Part One: Daryl Gates: The Man Who Invented SWAT Teams and DARE

Robert sits down with Bridget Todd to discuss influential LA police chief Daryl Gates, the Godfather of militarized policing.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a
podcast formed or filmed recorded all of those things in
the burning healthscape that is Portland, Oregon, the most vicious
and collapsed war zone on planet Earth. Here from the

(00:22):
Rubble Robert Evans to talk to you about a really
bad piece of shit with someone who isn't really bad.
My wonderful guest today, Bridget Todd. Bridget, Welcome to the program.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
I am also calling in from a bombed out healthscape
city that is Washington, DC.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah, Healthcape to Healthcape.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
It was so funny when we both got on jadams
detonated simultaneously right above both of our houses on opposite coasts.
It was quite funny. It's very good, very good stuff, Bridget.
What's your least favorite US aerial munition?

Speaker 3 (00:58):
Ooh uh, people have the least favorite.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
I most people who have been targeted by them do.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
I'll say that much.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
What is your least favorite?

Speaker 1 (01:10):
I will say the scariest thing I've ever seen a
hit anywhere is a jay damn. Although like hell, fires
are pretty fucking scary too. And then you know, just
watching in Apache empty, it's empty, it's it's it's it's
whole cartload into a building's pretty fucked up. None of
them are really that fun when you're anywhere close to
seeing them. It's more just like, oh, fuck fireworks. Really
ain't got the juice?

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah, no, part of you was like, oh that looks cool.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
Oh no, fuck me, I gotta get away from that,
son of a bitch real fast. Bridget What do you
do on the internet a place where there are no girls?
According to one of your podcasts, that is.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
True, there are no girls on the internet, yet here
we are showing up there every day making flapping our
gums and making opinions and all of that.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
That's right. And yeah, you got anything else you want
to plug right up at the top here before we
get into it.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
Oh yeah, you can listen to me on there no
girls on the Internet. I am occasionally on it could
happen here.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Hate fascism, hate everything that's going on. Excited to be
super bummed out by whatever you're about to tell me.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
I'm sure fascism. What is that? Is that good or
is that bad? It sounds like bad. I'm guessing.

Speaker 2 (02:22):
Who can say anymore? Who's to say that's true? There's
probably somewhere in the middle.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
That's right, that's right. You know who wasn't in the
middle of the fascism good or bad debate?

Speaker 5 (02:32):
Who?

Speaker 1 (02:33):
I mean? A lot of people bridget Have you ever
heard of a guy named Darryl Gates?

Speaker 2 (02:39):
I have not.

Speaker 1 (02:40):
That's interesting. Darryl Gates is was the police chief in
Los Angeles for a period of time right mostly through
like the eighties, the late seventies and the eighties up
until nineteen ninety two. And if you kind of know
what happened in nineteen ninety two, you might be able
to guess what made him have to stop being the

(03:03):
chief of police in Los Angeles, right. And the reason
why I want to talk about Darrel Gates is that
if you live in a US city and have been
to a protest recently, or if you've just like watched
the news and spent portions of the last decade or
so in muted horror as you see you know, police
officers and federal agents dressed like soldiers tear people from

(03:23):
their loved ones or beat kids in the street, then
you have a bone to pick with Darrel Gates, because
he is maybe the single most important figure in the
militarization of US law enforcement. Right, that's kind of what
Daryl was known for. Among other things, he co created
and named the first swat team, He invented the DARE program,

(03:45):
and he played a major role in the birth of
Hollywood copaganda, in the militarization of normal city police departments. Right,
this is Daryl Gates, Right, that's the fellow we are
talking about this week.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (03:57):
I will never forgive him for making me spend what
could have been a free period for most of my
K through twelve education. I don't know watching a police
officer sing a song about why you shouldn't do drugs
and play acoustic car.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Right, tell you lies about the crack houses he'd busted up,
and no one like no one who was busting up
drug rings or whatever, got made a DARE cop.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
I have a very.

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Clear memory of the DARE coop in our school saying, Oh,
if you ever go into your parents' drawers and you
see some of this green stuff, be sure to come
tell your buddies you're at the DARE program.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Tell us FU cops on your parents.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Let out your mom and dad kids.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
What the fuck? Yeah, we'll be talking all about that.
Daryl was a famous cop in his own life so
famous that after his career ended, he got to write
an autobiography. He's kind of like the first celebrity influencer

(04:51):
police chief, which is like a thing that we have
to deal with now on the.

Speaker 5 (04:55):
Right, I really hate that.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah, you can tell a lot. His autow biography was
just called Chief, and you could tell a lot about
his life by just skimming the first few chapters of
the table of contents. Chapter one is street fighter, chapter
two is Rookie, Chapter three is Parker, which was the
name of the guy he worked for when he was
chief the first time, and chapter four is gamblers, drunks, prostitutes,

(05:18):
and scumbags. So really just exactly what you'd expect from
an LAPD CoP's autobiography.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
You know, those are some of my favorite kinds of people.
He did Mike horror social groups.

Speaker 4 (05:29):
Yeah, everyone, I hang out with gamblers, drunks, prostitutes. It's comebacks.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah, which one are you? I'm at least three of
the four.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
Oh, I think I can make a claim for at
least all of them.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, most are all depending on the day
of the week. So Darryl Francis Gates was born in
August thirtieth nineteen twenty six in Glendale, California. His father
was a plumber and Catholic. His mother was initially a
homemaker and came from a Mormon background, and as a
little kid, he remembers that his family was comfortable and

(06:03):
had a large house and a decent part of Glendale.

Speaker 3 (06:06):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
And it is an interesting aside. Darryl d a r
y L is how his name would come to be spelled,
but he was born d a r r e l.
And I have found no reason why. I don't know
why he changed it to add A Why I don't,
I don't something something must have happened. There's a story there,
it's not in his autobiography.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
Dude. Is that like when girls will add what they'll
change the spelling of their name to look unique, Like, oh,
I added a why?

Speaker 1 (06:29):
I must right, there has to have been a reason,
like why would you take the E out and add
A why? I mean I have seen more d r
y L Darryl's than d r r e L Darryl's,
But I just don't understand it.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
Yeah, that's really I would love to know what the
what the story is there?

Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, that would be fun. So Darryl and his four
year older brother Lowell had separate rooms, you know, which means, again,
you're doing pretty good in the twenties and thirties if
each kid has their own room. And up until Daryl
was four or so, his family was doing all right.
But as he notes in his autobiography, in nineteen thirty,
my world changed, and without explanation, his parents moved the

(07:05):
family to the other side of Glendale, so far out
they were almost in Burbank, which residents of the Greater
Los Angeles metropolitan area will recognize as the very pit
of hell itself. You know, if you've ever had to
be out on that side of Glendale, wouldn't wish it
on the devil. And this is you know, today, when
we're talking about Glendale, nobody's like, oh, that's the rough

(07:26):
part of Los Angeles. But this is legitimately like a
more impoverished area, especially as like we're coming into the
early years of the Great Depression, and it's also semi
rule right. Gates describes the move as like, you know,
the family going past cornfields and grape orchards into this tired,
ramshackle house that was very small. He and his brother
have to share a room in a single bed and

(07:49):
quote even more disconcerting, my mother wasn't at home anymore.
That was the most shocking thing in my memory. My
mother going to work. And this is like the first
great trauma of Daryl's life is that his mom has
to get a job to keep the family afloat, which
he doesn't describe as like a bad thing on his
mom's behalf. It's just like it changes his entire conception
of the world because his dad goes from you know,

(08:10):
this powerful figure holding up the family to someone who
is on unemployment and unable to actually earn anything. And
he responds to it, Daryl's dad by becoming a self
destructive alcoholic and abandoning his family for days at a time.
Not a unique story during the Great Depression, but obviously
something that's going to fuck this kid up, you know.

(08:32):
And when Daryl's dad does show back up, he's no
longer present or functional. He stumbles around in what his
son describes as a boozy Hayes and Daryl would later write,
with my mother, God and my brother at school, I
was in effect home alone. So he's kind of raising himself.
In the earliest years that he has memories. You know,
that's a big deal for this kid. So we're starting

(08:54):
to see some of the trauma that this is making
him the person he's going to be. It's not surprising
that this leaves a mark on a kid.

Speaker 4 (09:02):
I don't think sure.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
I was also a latchkey kid with two overworked parents.
I didn't go on to remake so to militarize our
police department.

Speaker 4 (09:10):
Yeah, exactly. I know a lot of latchkey kids. None
of them did this.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
I mean I was doing things I shouldn't have been doing,
but not that.

Speaker 4 (09:17):
Yeah, not that.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
Get into drugs. Kids, don't create swat teams. That's our
advice here on behind the bastards. Just do drugs, don't
be caught.

Speaker 5 (09:26):
You know, speak for yourself, my friend.

Speaker 4 (09:28):
I am speaking for myself, Sophia. That worked out great
for me.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
You can run an opposite DARE program where you come
into schools and.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
Tell kids to experiment with drugs.

Speaker 4 (09:38):
Kids.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
I dropped out of school and started doing drugs, and
I make I have a comfortable live in these days.
You know, all my friends who have had who got
a college debt, not nearly doing as well. So just
just fuck off, you know, give.

Speaker 4 (09:52):
Up, Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
It works for everyone. It doesn't work for everyone, but
nothing works for everyone. There's no good there's no good
advice I have for you. My friends who got medical
degrees and became lawyers, they're all fucked too. I don't
know what to tell you.

Speaker 4 (10:04):
Kids. Do your best. It's messy out there.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Darryl has, you know, a rough time of it, and
he's not entirely consistent when he writes about his background,
so I expects there's aspects of this he's exaggerating because
it makes a better story. In one paragraph, he says
that his dad was pretty much absent during his childhood,
and on the next page he talks about how to
avoid starvation. His family raised livestock, turkey's chickens, and rabbits,

(10:31):
and his dad, per his recollection, was doing all of
the raising of animals. He talks a lot about his dad,
like butchering livestock in the house and preparing it for dinner.
And that doesn't sounds sound as like checked out and
unavailable and not a part of life, as he kind
of describes him in other parts.

Speaker 4 (10:49):
You know, so I don't. I'm not.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
I'm sure he's not completely making up that his dad
was out of the picture, but his stories about how
out of the picture he was are kind of inconsistent,
if that makes sense, right, Yeah, Now Darryl was particular.
You know the fact that they are raising their own food,
this still doesn't provide enough for the growing family, so
the Gates has come to rely on what he calls
government handouts.

Speaker 4 (11:10):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
Once a week, I would go with my father along
San Fernando Road to an empty lot just outside burbank.
We would join a long line of other recipients.

Speaker 4 (11:17):
Entering forward.

Speaker 1 (11:18):
I would hurld my gunny sack while people tossed in potatoes, cabbage,
and lettuce. I always felt a little embarrassed, thinking it
wasn't right people giving us things. I felt the same
way at Christmas when the school would come by to
deliver a Christmas basket to the Gates family. Again I
had those ambivalent feelings. I was delighted, but a little
uncomfortable at being singled out. And you see this sometimes

(11:39):
with conservative people who grow people who grow up to
be conservative, like influential figures in politics and were poorious
kids where they react and I have to think this
is a failing on behalf of our society with shame
at the fact that they survived due to social programs
that they later wind up thinking are the root of
all evil. Right, well, my family needed them, but I

(12:01):
felt bad about it, and so maybe no one else
should have them. I'm always interested when I encounter that
in one of these stories, right where.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
You just pulling up of the ladder, like I got
this and it was helpful for me, so nobody should
get this. It really reminds me of the way that jd.
Vance writes about himself and his books.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
My God, yes, yes, where it's like and your someone
the system absolutely worked on, right, Like to the extent
that your family, your parents were unable to close the gaps.
There were other things there for you, and you just
don't want those to exist anymore for anyone else because
you think that, like you felt bad about needing them,
and you don't think anyone else deserves them.

Speaker 4 (12:40):
It's so fucked up.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Yeah, I love when stuff like that makes me sad
and depressed about the world. Daryl would become a major
Reagan era figure in the law and order movement, And yeah,
he's just one of these guys who learns the wrong
thing from growing up poor, and he never gets over
the shame of the fact that his family has to
be given help during this period of time. In fact,
the shame of having been poor is a kid is

(13:04):
probably the strongest feeling that Darryl gets across in his memoir.
He writes at length about the god awful sandwiches his
mother had to make for him with their limited food
supplies during the depression, and how embarrassed he was at
seeing kids with shiny new lunch boxes while he kept
his food in a sad, crinkled up paper bag. Which, boy,
is that inexperience I share with him?

