.
Inexpensive home video technology was brand-new in 1991. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer was captured on a cell phone, Al Sharpton would refer to the grainy black-and-white images of the Rodney King beating as “the Jackie Robinson of police videos,” because it was the first time that a citizen’s recording of police brutality was broadcast to a national audience. The footage of King’s beating attained an iconic status almost immediately. Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X, which was released at the end of 1992, begins with a rendering of a speech Malcolm made in the 1960s over an excerpt from the King video.
That video was the culmination of a decade-ong battle between Daryl Gates and the local chapter of the ACLU and its allies, who blamed the chief for the culture and policies that led to the beating and many others like it that had not been captured on camera.
The 16-month effort to force Gates out of power was led by Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, one of the first Black mayors in the country and a former LAPD officer himself. Bradley and Gates had known and detested each other for 40 years. Bradley was a risk-averse political centrist, but after the King video surfaced, the mayor knew that his legacy depended on finally confronting Gates head-on. As part of his strategy, Bradley reached out to leaders on the left like Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) and the ACLU, while also recruiting allies from the LA business community.
At the time, I was the chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, a role that I had taken several years earlier at the suggestion of Stanley Sheinbaum. Stanley’s wife, Betty, had inherited a large part of the Warner Bros. fortune from her father, Harry Warner, and the couple deployed her inheritance on behalf of progressive causes and candidates. The Sheinbaums frequently hosted events at their home where politicians like Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Clinton mingled with journalists like I.F. Stone and Joan Didion and movie stars like Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier, Jane Fonda, and Warren Beatty.
I had a day job in the music business and was initially attracted to the ACLU because of its long-standing defense of free speech in the arts. Then Ramona Ripston, the legendary executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, explained to me that the group was involved with a wide array of social-justice issues and that one of its priorities was dealing with the police-brutality complaints lodged against the LAPD.
After the King video was broadcast, Gates attempted damage control by referring to the beating as an “aberration,” but the department’s detractors at the ACLU recognized that it was business as usual. The previous November, six LAPD officers had been called to arrest a 33-year-old Black man named Tracy Mayberry, who was accused of being a drug dealer. They beat him to death with the same type of batons that had been used on Rodney King, but the incident wasn’t videotaped, so there was no means to challenge the officers’ contention that they had done so in self-defense.
Neither Ripston nor I thought that most LAPD officers behaved like those that had beaten Mayberry or King. But there was a reason why none of the 23 officers who watched their colleagues pulverize a helpless Rodney King didn’t do anything to stop it. The department had a culture that strongly discouraged criticism of fellow officers, the so-called code of silence.
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In Walter Mosley’s novel Farewell, Amethystine, black private detective Easy Rawlins explained the syndrome: “The LAPD…was a cult…. [T]he greatest sin among them was turning a brother in blue over to the justice system.” Jesse Brewer had been the LAPD’s highest-ranking Black officer when he retired as assistant chief a few weeks before the Rodney King beating. Shortly after leaving the police force, Brewer lamented, “We know who the bad guys are in the department; we just don’t do anything about it.”
Maxine Waters joined the US House of Representatives two months before the King beating. She had confronted Daryl Gates 12 years earlier as a member of the California State Assembly. Her district included South Central Los Angeles, where a 39-year-old Black woman named Eula Love had been shot to death by LAPD officers in front of her two children. The cops claimed self-defense, a characterization that Waters angrily disputed, since Love was 5-foot-4 and weighed 175 pounds. The police were at her home because she had yelled at employees of the local electric company when they tried to collect on an unpaid bill for $22.09. She was “armed” with a kitchen knife, which she ineffectually tossed at the two officers, missing them by a wide margin and causing no injury, not even a scratch. She was killed by 12 police bullets.
Waters and 169 Black members of the clergy in Southern California accused the LAPD of “brutality and racism.” However, there wasn’t any video of the Eula Love killing, and Gates attacked the community group for “a public lynching of the LAPD.” The chief determined that the shooting was self-defense, and he declined to discipline the officers. Waters called on Gates to resign, the first of many times she would do so.