Speaker 4 (13:23):
You know, like just.

Speaker 1 (13:25):
Remembering being a kid, poor kid with a paper bag
lunch at school instead of like a nice lunch box,
and like or just getting new stuff from the fucking
the school lunch line. He describes his food as often
it would be bean or mashed potatoes sandwich. Sometimes when
things were really bad, my mom would make sugar, cocoa
and canned milk into a thick paste and spread it

(13:46):
on a piece of bread. So like legit poor kid sandwiches,
you know, Yeah, that.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
Is legit poor kid food right there.

Speaker 4 (13:55):
That is a poor kid sandwich.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
Yeah, yeah, you know, but smeared on a playing card.

Speaker 4 (14:02):
Yeah that sounds like shit, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
He writes that his mom was a non union laborer
and a dress factory. She put in nine or ten
hour days, probably because she was non union, and she
often came home with her hands bleeding because her workplace
had switched to electric cutters that were faster but way
worse for the workers. He grows up revering his mom
because she keeps his family together during this period of
time through sheer, perseverance and hard work. His father is

(14:29):
a very different figure, and Darryl describes him as having
quote kept us in line out of sheer fear. He
goes on to describe how his father was abusive, and
to be honest, it's one of the weirder descriptions of
an abusive parent that I've ever met, just because of
how he talks about it. When he was sober, we
were scared to death he would whip us. He did
that only a couple of times, but we were always
terrified he might do it again. Basically, Paul Gates was

(14:51):
an easygoing man who liked to laugh, with this self
deprecating humor and an ability to tell a funny story.
He made everyone else laugh too, but he also had
a real temper and whoo that kept us in line.
And it's like, my dad was a nice guy. You
hit us, and I get it. I get your interpretation
of that, but again, it's just evidence of this. You
haven't examined stuff all that much. You know, I get

(15:13):
what he.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
I think I sort of get what he's putting down.

Speaker 3 (15:16):
I would get you would get glimpses of a temper,
and that and the fear of that would be enough
to kind of write, had there be a fear behind
behind you at all times, whether or not your dad
was passively hitting you a lot.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
My dad didn't, you know, it was my dad, But like, yeah,
this parent was not constantly or even often violent, but
it happened a couple of times, and that was enough
that you were like, I am not gonna fuck with them,
you know, Yeah, And yeah, that's that's not again, uncommon
parenting experience for kids to have. Because prohibition coincided with

(15:50):
the collapse of the economy and his family fortunes, and
because his dad was a drinker, his father took to
brewing beer in the family home in order to stay supplied.
With alcohol and to supply his friends with alcohol. And
so some of Darrel's earliest memories were watching Paul and
his quote Irish Catholic buddies make beer in the bathtub
and bottle it. When the family moved houses, his dad's
friends still came over to make beer, but he notes

(16:12):
that his father was increasingly absent because he's just drinking
too much to make beer, you know, too much of
an alcoholic to be a moonshiner. And this is where
Daryl makes his first reference to being aware of the
police at the kid. Which is really interesting to me
for a guy who grows up to be one of
the most famous cops in the country, is he doesn't
like the cops as a kid because when his dad

(16:34):
gets more out of control as a drinker, there are
increasing run ins with the law. And one of Darrel's
worst memories as a kid was the day the Glendale
Pade finally came for his father.

Speaker 4 (16:44):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
There was a knock at the door, a loud knock,
and out front stood these large uniformed people. It was
just devastating as a kid, drunk or not, my dad
was still the authority figure in the family, and there
he was scurrying out the back door into the blackness
of night while these massive uniform peace people were beating
on the door rushing in. In those days, they didn't
stand on ceremony. They just pushed in past my mother.
Where is he? And that's a searing memory, right, it's

(17:09):
a memory Unfortunately even more kids are having today with
what the ice raids are doing, you know. And it's
not surprising that Daryl grows up hating the cops. He
repeats this story variations of it numerous times over his childhood. Right,
the police are coming constantly to his house. They're chasing
his dad off or taking his dad away all the time,
and he comes to see the police as fundamentally cruel

(17:31):
and destructive. As an adolescent, Darryl saw law enforcement as
quote just a plague on society.

Speaker 3 (17:38):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
I mean.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
It's so interesting to me.

Speaker 3 (17:42):
The same thing is what you were describing with him
not wanting to use welfare or other kinds of social services.
It turning him against those things. It's interesting that his
run ins with the police, he was like, oh, I
hate the police, and so I will become one.

Speaker 2 (17:56):
That's just very interesting to me.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
Yeah, yeah, how that's going to happen is going to
be interesting, But it is like such a sad part that,
like he grows up understanding what's so problematic about the police, right,
is that is this guy not doing good as a father?
Is he out of control to an extent? Does there
need to be some sort of intervention in his life?

Speaker 4 (18:16):
Sure?

Speaker 1 (18:17):
Is that an intervention armed uniformed men taking him away
from his family? No, probably not.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
Right, traumatizing his kids even.

Speaker 4 (18:25):
Yeah, it's probably not the way, you know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
One of his other traumatic incidents from his childhood comes
when he wakes up sick with his face all this
just tells you a lot of grown up in the depression.
He like wakes up with his face swollen and like
just clearly deathly ill, and his brother tells him he
probably skip school.

Speaker 4 (18:43):
Good with doctor.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
And Darryl goes to his dad and is like, hey, Dad,
I think I'm I'm not doing well, And his dad,
who was drunk at seven in the morning, probably from
the night before, it's like far off, Like just leave
it off, kid, I'm about to do that. So Darryl
stays home and then when his by the time his
brother gets home from school, Daryl's face is twice its

(19:05):
normal size. Right, it's just become clear that this kid
needs to be in the hospital. And instead of going
to the hospital, Darryl tries to go out and play
with the other kids when they get out of school,
who mock him for looking fucked up because they're like, dude,
your whole face is what the fuck's wrong with that? Right?
And it's not until his mom gets home later that
night that she's like, no one took him to the doctor.

(19:27):
What's wrong with you people? And she calls the family doctor,
who diagnoses Darryl with an acute kidney condition. He blames
this on the fact that there's just been like a
sports competition in school that he won, and that he'd
had to push himself so hard to win that he
pulled a kidney loose. I don't know if that's what happened.
I think it's just that it's the thirties. People are
getting sick all the time, you know, they don't know

(19:47):
medicine yet. But he's treated in time, and he manages
getting over it. But the fact that his dad ignored
it in order to get drunk is like a sear
ring moment to him. Right, this really burns itself into
his brain as you'd expect it to, right. He spends
three months slowly recovering from his injuries, and since his

(20:09):
mom worked all day and his brother was at school,
that means that for three months he's basically rotting alone
in bed. You know, there's not a TV. They don't
have a radio. His dad doesn't go to the library
off at a check out books, so he's mostly just
laying there alone, stewing in his anger, you know. And
that's not gonna help anything about this kid.

Speaker 3 (20:29):
No, I could see that being a very formative experience
for a child. Just lots of time to sit there
and stew about your drunk father and the horrible school
lunches you're packed every day.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
Right exactly. So the next year, nineteen thirty five, his
family moves again to Highland Park. Decades later, Daryl would
recall the racial makeup of their new neighborhood in what
i'd call telling terms. Quote, a lot of Italian and
German families, a mixture of Catholics and Jews, many Hispanics,
some Japanese and Chinese. I don't recall any blacks. He

(21:02):
writes this book in the mid nineties you know, so
was it.

Speaker 3 (21:06):
Still wasn't cool to be describing the makeup of your
where you live in that way and like just completely
obsessed with the races and ethnicities of people around you.

Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah, just like like really laying out here's all the
different races in my town when I'm ten.

Speaker 4 (21:21):
You know, like, yeah, I don't know, man, I don't
know that I believe that.

Speaker 3 (21:24):
Do you ever meet somebody that tells a story and
whenever they tell a story, they have to tell you
the ethnicity or the race of the person involved.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
When you meet.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
Somebody like that, it really tells you a lot about
how they see the world.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
Yes, yes, yeah, that that that that really like gets
across significant details. Is like what ra Also, just what
races you remember?

Speaker 6 (21:43):
You know?

Speaker 2 (21:44):
Okay which ones were notable to you?

Speaker 6 (21:46):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (21:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (21:47):
What are the notable races in your childhood? So the
same year, his dad notched a new public drinking arrest,
for which he finally serves jail time, and Daryl calls
this his dad's rock bottom point. You know, he goes
through the DTS after he sobers up in the drunk
tank and the experience fucks up Paul Gates so much
that Paul commits to sobering up, and he did, and Gates'
family life gets better at this point. Not only is

(22:09):
the Great Depression starting to wind down by the later
half of the thirties, but his dad gets to another
job and starts working again. He gets a family car
so that the Gateses have a vehicle for the first time,
and his new dad, the sober Dad, becomes a real
gung ho pro fdr New Deal Democrat, which makes complete
sense because a lot of people my grandparents were like that,

(22:31):
where it's like, yeah, they were dedicated New Deal Democrats
for a long time because they survived thanks to New
Deal programs. You know. Of course, that makes you real
positive towards government programs, you know, at least for a
period of time. Paul becomes more involved with his kids
and makes the questionable decision to teach young Daryl how
to box. I say questionable because Daryl decides I want

(22:54):
to be a professional fighter, right, So, as an adolescent,
he joins a boxing club. He spends all his free
time fighting. By the time he's fifteen years old, he
is muscular and increasingly aggressive. That Halloween, he dresses up
in costume with what he called a bean shooter up
his sleeve, and at parties he would shoot beans randomly
at other kids. This predictably leads to a fist fight,

(23:16):
which his brother broke broke up, but the other kid's
dad came in and saw Lowell with hands on his son,
and so he starts attacking Daryl's brother. Lowell and Darryl
Sucker punches the dad of the kid that he'd shot
repeatedly with beans. Quote absolutely furious in me, Lowell grabbed
the bean shooter and snapped it in half. But the
lesson he intended to teach me fell on deaf ears.

(23:36):
I could not keep my fists to myself, so just
a bean shooting little prick.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
I grew up in a house where my brother is
a boxer. My dad and grandfather are boxers. I took
boxing lessons as a kid. And it's the kind of
thing that a well meaning adult is thinking, maybe this
will teach my kid some focus. Yeah, yeah, and then
off and it can go that we can It could
be gad for you, or be making a very violent child.

Speaker 4 (24:04):
You have to teach. Here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
If you're going to teach your kid to be good
at beating people, up which boxing can teach you, Boxing said,
a functional fighting sport art, right, you also have to
teach them how not to use fighting people as like
a default go to, you know exactly. Yeah, speaking of
beating the shit out of people, here's ads for some

(24:27):
companies that won't beat the shit out of people.

Speaker 4 (24:35):
We're back there, you go. So uh.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
He starts high school, Darryl, and this offers him some
you know, outlets for his violence, because he describes himself
as getting regularly into fights with kids he calls bullies,
and I'm not sure if they were the bullies, I'll
say that much, right. This leads him to his first
real legal trouble because by age sixteen, these other he's
come to the conclude, and the accurate one in my opinion,

(25:01):
that quote there was no bigger bully than a cop.
And he saved up money to buy an old car
of his own by this point, and the police, he says,
were quote always pulling me over for something, citing him
for everything under the sun, including having a loud muffler,
and again like, yeah, a lot of people have this experience,
mostly not white kids, and the fact that you did,

(25:23):
it's a bummer that this doesn't like make you a
better person.

Speaker 3 (25:27):
Yeah, I feel like he's taking all the wrong lessons
from these very formative life experiences.

Speaker 4 (25:32):
All of them. It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
Yeah, it's just every wrong lesson you could take, shocking stuff.
Here's a passage from his book talking about how you
Know one of his early meaningful interactions with the cops.
On a Sunday night in nineteen forty two, with my
girlfriend beside me and my buddy and back, I stopped
my car in front of the Franklin Theater. Every Sunday
night they showed a hop along Cassidy and my buddy

(25:55):
Pete Siula went in to see what time the next
show started. We were sitting there, my car parked just
a little bit out from the curb, when suddenly a
squad car slammed to a stop behind me. Because of
the war, the LAPD had been forced to hire emergency
wartime officers. Among them, it turned out these two. One
strolled over and whipped out his pad. I jumped out
of my car, what are you doing? Writing you a citation?

Speaker 4 (26:16):
Come on, what for?