Gates’s most notorious public moment occurred in 1982, after it was revealed that in the preceding seven years 80 percent of the men killed by LAPD choke holds were Black, even though African Americans made up just 18 percent of the city’s population. (Fifteen men were killed by LAPD choke holds during those seven years. Police departments in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Dallas each reported only a single such death over the same period.) Asked by the Los Angeles Times if there was systematic racism in his department, the chief indignantly denied it and told the reporter, “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.”
After the uproar triggered by the outrageous remark, the Los Angeles City Council and the Police Commission voted to ban police choke holds. In every other respect, though, the chief’s power was undiminished, and as charges of racist policing continued to accumulate, Gates was unrepentant. After the Rodney King beating, he said that if the choke hold hadn’t been banned, the officers on the scene could have used it in lieu of pounding King with batons and he would have been better off (assuming he survived).
Serious as the choke hold was to the families and friends of men who were killed by it, the “normal people” comment touched a deeper set of cultural and moral nerve endings. Once there is a category of people who are defined as not “normal,” there is no need to view them as fully human or to abide by moral codes that apply to the treatment of “normal” people. That characterization of Black people coming from a powerful government official with thousands of armed officers at his command left deep emotional scars.
After the video of George Floyd’s murder was broadcast in 2020, Maxine Waters said that the incident reminded her of Gates’s comment. “He was saying that we die when ‘normal people’ wouldn’t be dead. He was differentiating ‘Black people’ from ‘normal people.’ That has stuck with me for a very long time.”
Daryl Gates’s public image was animated by a toxic combination of racism and charisma, a persona that Trump would revive on a national level decades later. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who has written extensively about Trump, reported on the LAPD for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s. He told me, “I was fortunate that by the time I met Trump, I had already covered Daryl Gates. They were both megalomaniacs and prone to disregard facts. They both insisted that if they said something, that made it so.”
Gates and Trump were demagogues and bullies and vehicles for white grievance, and they both intimidated politicians who should have known better. Decades before Trump ran for office, Gates demonized the news media and coined nicknames for his adversaries. Gates used illegally gathered intelligence to pressure local officeholders. Trump used social media to threaten his critics. Gates told his troops that attacks on him were really “attacks on all 8,300 LAPD officers.” Trump told his devotees, “When they attack me, they are really attacking you.” Both claimed to be victims rather than oppressors, both clung to power like their life depended on it, and neither man ever made a genuine public apology.
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To help him dismantle the political and institutional fortress that had long protected Daryl Gates, Mayor Bradley assembled a unique coalition that included future secretary of state Warren Christopher, local journalists who felt that the reputation of their city was at stake, the “liberal Hollywood” community that I was a part of, local rappers like the members of N.W.A (Gates was name-checked in more than a dozen hip-hop lyrics), community activists who saw the struggle as an essential chapter in America’s long-delayed march to racial justice, and Southern California millionaires who had come to see Gates as bad for business. Bradley’s coalition also included Stanley Sheinbaum, who was appointed to the Los Angeles Police Commission shortly after the King beating.
Willie L. Williams replaced Gates as LAPD chief in 1992, and the LA City Charter was amended to make the department more accountable to the rest of city government. Those changes would not dissipate the effects of decades of racist public policy in Los Angeles. Nor did they fix the inequities that fueled the riot that exploded in Los Angeles that same year, after the officers charged with King’s beating were acquitted by a jury with no Black members in the suburb of Simi Valley. But getting Gates to retire was a vital step in the right direction, and it wasn’t easy. Gates benefited from a fear of crime, exacerbated by the crack epidemic and gang warfare. He also held on to power thanks to an elite unit of LAPD officers whose sole job was to gather personal dirt on local politicians.
Still, after a 16-month struggle, Bradley was able to win a rare victory on issues connected to law enforcement and race by forging a center-left coalition that focused on a specific, tangible agenda. That’s a strategy that current Democratic Party leaders would do well to emulate.
Danny GoldbergDanny Goldberg is a former music industry excecutive and the author of Liberals With Attitude: The Rodney King Beating and the Fight for the Soul of Los Angeles.