Speaker 1 (26:17):
You're double parked? But my friend'll be right back. And
it deteriorated from there now Eventually, his friend comes out
and his brother tries to de escalate things, and when
the cop shoved Lowell away, Darryl loses it and he
punches the cop who'd shoved his brother, and one of
his friends punches the other cop, and they all get arrested,
he and his friend and Lowell. Now he punching a

(26:38):
cop normally would get you jail time, but his brother
is kind of like a good goody two shoes in town.
He started some local sports program for kids that the
lapd are partnering with, and so they offered Darryl and
Lowell a deal, which is that they'll drop the charges
if he apologizes, and Darryl refuses at first. Right, he's

(26:59):
wanting to, like, you fucking charge me with assaulting a
police officer. I'm not gonna say sorry to this dick,
and insisted that like, well, the cop pushed my brother,
so I had a right to sock the bastard. And
eventually Lowell has to like intervene and be like, you,
stupid motherfucker, they're offering to drop assault on an officer charges.
Shut your fucking mouth and say sorry. Right, yeah, Like.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
I appreciate standing on business and being like, no, it's
the principle.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
But if they're gonna drop.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
Charges, yeah, you hit a cop bro like the take
the dub you know next pern article in the La Times.
In nineteen forty three, after graduating from Franklin High School
in Highland Park, Gates joined the Navy and served two
years as a plain old seaman on a destroyer in
the Pacific. After his discharge, he enrolled at Pasadena College

(27:46):
and married a classmate, Wanda Hawkins. He was taking pre
law courses at USC when he learned that she was pregnant.
I'm sure how he was going to support a family.
He did not greet the news happily. Not a weird story, right,
you know a lot of kids like this out there
in the world. And one of his friends, this is
kind of him finally breaking bad is he's like desperate

(28:09):
and has to figure out how to make money to
pay for a kid now. And one of his friends says, hey,
the LAPD is hiring. They don't have enough people, and
the pay's good. They've got like signing bonuses and a
decent starting salary. And Darryl reacts with fury. At first,
he remembers calling this telling his friend, no way in
the world will I ever be a dumb cop. But
then his friends like, but they pay like two hundred

(28:29):
ninety bucks a month, and that's real good money back then,
and while he's in police Academy he can continue to
study at USC the whole time. So he drives out
to Hollywood High and he takes a civil service exam
and he's claims scored number nine in a room with
five thousand applicants. And this is where we get a
strong hint that old Darryl might have some narcissistic tendencies, because,

(28:50):
rather than taking satisfaction in his high score, he recalled
anger that eight other quote prospective dumb cops had scored
higher than him. He assumed that this must have been
the rep the result of nepotism, or these other kids
gaming the system in some way. But it continues on
to the other stages of the application, right, He's like, no,
there's no way these other the only dumb people would
want to be cops. So I have to be the

(29:11):
smartest person in this room full of people who are
desperate for money.

Speaker 4 (29:14):
You know, every.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
Takeaway is the wrong takeaway.

Speaker 3 (29:17):
Also amazing that hard that there are eight kids who
are who would score better on this test than you?

Speaker 4 (29:22):
Is Is that really five thousand? No?

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Yeah, no, and you're doing fine, brother, Like, come on, man.
So he has to lie when his interviewer asks if
he has any criminal history or has ever been arrested,
but since the charges had been dropped, the guys responsible
for the hiring process have no evidence to the contrary.
At first, he joins the LAPD to pay his way
through college and support a young family, and he starts

(29:47):
the job holding his nose and kind of not really
wanting to do.

Speaker 4 (29:50):
It at all.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
On September sixteenth, nineteen forty nine, he has his first
day at the police Academy and it's not like the
classic film Police Academy, unfortunately. His first sight as he
goes to the academy are the words inscribed on the
entrance of the building. The more you sweat here, the
less you will bleed in the street. And Darryl writes
about his time training in a typically self aggrandizing fashion,

(30:15):
noting that he was too heavy when he joined, but
at the end of the training he was two hundred
and five pounds of pure muscle and that his colleagues
nicknamed him the bear, and.

Speaker 4 (30:25):
No they did whatever.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
I'm sorry, man, No one's no one's colleagues, and like,
no one gets nicknames that cool that other people.

Speaker 4 (30:32):
Give them.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
Nickname if I've ever heard, yeah.

Speaker 4 (30:36):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (30:38):
And if you get a nickname like the bear, it's
not for a cool reason. It's because you like scratch
your back on a wall or something and you look
like a bear and people are like, oh man, he
looks like he's a bear, a tree.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Always getting your head stuck in picnic basket.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Right, yeah, you get your head stuck in a picnic
basket and people are like, fucking Yogi bear over here, right,
that's someone who gets nicknamed the bear.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
You know.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
It's like if anyone ever tells you my nickname was
the Reaper, it's like, no, that's probably because you ate
nothing but corn or something during basic training or some
weird shit. It's not because you were cool. Nobody gets
that nickname for being cool.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
Now.

Speaker 1 (31:11):
People just don't give out nicknames for that reason. You
get a nickname like fucking cumstain or whatever. Right, that's
a military nickname anyway. He claims, more than on my physique,
I prided myself on my intellect, which sherif bro I
don't know, man, that's not going to be a real
through line in your life.

Speaker 4 (31:31):
But Okay.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
Now, by the time he finishes training, he says his
opinion on the police had changed. He met so many
great guys in police academy that he realizes, oh, no,
I've been wrong about the cops all along. And he
never seems to have squared this fact that whatever his
experience with the instructors and with his peers, the experiences
that he had as a child of the police busting
down his door and fucking up his life also happened, right,

(31:55):
He never deals with the intersection of these two things,
which is in interesting to me.

Speaker 3 (32:01):
Yeah, I'm so curious what's going on there other than
seemingly just being someone who again, every lesson is the
wrong lesson from a life experience.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
Yeah, that is His most consistent characteristic is that he
never learns the right thing from the things that happened
to him to it with a consistency that's like impressive
in its fucked up inness. If that makes sense, it
does so. Darrel's first job on the street was as
an accident investigator with the Traffic Division. He spends a
little time on control after that, and at the end

(32:31):
of his rookie year, he still thinks policing is like
a temporary gig for him, you know, a stopover on
the path to him becoming a lawyer. He does not
want to work for long at the LAPD. His plan
is to finish school, get his law degree, and then
leave the force. But shortly after his starting his rookie year,

(32:52):
you know, he spends a little bit of time moving
around different jobs as a rookie, and then he's selected,
after like kind, right at the end of his first
year for this special detail where they're going to make
him the personal chauffeur and bodyguard for the new police chief,
William H.

Speaker 4 (33:06):
Parker.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
And I don't think this was meant as a compliment
to him. It's going to help his career immensely because
he gets close to the boss. But I don't think
you make the best new cop the cop the police
chief chauffeur. And as a spoiler, the police chief needs
a chauffeur because he's a hardcore alcoholic who can never

(33:27):
legally drive. Right yikes, Yeah, he's not getting this because
he's the best yike.

Speaker 6 (33:36):
Yeah, yeah, woo, we need you to drive the boss
who has never been sober a day in his life
because you're the best cop.

Speaker 4 (33:48):
Yeah, you don't give RoboCop that gig, you know, no, no,
no no.

Speaker 3 (33:53):
Also, it does kind of put to rest the idea
that people have, the fiction that people become police because.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
They really care about law and order.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
I've known like the handful of people in my life
who are law enforcement. They're the most lawless, psycho pieces
of shit you've ever met in your life.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Never dat a cop. Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah it's I mean that statistically the evidence bears that
one out. And yeah it's yeah, it's just this, Yeah,
you did it because the money was good, and you
suddenly didn't care anymore about the fact that you knew
they were bad in a lot of ways, you had
horrible experiences with the police, but then they offered you
two hundred and ninety bucks a month, so like fuck it.

(34:34):
You know, I guess they're good guys.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
Yeah, yeah, I can't help but think about hearing all
of the stuff like, oh, join ice, you get a signing.

Speaker 4 (34:42):
Bonus, maybe rand Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
So yeah. The way they.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
Sweeten these jobs that most people can see are odious.
The way they sweet in them, and it makes I
think there's a certain kind of person that will just
forget how harmful these these jobs are to people.

Speaker 1 (34:59):
Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, it's that they live kind
of John Carpenter called all this out decades ago in
his classic film, Right. You know, people will forget their
morality as soon as you offer him some cash, which
you know is none of us are immune to it.
I think some people's price is higher than two hundred
and ninety bucks a month, but whatever, So we're I

(35:19):
want to talk a little bit about the cop that
he becomes the chauffeur for, right, William Parker Bill Parker,
who is a really influential LA police chief. He takes
the LAPD from like old timey cops kind of into
the early modern era in a lot of ways. And
he's got one of these like classic American turn of
the century LIFs. He was born in the town of Lead,

(35:41):
South Dakota, and then he was raised in the even
more the only town with a more sinister name than Lead, Deadwood.
It's it's awesome. I think that one's in North Dakota,
but like, yeah, from Lead to Deadwood is his childhood.
He's an Okay, student as a kid and a promising athlete,
but obviously he's in dead Wood, so there's not a

(36:01):
lot of a future there, right, And after he graduates
he works a series of dead end jobs. At one
point he's selling underpants that his mom knitted to women
in town, so he's an underwear salesman for a little
while in Deadwood. I have never heard of a bleaker
job than that. Not just underwear, hand knitted underwear, hand
knitted by your mom, underwear salesmen in fucking Deadwood. Bro,

(36:24):
that's bleak. Like, doesn't get any worse than that. Eventually,
in nineteen twenty two, his mom splits from his dad
and decides to move to LA with his younger siblings,
and Bill's like, I guess I'll move to Los Angeles too.

Speaker 4 (36:37):
It's got to beat fucking Deadwood.

Speaker 5 (36:39):
You know.

Speaker 4 (36:40):
Now.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
At this point in time, LA is advertised as being
like if you look at like the advertisements the city
is putting out. One of the names that Los Angeles
gives itself is quote the white spot of America. I
don't need to tell you what the word white means
in that context, right.

Speaker 2 (36:58):
But I can figure it out.

Speaker 4 (37:00):
You figure?

Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yeah, I know what it means. It's not talking about
the color of clothes or whatever.

Speaker 4 (37:04):
Right.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Per the book La Noir by John Bunten, it was
seen as quote a place where native born, white Protestants
could enjoy the magic of outdoors, inviting always trees and
blossom throughout the year, flowers in bloom all the time,
as well as mystery, romance, charms, and splendor, all safe
among others of their kind. Right, the weather's always nice

(37:27):
for white people, who are the only ones allowed in
Los Angeles. That's how LA is presenting itself to the
rest of the country at this period of time. And
not because that's a totally accurate description, because even LA
is never not at a first place, right like it
is always an incredibly mixed city. This is how they're trying.
They're trying to portray themselves to the rest of the

(37:48):
country that way so that white people will move there.

Speaker 4 (37:50):
Right.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
This is a conscious attempt by the people leading the
city to gentrify it. Right now, LA is at this
point a vice and organized crime because there's a lot
of money and the film industries there, and all of
the gangsters who'd gotten cracked down on the East Coast
had moved out west, right Like, that's a big thing
that has happened by this period of time. It's why

(38:12):
I mean, I just quoted from a book called El
a Noir, But it's why LA and War becomes a genre,
right is because Los Angeles a lot of crime. There,
a lot of real good opportunities for organized crime there.
It's a huge port a lot of money moves through it.
And as a young man, Parker joins the police and
he spends his adulthood fighting crime and a city overwhelmed
by it. He takes a brief break to fight in

(38:34):
World War Two, and he comes home a war hero
and is the highest ranked LAPD officer and war veteran.
This earns Parker a measure of fame. The city council
passes a resolution thanking him specifically for his service, and
to make a long story short, he writes that fame
to the top, Parker would go down. Is perhaps the
most consequential chief and LAPD history, certainly before Darryl Gates.

(38:55):
In an LA Times article, Joe Dominic describes his reign
this way or two in the years that followed, had
brought a mass migration to Los Angeles of job hungry
African Americans, Jews, and later Latinos. By the mid sixties,
these new arrivals were transforming the complexity and politics of
the city and coming into conflict with the LAPD. Parker
reinvented the LAPED, making it a less corrupt and more

(39:17):
professional department, but also turning it into one that was aggressive, intimidating,
and confrontational by design a small force of faceless, paramilitary
cops and patrol cars. Policing through fear doesn't sound familiar.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
It certainly does. Such what was the police?

Speaker 3 (39:33):
So the only police that I know is the one
they have described, you know, hyper militarized.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
What was it like before then?

Speaker 3 (39:39):
I can't even conceptualize what policing would be like before
that was the vibe.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
Yeah, I mean, Number one, there just weren't as many cops.
Number two, the idea that like they would have that
kind of strength, they would have access to heavy weaponry,
the idea that they would have access to high numbers,
that they would do sweeps in big numbers. That was
all fairly new at the time. Right, some of that
really starts becoming a thing because of the gangster era.
But you know, and there's also this factor that like,

(40:08):
the LAPD isn't a thing for you to worry about
if you can bribe them. And so one of the
things that happens when Parker's with the LAPD is that
the ability of just like random, normal local criminals to
pay their way out of problems becomes less of a factor.
But also the LAPD are becoming increasingly violent and increasingly
like a force of their own right during the time

(40:29):
that Parker is in charge. So there's both this thing
of like, well, the LAPD are less of a whoever
can pay for them owns them, and more of a
militant force of their own that is increasingly controlling the
city during his reign.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
This might sound fucked up.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
I feel like it might be less harmful to have
them be a force where anybody who can pay them
kind of owns them than having them be their own
their own like military force. Yeah, you know, wreaking havoc
in the city.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
I can say how you would view the change his progress,
but also like, I don't know, maybe it didn't. Maybe
that's maybe it wasn't as much of an improvement as
you might have thought, right there. Yeah, speaking of improvements,
you know it will improve my day is if people
check out these.

Speaker 4 (41:14):
Ads, ah beautiful and we're back.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
So we just set up, you know, Bill Parker's time
running the LAPD. And right after Parker gets made chief,
Daryl has made his driver. And the fact that Darryl
is the Chief's driver during the busy fifteenth first fifteen
months of Parker's time running the department gives him a
front seat to this revolutionary period in LAPD history, and

(41:45):
his position makes him a natural sounding board for Parker's ideas.
It gives him influence incommensurate to his low rank and
his rookie status inside the department. In the LAPD, Gates
gains of reputation as being the Chief's fair haired boy.
Per journalist Slaine and Eric Walnick. Gates would later write, quote,
what I received during my fifteen months with him turned

(42:06):
out to be more than a primer on policing. It
became a tutorial on how to be chief right. And
for the sake of completion, I should note that in
his own autobiography, Gates paints a mixed picture of his mentor.
He admits that he became totally smitten with Parker and
saw him as a kind of father figure. But also
Parker was sadly a father figure in quote more ways

(42:28):
than I would have liked, by which I mean Bill
was a raging alcoholic like Darryl's dad. And Darryl writes, yeah, like, oh, yeah,
I can see why this guy influences.

Speaker 2 (42:39):
You, A guy just like daddy. I know all about it.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
Yeah, but Daddy got in trouble with the cops and
this guy gets to run.

Speaker 4 (42:46):
Them for some reason. Here's a quote.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
After trying to absorb Parker's brilliance by day, I would
too often by night drive him home drunk and I
mean loaded. He drank until his words slurred and stairs
became a hazard. He would repeat the same thought over
and overuntil he became a terrible bore. Some nights he
would attend to function and not touch a drop. Other
nights he drank heavily and smelled embarrassing to me as
he stumbled getting into the car and stumbled getting out

(43:09):
from the street to his house required negotiating a steep
hill that I often had to help him up. And
Daryln sis, yeah, and he's like, but his drinking never
affected his thinking, right, It never changed the way he worked,
and like I don't know, man, You're just describing it
as affecting him on the job, but.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
Him as smelling embarrassing. You think that didn't impact his
work at all?

Speaker 4 (43:29):
Really, that didn't change how he worked as police chief.
I don't know, man.

Speaker 1 (43:34):
Now, Daryl does note fairly well all the journalists in
the media pool that press conferences were outrageous alcoholics too,
And yeah, man, it was the fifties, right, Like, I
don't believe you're lying about all the journalists having being
self destructive alcoholics in nineteen fifty one, you know, yeah,
that makes sense. He did acknowledge one time in which

(43:55):
Parker's drinking cast serious issues. New Year's Day nineteen fifty one,
he and the chief were scheduled to pick up the
mayor and drive to the Elks Club for breakfast before
the Rose Bowl, but Parker had gotten completely shitouse hammered
the night before, and Gates only got him home two
hours before they had to wake up. The result of
this was that they are late to pick up the
mayor the next day, and the mayor is furious. Gates

(44:17):
plays this off as the mayor being an arrogant prick,
even though he admits he and his boss were giggling
the whole time about how hammered he still was. So
I'm not sure it's the mayor who sounds bad in
this story. The Mayor's like, my fucking belief chief can't
sober up to pick me up for the fucking rose bowl, Like,
can't do one night without getting so drunk that he's
blacked out the next morning.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
Yeah, hours late and laughing about it in front of
the mayor is not a great in front of their
drinking never impacted his drinking.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
Never impacted his job, never impacted his job. Absolutely not.

Speaker 4 (44:46):
Now.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
One long term impact of this year and change is
that Gates rockets himself to the head of the line
for promotions and choice appointments within the department. When he
gets back to normal duty, he works briefly on juvenile patrol,
like the cops who'd let him and his brother off
easy for assaulting an officer when they were kids, and
his section of the book on his time in juvenile
patrol is one of the most incoherent pieces of his autobiography.

(45:09):
He describes this adolescent kid named Jose who was a
serial burglar and enough of like an habitual criminal that
he and his partner could tell when they got a
call about a burglary that like, oh, that's Jose, right,
Like that must have been him. It matches his mo perfectly,
classic classic Jose. And he's like, we liked this kid,
but like, you know, we had to deal with him constantly,

(45:29):
And he describes having to call Jose's parents all the
time about their son, and then he writes a very
confusing passage that is absolutely not consistent. Times were so
different than the people were different, and the laws were different.
Often you'd call a kid in, show him out, and
call us folks. Father would come down, bawl the kid out.
You'd never encounter that kid again. And he goes on

(45:50):
to complain that like that's not the way it is
today because police don't have as much power. There's all
these children's rights advocates who've lobbied for laws that give
kids more rights, and now hops can't use their own
in house probation system to quote skip the courts and
put kids on probation at their own recognizance without involving
a judge or court, and like, but you just talked
about this kid who was constantly a problem and who

(46:12):
like the way the system worked didn't benefit him at all.
It didn't like help him stop, like he was a
career criminal anyway. And then you're like, but things were
that didn't happen back then. You know, it's not like
it was in the now it is today. He's writing
in the nineties, where like, because kids have rights, things
are worse. It's just interesting to me. Again, he just can't.
It's completely inconsistent, right, Like, his recollection of things and

(46:36):
how they worked then versus how they work now is
just never accurate to the actual things he's saying.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
I almost feel like this is an issue with the editor.

Speaker 3 (46:45):
I like, I'm curious if an editor of this book
would have called out that very clear inconsistency there to say, hey,
your point's getting a bit muddled.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
They don't have those on right wing Sheriff books.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
You know, just write whatever you want hit, publish.

Speaker 1 (46:59):
Throw wherever you want there, kid, We don't give a shit.
It's your name that's gonna sell this motherfucker. People will
know it's the swat guy.

Speaker 4 (47:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
So Daryl goes from this point where he talks about
this this kid and how things are different now than
they were back then. He goes from that to immediately
telling an anecdote that makes me feel like none of
his colleagues should have been allowed within one hundred yards
of a school. And this is so fucking wild that
he just tells this as like a gag. We had

(47:26):
encountered a sixteen year old girl living on her own,
a typical arrival. She was hoping for the big break,
but on the streets of Hollywood, anything could happen to her.
So when we'd spot her, we would stop and talk,
or sometimes we'd go by her room to check up
on her. I tried to give her all kinds of
fatherly advice, and I guess she kind of fell for me.
One day, I was thumbing through a batch of crime
reports when I noticed one for rape. I'd picked it

(47:47):
up and went, oh, no, it was the girl. Next
I saw the suspect's name me, Oh my god, I
thought instinctively. I checked the date of the rape and
the time, trying to remember what the hell was I doing.
Then suddenly I looked up. A bunch of detectives were
standing there, laughing, thinking they'd played a pretty good joke
on me.

Speaker 4 (48:06):
Uh So, the joke.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
That his colleagues play is filing a fake child rape
report for him.

Speaker 4 (48:15):
Isn't that funny? What a great a joke?

Speaker 3 (48:20):
I mean, it's hard to know what to say. These
are like, I mean, oh my God.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Got him, got him? He thought he raped a kid.

Speaker 4 (48:31):
He thought you raped a kid. You were thinking back
to remember if you rape that kid?

Speaker 1 (48:36):
Ha ha Oh Darryl, we got you because you have done
it before, right obviously, like it was a possibility in
your head.

Speaker 4 (48:43):
You had to think about it, right man.

Speaker 3 (48:44):
The fact that he was like, oh, let me let
me think back, let me think back, as.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
Opposed to this is clearly some mistake.

Speaker 4 (48:51):
Who was I raping that day? Oh no, Like that's
really weird.

Speaker 1 (48:56):
That's insane as a bit, as a bit, that's nuts,
And that you'd say that about your colleagues who were
like I respected my I really had my mind changed.
I thought the LAPD were all bullies, but then I
learned they're real serious professionals who do joke about child
rape reporting.

Speaker 4 (49:12):
Obviously, but that's fine. You know, it's a bit Jesus right,
Holy shit, Like.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
That was really one of those like, oh, okay, so
things haven't changed all that much, huh, Like cops, No,
I haven't.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
No, Okay, cops really have not changed, cool bro.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
After his time on the juv beat, Gates gets moved
to the vice squad and in nineteen fifty five he
makes sergeant. Four years later he's promoted to lieutenant, and
four years after that he makes captain. This is a
pretty rapid pace of advancement, and he credits this. He
says he gets his promotions as rapidly as he does
because he studies really hard for every exam and he's

(49:52):
just very rigorous in the way he approaches the work.
But brown nosing is at least so much a factor
in his rise as anything else. You know, the likes him,
He's the golden boy. He drove him around, they bonded,
and so for the remainder of the time that Parker
is running the lapd Daryl can count on having the
boss's ear whenever he needs it. So he's never going
to get turned down from a promotion when he goes

(50:13):
up for it. Right by the spring of nineteen sixty five,
Gates had risen to an impressive rank indeed, inspector. His
particular role is oversight and bridget This is probably going
to start the ominous music in your head. In sixty five,
he gets made the inspector overseeing all patrol officers in
a certain neighborhood of Los Angeles called Watts.

Speaker 6 (50:36):
Oh right, god.

Speaker 4 (50:37):
Uh yeah, I know where this is going. We know
where this is going.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
Right.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Watts is a majority black neighborhood that is very impoverished. Right,
And as the civil rights movement is picking up steam,
people there are growing increasingly organized and increasingly angry about
a system that rules their lives. And the fact that
Parker has turned the LAPD into this unaccountable Parama military
force and set them patrolling neighborhoods with an aggressive posture

(51:04):
is about to bite everyone in the ass, right. That is,
that's what's coming up. And as a spoiler, Parker is
in charge of not the whole LAPD, but like the
group of cops who are directly responding to Watts when
the Watts riots breaks out, and he's running the whole
department during the ninety two Rodney King riots, that's Daryl Gates.

(51:25):
The same guy was probably not when you think about it,
there's like, oh, it's the same guy on deck for
both of those things. Yeah, hell yeah, that's kind of
scar huh Unyeah, there's four guys in all of history,
and two of them are Darrel Gates. The other two
are Hitler. It's just Darrel Gates and Hitler all the
way down, Babe, all the way down. But speaking of

(51:49):
neither of those guys, bridget Todd, you want to plug
anything as we head out here on part one.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
Yeah, well, I am not Darrel Gates or Hitler, and
I actually host a podcast that I think is pretty
good called There Are No Girls on the Internet.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
You should check it out.

Speaker 4 (52:04):
You should check that out.

Speaker 1 (52:05):
You should check out our new podcast or the new
our new season of a pre existing podcast. Ja Canrahan's
sad Oligarch just dropped its second season. If you wanted
to learn about all these powerful Russian businessmen and corporate
leaders who keep dying strangely, you know, check that out too.
Check out There Are No Girls on the Internet. And

(52:26):
if you want to learn more about Darryl Gates and
why Los Angeles be the way that it is, there's
a book we'll be quoting from in our next episode
called City of Quartz by Mike Davis. Check out that
book too, because we'll be hearing from that in part two.
All right, that's been our episode Friends and Enemies for Enemies.

Speaker 5 (52:47):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 3 (52:59):
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Speaker 4 (53:05):
Subscribe to our

Speaker 5 (53:06):
Channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards