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

Robert concludes the story of Daryl Gates with his founding of SWAT and insane reaction to the LA Riots.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, welcome back to a podcast that you've been
listening to, and this is the second episode. So you're
not starting there, right, you know, because that would be crazy.
You're continuing here, you know. You know what show this is.
It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people

(00:22):
in all of history. Now, Bridget, are you ready to
learn more about Daryl Gates?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
You bet your ass? I am, Let's do it.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Do you want to tell people where they can find
you on the old internet? So far? Right now?

Speaker 3 (00:35):
You can find me at my podcast. There are no
girls on the internet or on Instagram at Bridget Marie
in DC.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hell yeah, We'll find Bridget on the internet and find
Darryl Gates in this podcast where you'll learn more about them.
Right now, right, let let's do it. Let's let's hear
from this motherfucking guy, you know. Oh okay. So when
we left off with the story of Darrel Gates, it

(01:04):
was nineteen sixty five and he had become one of
the youngest inspectors in Los Angeles police history. He's in
like his mid thirties at this point, and he's overseeing
all of the patrol officers and watts, right, and that
is nineteen sixty five, and Watts, you know, as I said,
should start the dune dune dune music in your head,
you know. And we're about to talk about why because

(01:26):
on the evening of Wednesday, August seventh, nineteen sixty five,
a twenty one year old black man named Marquette Fry
is driving home drunk with his stepbrother Arnold. Right, so
these are two guys driving a little bit buzzed, which
isn't great. But it's nineteen sixty five. The cops aren't
sober on the road. Nobody is. It's the sixties, right,

(01:48):
There's no seat belts, there's barely laws. Having a roade
soda is the most normal thing. I'm not saying it's good.
I'm just saying they are not outliars here. We just
talked about how the chief of Leaves couldn't drive himself
because he was too drunk at all times. Right, just
trying to really set up that this is not like
a weird thing. These guys are not like, you know,

(02:10):
bad dudes or whatever. They're They're doing the same thing
most you've watched mad Men. We all know what life
was like in this period of time.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
Yeah, so the cops to pull you over, and you'd
be blind drunk, and they'd.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Be like, are you drunk, I'm drunk.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Okay, drive straight home. Well you drive.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
I want to see that you can stay right in
the middle line. Get in that car. No, you're not
sober enough. Do a shot of snaps before you get
back in that car.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
You gotta light your lighten your head up. Come on now.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
So Marquette and Arnold is stepbrother. They're driving back home
and an LAPD motorcycle cop pulls them both over. Right,
Fry fails a field sobriety test that I'm sure the
cop would have failed to and the cop officer Minicus,
radioed for backup in a patrol car because he's gonna
book Marquette now. Friday, he says, is initially quiet and compliant.
He's like, ah fuck, Like, okay, I just gotta keep

(03:05):
quiet and you know whatever, I'll deal with The sixties
drug driving consequences aren't that bad at this point in time. Right,
They're gonna take my fucking license otherwise no one'll be
able to drive in Los Angeles. Things get worse, though,
because his stepbrother gets out of the car, and again
everything's different. The cops would just be like, oh, you're
just passenger. Yeah, you just walk home, buddy, you know,

(03:25):
like walk home drunk. I don't give a fuck yet, right,
And so his stepbrother walks home and gets their mom
and tells them what happened, and Marquette's mom is like,
the fuck is he doing? He's drinking, And so she
shows up and she starts yelling at her son. Now,
it's a hot August night, a seed isn't really a
thing from especially in Los Angeles for people. So everyone

(03:49):
hangs out outside anyway, right, and there's fuck all to
do because it's the mid sixties. So you see some
people get pulled over and you hear yelling. What happens?

Speaker 4 (03:58):
Next?

Speaker 1 (03:59):
Everyone shows up, right, and how drunk? Is everybody about
as drunk as Marquette and a stepbrother, right, and presumably
the cop and his mom. Right, Like everyone's everyone's I'm assuming,
at a roughly equivalent level of toasted.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
You know.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Yeah, So across this crowd and across the PD, decision
making is going to be at about up like, let's
say a three out of ten for everyone involved in this, right,
No one is their best self on a hot August
night in nineteen sixty five, you.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
Know, and when you hear a commotion that brings everybody
out to be like, oh, what's going on there?

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Fuck it?

Speaker 1 (04:38):
And the cops are the same way, like, hey man,
put down your.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
Snops, let's go.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
We gotta deal with these fucking crowds, right, grab a shotgun,
put whatever in it.

Speaker 2 (04:46):
I don't care.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
By the way, your old timey drunk cop impression ten.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Ten everyone drunk, everyone right. So a crowd gathers around
the arrest at this point, and again it you know,
the city situation gets out of control in the way
that things do, and the book El a Nooir describes
what happens next. By the time Marquette got angry, a
crowd of roughly one hundred bystanders had gathered. Some of
them started to murmur angrily. Minicus's partner slipped off and

(05:14):
radioed a code eleven ninety nine. Officer needs help. He
returned with a baton used for riot control. The officer
in the patrol car grabbed his shotgun. The crowd, now
numbering perhaps one hundred and fifty people, was starting to
turn hostile. Hit those blue eyed bastards, A voice yelled,
while one Highway patrol officer waved his shotgun at the crowd.
The two motorcycle police officers attempted to grab Marquette. A

(05:35):
scuffle broke out as California Highway Patrol reinforcements arrived at
the scene. Marquette was struck by a baton and collapsed
on the ground. Missus Fry jumped onto the back of
the arresting officers, screaming, you white Southern bastard. Little brother
Ronald got into the mix too. By seven twenty three pm,
all the Fries were under arrest. The crowd was now screaming.
And what do we see here? A crowd who are

(05:57):
not their best selves and a bunch of cop show
up with weapons and start hitting people, and everything gets
much worse because the cops showed up and started hitting people.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Right, Yeah, way to de escalate cops. Yeah sounds great.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
Glad a guy with a shotgun and a baton came
into this situation that things down. The best thing to
have shown up right then would have been, like, I
don't know, the local pastor with a pot of coffee
and like, everyone, shut the hell up, drink some coffee,
and go the fuck back to your stoops. Come on,
what the fuck are you doing? Right, that's what the
situation needed.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
You know.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
Things just get worse from here on out Right, the
Fries get hauled off, and more cops starts showing up
because again everyone's drunk and everyone's fighting now, and the
cops start hitting everybody with night sticks. Fry is beaten
badly in the process of being taken away. This angers
the crowd even more is he's taken off, more officers
arrive and they just start beating members of the crowd

(06:53):
because someone thinks they get spit on. It may just
be everyone's yelling and kind of drunk in their spittleflow
because people are yelling at each other. He spit on me,
I spit on him, and then they just start beating
the fuck out of each other.

Speaker 4 (07:06):
Right.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
The cops pulled back at around seven forty pm, but
the crowd doesn't disperse and they start throwing rocks and
attacking white drivers that they see going through town. Right,
and one of these white people who's like showing up
in plane clothes is Daryl Gates. So Daryl's car gets
pelted with shit as he shows up because he's supposed
to be looking at the scene because he's thirty eight.
He's one of the youngest inspectors in LA history.

Speaker 4 (07:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
He had actually only been heading through Watts because he
was going to a labor strike nearby when he heard
over the radio that there was a civil disturbance, and
he recalls that by the time he arrived, quote, a
kind of crazed carnival atmosphere had broken out. There was
scattered violence, but there was no single mob, and things
were mostly limited to an eight block radius. So what
you have here is not a serious problem. Right. People

(07:53):
have gotten a little out of hand. The cops have
beaten up some people. People are throwing rocks at cars,
but it's kind of scattered, and there's it's not like
a motivating animus to what's happening. It's just a hot night,
and everybody's blood is up right, And the people who
know anything about the neighborhood again, like the local pastors
and like neighborhood organizers, the old grandmas and stuff, are like,

(08:16):
everyone needs to just calm the fuck down. If everyone
pulls back, folks will calm down and they'll sleep it off,
and they'll wake up the morning and it'll be okay. Right,
like anyone who knows anything is like, just give everyone
time to cool the fuck down, right, But this is
not what's going to happen, because Gates winds up the
man in charge on the ground that night, right, and
his first priority is to put a lid on the

(08:36):
situation and stop it from spreading. And he tries to
stop it from spreading by doing the same thing that
had made it to spread, right, And it had started
spreading because a bunch more cops showed up and started
hitting people, And so he's like, well, what we need
here is more cops, right, get all of our drunkest
officers at three in the morning out here with sticks.
You know, some of them gonna have shotguns, fuck it,

(08:57):
you know, make sure they got enough shnops to stay awake. Right.
So by three or four am, he's like, hey, everyone's
calmed down. This must be because all these cops made
the situation as posed to like, no, it's four in
the morning, everyone fall asleep, right. And again, if the
cops had left and not come back, people would have
woken up hungover and been like, well, last night was
kind of weird and like it would have been over probably, right,

(09:21):
m hm, And the very next day, you know, the
police or the media, you know, Parker has to give
a press conference in the LA Times is like, so,
what happens Is this a race riot because that was
happening around this period of time in the US, And
he's like, no, no, no, We're not having a race riot.
And he says it's not a race right because quote,
all the rioters are negroes. Right, can't be a race

(09:42):
riot if it's only one race. Like, just what, I
don't know, man, Okay, Like, I agree, it's not a
race riot, but your justification for why is really weird. Right, Yeah, it.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
Seems like a theme with this guy is just I
can't follow I can't follow the logic.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah, and it's true again, this is a race, right,
Yet people were angry one hot night and it's kind
of calmed down by the next day. The reason why
everyone's asking is this another race, right, is that nineteen
sixty four had seen several race riots in major cities, right,
and Parker had been warned by leaders in the community,
particularly leaders in Watts, that like that could happen here,
Like people are pissed, you know, everyone's blood is up

(10:20):
as a result of the civil rights movement as a
result of what you know, the cops beating the shit
out of protesters all around. This could happen here if
we're not safe, if we don't stop the police from
becoming from doing what they've been doing in places like Selma.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
But Gates ignores the warnings.

Speaker 4 (10:35):
Right.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
He tells all these local leaders who say, hey, we
need to keep the cops out of Watts for a
while and get people a chance to cool down. He's like,
we don't need to do that. Los Angeles has never
seen quote an insurgency situation, and it never will if
we know. If I know one thing is Daryl Gates
about the city of Los Angeles, It's never going to
see an insurgency against the police. Los Angeles will forever

(10:58):
be known, is the calmest city.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Never any problems. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
Yeah, it's interesting to me that had he listened to
these local leaders. I almost wonder if the fact that
these local leaders, the old ladies.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
And pastors and community leaders, but.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
They were saying, what we don't need is police making
the situation worse and escalating, if that seemed kind of threatening, like, oh,
you won't tell.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
Me where police can and can't go right.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
And again, I'm not a big community policing will save
all of our problems thing. But if the cops and
Watts had been like mostly black officers from Watts, that
also might have called, because they probably would have been like,
hey man, no, we shouldn't have a bunch of guys
out because my mom just told me don't do that, right,
or like my pastor is like, hey man, we don't

(11:44):
need you guys here right now. Calm the fuck down, right,
But that's not the way the laped works either, right,
So that's just not happening. These are white officers who
don't live in Watts who are being told you're going
into a very dangerous situation. Keep your guard up because
these people are animals, right, that's what they're being told
right now. Part of why things are going to get

(12:05):
a lot worse is that, you know, Gates is the
man on the ground, but Parker is running the department.
And the year before, in sixty four, as all these
race rids are happening across the country, park had gone
on a right wing radio show to warn that he
thought a slow motion socialist revolution was occurring throughout the country.
So the guy in charge of everything is like, we
have to always be on guard and respond violently to

(12:27):
anything that smells like a protest because it could be
part of this USSR backed Kami revolution. Right, So that's
how the boss is thinking about things now. Again, the
day after things kick, the day after the Fries get arrested,
and there's that first night of it's not even really rioting,
but like some scattered you know, fighting, and you know whatnot,

(12:48):
it seems like things are going to sputter out.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Right.

Speaker 1 (12:50):
There are a bunch of community meetings. Local leaders are
getting everyone together, trying to turn down the temperature and
all these again, as I said, they're being like, please
keep the cops out of town. We can handle. And
Parker ignores them, right, he actually says in a press
conference he calls them be so called leaders of the
black community, and he accuses them of trying to relieve
the Negro people of any responsibility for what had happened

(13:13):
that night. Right, Yeah, cool guy. To make a long
story short, he ignores the requests of these local leaders
to avoid sending cops back into Watts that night, and
Parker and Daryl Gates sit down and they work up
a plan where Gates is going to oversee the epulimit
of several hundred police officers into Watts that night to
deter the rioters. So things have calmed down. There's still

(13:36):
some angry people in the street, but there's no rioting,
and so they're like, well, in order to make sure
there continues to be in no rioting, let's get like
two or three hundred cops and Watts tonight, right, Let's
flood the zone with all of our armed, drunk guys.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah, yeah, that'll calm things down.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, exactly. So this does not work. This is a
dismal failure. And under Gates is direct leadership and Parker's
overall command. And I'm not trying to this is not
an episode about Parker. He does deserve a bastard's probably,
but I don't want to like. Gates is the guy
on the ground. Gates is like Patten, and Parker is
like Eisenhower. If we're making a World War two comparison

(14:14):
here to the Watts riots, you know, so under Gates's
direct leadership, in Parker's overall command, the LAPD re engages
in Watts and violence sparks off again. The next six
days would see more than six hundred buildings damaged and
destroyed and more than one thousand people injured. Thirty four
people are killed. Right, so this goes from some dudes

(14:35):
have thrown rocks one night to a huge chunk of
the city is on fire, dozens of people are dead
and more than a thousands are injured. Right, it is
a fucking calamity. And it becomes a fucking calamity because
they flood this neighborhood with cops. Well, everyone who knows
anything about Watts is like, keep them out of here. Right.
In an article for The Metropole, Aaron Staghoff Belfort explains

(14:56):
how Parker and Gates interpreted and explained what had happened
this cataclysm that erupts from their decision making quote. The
National Guard were deployed, and public officials framed the events
not merely a civil unrest but as a new form
of urban governance crisis. Parker compared the rebellion to Viet
Cong insurgency, insisting a paramilitary response was necessary, while Governor

(15:18):
Pat Brown described the events as guerrillas fighting with gangsters.
For Gates, Watts crystallized the stakes of what he saw
as America's spiraling urban crisis, the specter of disorder, black insurgency,
and the perceived loss of police control over racialized city scapes.
And he's dead. These aren't cops getting killed by fucking
Punji stick traps. They're people getting killed mostly by the cops, right,

(15:40):
and the National Guard. This is not an insurgency. That's
not what it looks like. But this is if we're
looking at like what's happening right now, where people are
talking about fifty people in front of the Ice Building
in Portland, fucking third of them dressed as frogs, being
described as like a militant movement, as an army, as
a war zone. This is the start of that language
in response to urban unrest.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
Right, This is so easy to see that through line
of what you're describing and what is happening today right
now in our cities. And it's wild to think how
this one person really is responsible for architecting a lot.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
Of them today.

Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah, Parker, and Parker too, you know his boss, but Gates,
you know, And as Gates wrote in Chief about the
Watts riots, we had no idea how to deal with this.
We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives and molotov cocktails.
It was random chaos and small disparate patches. We did
not know how to handle guerrilla warfare. Rather than a
single mob, we had people attacking from all directions. The

(16:38):
streets of America's cities had become foreign territory. And like,
the one thing that's true there is that it is
foreign territory for your cops because they're not from there
and they don't know these people, and you're not listening
to them.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Wouldn't even be in this situation.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
If you listen to the black auntie from around the way,
you might.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
Even be in this situation.

Speaker 1 (16:59):
It is like Vietnam, and that like, yeah, if you
guys just stayed out, it would have been okay, right,
This would have calmed down if you'd stayed the fuck away, right,
because then there's nothing for the angry people to get
drunk and angry about. And you're drunken angry cops aren't
going to be inciting more violence.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
Right.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
And again, just like first off, this fundamental misunderstanding is
part of the thinking here. And how they apply Vietnam
logic to Watts kind of shows you why we lost
in Vietnam, because he's describing this Gates is as like
a military insurgency, but he also describes it as random
chaos and small disparate patches. That's not what an insurgency is.

(17:38):
The Vietcong, the insurgents in Vietnam, we're not doing random, disparate,
small acts of violence. They were doing coordinated attacks working
with a functional like actual standardized military the NVA, as
part of a strategy of tension, which successfully defeated the
United States. And again, the fact that you don't know

(18:00):
this is part of why you're going to lose this
and why you're going to lose Vietnam, right, is that
we never understand what any of this is, right, because
these people are dumb, arrogant, angry assholes with guns.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
And they have a real inability to look back and
take and sort of take away things, glean things, learn lessons.

Speaker 1 (18:19):
Yeah, like the fact that this all goes as bad
as it could have gone, exactly as these community leaders predicted.
Is like, well, maybe I should change everything I think about,
like how policing should work. But that is not the
lesson that Darryl Gates is going to learn from the
Watts riots. You know, if he were an intelligent and
thoughtful man. He might have been like, well, shit, I
fucked up. Our response was clearly disaster. Maybe we need

(18:41):
to fundamentally rethink how the police respond. He does decide,
He does come to the conclusion that, like, we do
need to fundamentally rethink how police respond to civil unrest, right,
but he doesn't think maybe by having them de escalate
these situations rather than show Instead, he's going to be like, no, no, no,
we need as more cops with more that would have
calmed this ship down.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
More guns, more schnops.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Right, more schnops, more guns. That's Darrel Gates' policy, right.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Which, if we're not talking about police, it actually doesn't
sound like a bad time.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
No, no, no, people, you should in fact have more
schnops and more gun I'm always telling people this, right,
more and more guns. It makes everything better. Right, Speaking
of being heavily armed and drunk as hell, let's see
if any of our sponsors are relevant to that. And

(19:37):
we're back.

Speaker 2 (19:38):
So I'm giving you.

Speaker 4 (19:40):
I gave you a slow clap for that one.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
Thank you, Sophie, thank you. I'm glad we turned down
the one gun manufacturer that ever offered to advertise on
this podcast. Sophie knows what that story is. I can't
say anymore, probably for legal reasons.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
But oh boy, yeah, uh yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:58):
So Darryl Gates, you know, well, He's decided what we
need in the LAPD is more armed men with bigger guns, right,
and the new tactics we need are making them get
more violent, more faster. You know, Gates would devote large
portions of the remainder of his life and career to
figuring out how to get the LAPD bigger guns and

(20:19):
more men so that they could respond to any given
situation with a team of goons who had more weapons
than the National Guard, you know, heavier hardware. And this
bridget is where SWAT teams come from, because Darryl Gates's
next big move is being the co creator of the
very first SWAT team.

Speaker 4 (20:38):
Right.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
This is before he's the chief of police. Immediately after Watts,
he starts sitting down with a couple of guys. And
he's not the only founder of SWAT or even necessarily
a guy. Cut Probably most responsible for the basic ideas
that becomes SWAT is another LAPD officer, John Nelson, who's
a Vietnam veteran and a former marine who joins the
LAPD and Nelson and the Gates are both united in

(21:01):
their opinion that the department had fucked up in response
to the Watts riots in sixty five, and that we
need a new unit with special weapons and tactics that
can crack down on urban insurgencies.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
That's the birth of SWAT teams. Now, Watts isn't the
only reason why they decide they need this new team.
Within weeks of the Watts riots, large numbers of Mexican
and Filipino agricultural laborers had gone on strike in the
San Joaquin Valley. This became known as the Delano Grape Strike,
and it was a seminal moment in California's labor history,
per an article in the Metropol Quote, with the ariser

(21:32):
of Caesar Chavez and the formation of the United farm Workers,
the movement rapidly expanded in size and national visibility. Back
in Los Angeles, LAPD personnel watched with interest as television
reports highlighted the Delano Police Department's crowd control tactics and
surveillance strategies. Intrigued, they reached out to Delano officials to
observe the program firsthand and This combined with Watts and

(21:52):
some other high profile shootings that take place at the time,
are all kind of fuel for this idea that what
is its own special forces unit to take on gang crime? Right,
And that's part of what this big part of what's
happening here is we're seeing the use the first deployment
of special forces in a big way in Vietnam, and

(22:13):
a lot of these former military guys who get in
the lapd are like, you know, what's definitely going to
win the war in Vietnam special forces guys. We can
win the war on crime if we add special forces guys.

Speaker 3 (22:26):
And I have a question for you. I don't know
if this is the question you can answer. But the
way that people today, the way that people you know,
conserve it's a conservative talking point that, oh, we're at
war with our own citizens, YadA, YadA, YadA. Do you
think that this was also the beginning of thinking about,
you know, black folks in LA or Watts as kind
of enemy combatants, like talking about them like you're talking

(22:47):
about a foreign enemy. Do you think this was also
coinciding with that kind of attitude.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
Yes, And again it's never you can never with these
things say and this is the very first time, because
you can even find evidence of that around the turn
of the century, and like the twenties and thirties and
the gangster era, there's talk like that from law enforcement.
There's talk like that from law enforcement in response to
around the turn of the century when anarchist terrorism is
a really big deal in the US and elsewhere.

Speaker 4 (23:13):
Right.

Speaker 1 (23:13):
So all of these things they have earlier precursors, and
I'm not even saying that those are the very first examples,
but this is the first time that that's really happening
in a very modern way. And where they're saying the
response to this is we need to take this idea
that's new in the military, of these special forces units,
and we need specops units for American cities. Right. That
is very new and modern, and that does start exactly here, right,

(23:37):
And it is to a degree building on things. You
can draw a line again from the birth of SWAT
to back to the hunt for John Dillinger, and you
know these FBI units that are going after gangsters, right,
this is not entirely disconnected from that stuff in the past, right,
But it's Watts and the Delano grape strike that really
are the direct inciting influences for the birth of SWAT,

(23:59):
right for the birth of this idea that our cops
are at war in American cities and we need to
take the tactics that we're using in these colonial wars
overseas and bring them home. This is where, really when
that gets started in an organized way. Now, if you
know anything about SWAT units, you know the name stands
for Special Weapons and Tactics or did you know that,

(24:20):
bridget I did know that. Yeah, yeah, so that's like
what the actual like, that's the current acronym for, or
that's what it stands for. But initially SWAT was always
the acronym. But that's not what it stood for initially.
And to give that story, I'm going to quote from
Gates's book Chief. One day, with a big smile on
my face, I popped in to tell my deputy Chief

(24:42):
Ed Davis that I'd bought up a new acronym for
my special new unit. It's SWAT. I said, Oh, that's
pretty good. What's it stand for? Special Weapons Attack Teams?
Davis blinked, No, there was no way, he said, dismissively,
that he would ever use the word attack. I went
out crestfallen. But a moment later I was back special
weapons and tactics. I said, Okay, no problem, that's fine,

(25:04):
Davis said, And that's how SWAT was born.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
I have an important question for you.

Speaker 3 (25:09):
Have you ever seen the terrible movie Swat with Samuel L.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Jackson from two thousand and three?

Speaker 1 (25:14):
I have, yes, and that is a god awful movie.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
And this is, by the way, the fact that there
are TV shows and movies about SWAT, as I'll talk about,
is a huge factor in the birth of copaganda that's
happening at the same time SWAT is being born. I'll
talk about that in a little bit later, right, And
quite frankly, I do like Gates as I wish we'd
use the original name for SWAT that Gates came up with,

(25:42):
because it's truer to what they do. They're teams with
special weapons who attack American citizens, Right, That's what SWAT is,
you know, crediting the guys who are best known today
for throwing flash bangs into children's cribs and lighting babies
on fire. Like I don't know if tactics is what
i'd call that. I guess you could say it's a

(26:04):
tactic you know, I like what Gates's original acronym is
at least honest, right, but it's bad optics. You know,
Davis is his coach deputy chief is probably right that, like,
now we don't want to attack in there, right, come on, bro,
Like that's kind of fucked up. Yeah. So the broader
strategic impulse behind the creation of the first SWAT team

(26:26):
is essentially cribbing from how the US military was handling Vietnam.
And this is coming to be in like the late
sixties early seventies, as it's become clear that we're losing
in Vietnam and that this this idea of well, yeah,
we have you have these small teams that are super
hyper trained for doing very specific acts of targeted violence,
and it's not working. We're not winning because just having

(26:49):
some guys who are good at killing, really good at killing,
doesn't win wars, because wars aren't mostly about how good
you can train a small number of dudes to kill.
They're about whether or not you have a plan for victory. Right.
We didn't win World War Two because our men Man
demand were the best killers. Mandman German soldiers were generally

(27:13):
better fighters than their counterparts in most theaters, not to
the extent that this is usually claimed, but generally this
is the case, right, And they lost badly because we
had all of the resources and the logistics, And that's
what wins wars. Having gasoline and steel wins wars. Knowing

(27:35):
where to move men and where not to waste their
lives wins wars. Individual dudes being really good at shooting
other individual dudes doesn't win wars. It just doesn't. It
never has and it never will. What wins wars is
having a plan for how to win that fucking war.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
Also, let's say that it did. Why would you want
to take the tactics of a war that did it
go well?

Speaker 1 (28:00):
That we get our at well, it's very obvious by
the late sixties, Oh shit, no, this has worked well. Right.
That's what's constantly amazing to me when everyone's like, what
we got to do is what we're doing in Vietnam?

Speaker 4 (28:10):
Why?

Speaker 2 (28:11):
Why?

Speaker 3 (28:14):
So?

Speaker 1 (28:15):
Gates, though, is reading obsessively from US military counterinsurgency manuals,
and he's learning about coin counterinsurgency strategies in the early
Vietnam War period, and the fact that those strategies had
failed was immaterial to him, as Aaron Staghoff Belford writes
he consulted with marines at the Naval Armory and Chavez Ravine.
It was out of a belief in counterinsurgency's ability to

(28:35):
discipline the metropolis where domestic unrest could be neutralized like
insurgencies abroad, that SWAT was born. Now, shockingly, the other
higher ups at the LAPD don't immediately embrace this idea.
So Gates and a couple other people have to work
in their own time, kind of clandestinely to set up
the SWAT team. They're initially doing this sort of unsanctioned

(28:57):
Staghoff bell Ford describes it as an unsann and experiment,
and they start by bringing in this part maybe apocryphal,
but the story is, they're like, who is best at
shooting in the whole department. Let's get the twenty best
sharp shooters we got and those will be our first
LAPD SWAT team. And they carry out these clandestine training
operations on farms in the valley. Eventually they graduate to

(29:19):
training with Marines at Camp Pendleton, which feels like a
violation of the spirit of possecombatatas if not the letter
of the law. Right Army's not supposed to engage in policing,
but we can train the cops, right, Why is that
a problem with anybody?

Speaker 4 (29:34):
You know?

Speaker 2 (29:34):
Found a little workaround, found a little workaround.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
So ultimately they gain approval to execute their plan, and
the first SWAT team officially starts working near the end
of nineteen sixty nine, and its inaugural action is a
raid on the Black Panther Party headquarters in south central LA.
Officers show up with a warrant and they bring grenade launchers, dynamite,
and other heavy weapons with them. Shockingly, Bridget do you

(29:59):
think think this is going to de escalate tensions and
get the Black Panthers to turn themselves in peacefully?

Speaker 2 (30:05):
I can't imagine it did.

Speaker 1 (30:07):
No, when an army shows up at their door, they
respond as if an army has shown up at their door,
and the firefight that follows more than five thousand rounds
are exchanged. Now, despite all of their training and year,
the SWAT cops don't perform notably better than the Panthers.
Four police officers are injured and four Panthers are injured,

(30:27):
and again no one dies, which is wild for how
many bullets are flying in this fucking thing, right, part
of this is just that this is kind of a
thing that you learn if you study the history of
like gun training, people don't know how to shoot back
then by and large, like even experience, so don't are
not accurate with their guns. That's not what training is about.

(30:48):
It's about firing for effect, right, it's not about hitting
individual people. And by god, everyone sucks ass with guns
back in the day, not.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
Firing for effect, Like, well, I did it hit him,
but looks pretty cool, But I.

Speaker 1 (31:01):
Filled that whole area with fucking bullets, right, And then
is in war that is what you do in war,
very few bullets. I think in the Iraq War its
an average of like fifty thousand rounds fired by coalition
forces for every person killed, you know, because nearly every
bullet that's fired in war is for suppression. But you
shouldn't do that for policing, because bullets keep going, right, Like,

(31:25):
it's bad to do this in a neighborhood filled with people.
It's a miracle that no one dies during this gunfight, right,
it is a fucking miracle. And in the end there
is massively violent and insane use of force accomplishes nothing.
The cops don't even succeed by their own standards. They

(31:46):
arrest six Panthers who are acquitted on most of the
charges against them, because again, the cops don't do anything
by the law. They just show up and there's immediately
a gun battle in South central and and the fucking
courts are the judges, and our juries are.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
Like, what the fuck? This is nuts?

Speaker 1 (32:05):
Right, these guys are guilty of most of the things
that you accuse them of. Gates himself later admitted the
apartment was roundly criticized by its brutal activity, and he complains,
even though our injuries are worse than theirs, and again,
maybe that's evidence that your training doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, maybe something's not going right.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Maybe this didn't work. Maybe this is a miserable failure.
You get send all this time and money training these
guys to be super soldiers, and some panthers in their
house fight them to a stand still damn near right,
and you don't even you don't even win in court
against them because you did this big, insane, violent thing.

(32:45):
And Gates complained later in his autobiography, nobody, not even
the media, ever learned the whole truth. And the whole
truth is that in a nondescript military vehicle parked in
a side street, sat one very frightening military grenade launcher,
primed and ready to blast the house to Kingdom. Calm right,
He's like, the press never knew that we had a
grenade launcher that we could have used to blow everything up,

(33:06):
and we didn't, And I'm like, do you see that?
That makes it worse? Yeah, should the lesson not have been?
My God, what a nightmare that we had this thing there, Jesus,
can you imagine this whole thing ended without anyone dying,
and we might have blown up half the neighborhood.

Speaker 2 (33:19):
Fuck, no one's praising our restraint, though.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
No one's praising that we didn't even we asked to
use it and the National Guard said no, we wanted
to use it, but they didn't let us, and no
one died, and that wound up being fine. God, can
you imagine, like again, never learns a lesson, this motherfucking guy,
And you know, the lesson from all of this should
have been, well, I guess we probably shouldn't give Daryl
Gates and his cops access to military grade weaponry and

(33:46):
tell them that they're members of a special elite unit
because that's like a drug. It's like giving cocaine to
a nine year old, Like, oh boy, this is gonna
just make everything about this kid more of a problem,
right Like. And the problem is that after this fucking
swat raid, SWAT teams spread like a drug across the
country because every other police department and all of the

(34:08):
you know, mostly white citizens watching this, they see how
cool these guys look, and they're like, we need swat
teams where we live. I feel like I'm not safe
without a SWAT team. Now, A big part of the
inciting reason why swat teams are going to have the
funding that they are is that in nineteen sixty eight,
President Lyndon Baines Johnson had signed an omnibus crime bill

(34:28):
into law, and among other things, this crime bill created
the LEEAA, or Law Enforcement Association Administration. When Nixon succeeded LBJ,
he appointed a guy named Donald Santarelli to head the agency. Now,
Donald's not going to be along around a terribly long time.
He has to resign in seventy four because he leaked,
like the news leaked reports that after the Watergate break in,

(34:49):
he said that Nixon should resign. But before he resigns.
He turns the newly minted LAAA into an organ for
funding and supporting the spread of the ideas that Gates
and his fellows had used to justify the creation of
the first swat team. The LAA used federal funds to
push more police departments to follow Los Angeles and to
start treating policing as not the maintenance of law and order,

(35:11):
but as counterinsurgency. From that article in the metropol Through
the LAA, federal funds and surplus military equipment were funneled
into police local police departments, facilitating the expansion of SWAT
programs nationwide. Public enthusiasm grew after the high profile in
nineteen seventy four standoff between the LAPDS swat Team and
the Symbionese Liberation Army during the Patty Hearst kidnapping case.

(35:34):
And have you heard much about the SLA and the
Patty Hearst's case.

Speaker 2 (35:39):
I know a little bit about it, but I don't
know that I know the broad strokes.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
Yeah. I probably learned about this from a fucking cartoon
that I watched in the early two thousands for the
first time. The SLA isn't super well known today. But
from nineteen seventy three to seventy five it was a
militant left wing terrorist organization. It's sometimes called the first
recognized by law enforcement left wing terrorist organization. I don't
know if that's entirely accurate if you want to look

(36:03):
at kind of the history of like anarchists, you know,
but they weren't necessarily always using the term terrorism back
in that time. We're talking of the turn of the century, right,
But like, our president is assassinated by an anarchist, and
there's the FBI gets a lot of its early power
cracking down on that. So, you know, you can kind
of argue that point. But that's one thing that the
SLA is sometimes called. And this group they rob banks,

(36:26):
they assassinate the superintendent of Oakland Public Schools. They're a
messy group of people, right. Their name is a reference
to the word symbiosis, and they are ostensibly a United
Front kind of left wing militant group. Probably the most
infamous thing about them is that they kidnapped Patty Hirst,
who is heir to the Hurst Publishing fortune. And depend
on who you depending on who you listen to, they

(36:47):
either brainwashed Patty or radicalized her into participating in a
bank robbery. In the late spring of seventy four, a
petty crime led LAPD investigators to a home in South
LA where the SLA had set up shop. Furled into
an attempted raid and then a siege, which became a
two hour long firefight in which six SLA militants died
at the hands of Gates. As SWAT officers, he had

(37:09):
field command during the entire incident, which is filmed and
broadcast live, and it acts as the coming out party
for these fancy new SWAT officers and the public's broader awareness. Right,
this is when most Americans become aware of the SWAT team.
Is this massive videotaped gunfight with automatic weapons and shit

(37:29):
against the Symbionese Liberation Army. Right, this group of communist
insurgents trying to overthrow the government. And the fact that
again the cop showing up with all these weapons turns
this into an even worse situation than it might have been.
The fact that the Symbionese Liberation Army had never been
a real threat to the government, none of that matters
as much as the footage that comes out of this.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
Right, I'm sorry if you are living in a if
you're a white person living in a white suburb, or
this kind.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
Of hre this kind of like these are mostly white attempts.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
Yeah, yeah, Like I could see how you can watch
this stuff unfold and think we need to have that here.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
We're watching this like with a fucking boner.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
Absolutely. Absolutely. And in nineteen seventy five, right around the
same time, a police procedural show SWAT comes out for
the first time, right, and this is one of the
very first pieces of copaganda. It's not exactly the first,
but it is this heavily dramatized like image of the
SWAT team, right, and it's set in a fake city

(38:30):
in California that's clearly a stand in for Los Angeles.
The SWAT TV show's theme song reaches number one on
the Billboard Top one hundred in nineteen seventy six. A
former LAPD SWAT officer, Richard Kelbaugh, is the show's technical consultant.
And it has these these very nice looking navy blue uniforms,
and you know, they've got SWAT, you know, written across

(38:51):
there all of their gear and everything, and it helps
make SWAT into a a household name, right, you know.
And it's kind of a side effect. Later in his life,
after leaving the LAPD, Gates will consult on a series
of SWAT of video games called Darryl F. Gates Police
Squest Swat, where he's a character in the video games.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yo, you have to find this game and play it.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
Oh yeah, I really need to get a copy of
this motherfucker. And look at that sound of a bit, right, like,
oh my god, But this is huge, right, And this
is again coppaganda had existed. You could talk about the
show Dragnet, but this is the first time you have
both a new police unit with access to military weapons
that rolls out starting in LA and then you know

(39:37):
nationwide at the same time as this TV show that
really hypes up the supposed capabilities of the unit. Right,
And as a result, Darryl is swept into office as
the LAPD police chief himself in nineteen seventy eight. You know,
he has turned himself into a celebrity by co creating
SWAT and by making it not just at the same

(39:58):
time as it becomes an actual unit in police departments
across the country, it becomes an idea in American heads
through this TV show, and that's a very new concept. Right,
the same thing's going to happen with the special investigatory
units that use like science and fux oh CSI. Right,
The same thing happens with CSI in like the early

(40:19):
two thousands, I think, late nineties, early two thousands, right,
where right as CSI teams are becoming more of a
thing in law enforcement, there's this TV show that really
hypes up with all of this fancy new science can do. Right,
it's the same playbook that Gates is really writing in
this period of time, you know. And some individual pieces
of this it existed prior to Gates, but he puts

(40:39):
them together for the first time. Right Now, despite the
fact that you have all of this money coming into cops,
that cops are getting more guns and more funding than ever,
gun crime and gang violence only rises, right, and again,
thoughtful people responded to this should have by being like, oh,
this probably doesn't help, Like maybe doing all this is bad,

(41:02):
Maybe this is actually part of the problem. Right, But
the way it gets carried in the news and the
way Gates frames it is look at how crime keeps rising.
We got to have more cops and guns. Huh, crime
rose again, we need even more cops and guns right,
and Gates successfully positions himself as the public face of
militarized law enforcement. He is declaring war on the thugs

(41:24):
and radicals, in the eyes of conservative white America, were
responsible for everything that was going wrong in the country. Well,
it's not that these policies are bad or that adding
more men with guns to the situation isn't working. Is
that we don't have enough men with guns. Come on,
give us some more. We promise, just one more man,
just one more gun, just one more guy. You know,
it's the same thing you have like highways in major cities,

(41:45):
like one more lane, one more lane, It'll fix it,
It'll fix it. Never quite works that way.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
It's such a frustrating conversation because people who continue to
beat the drum that we need more police, more cops,
more like the police need more money, we need more.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
How much is enough to show it's not working?

Speaker 1 (42:02):
When is it gonna work? Not yet? Huh?

Speaker 2 (42:05):
All right?

Speaker 1 (42:07):
Now, there are some other reads of the situation. Right
as Darryl becomes police chief in seventy eight, a month
after he's sworn in, he speaks before a Latino civil
rights organization, and he notes that black officers in his opinion,
were more proactive and trying to get promoted than Latino officers.
He claimed to have talked with a Mexican American police
lieutenant who failed the captain's exam, and he tells this guy, well,
you didn't pass because you're lazy. And the news reports

(42:29):
this as like, oh, he's being racist against Latinos, which
is pretty accurate if you ask me. And this is
the first time there's calls for his resignation. It's this
thing that happens. He talks out of pocket right after
he becomes the chief, and people are like, this guy
should quit. He does not. Now. Around the same time
as he becomes chief, a white former cop starts showing

(42:49):
up on local TV news shows wearing a mask, right
and like talking about the LAPD. As an insider in
City of Courts, the Great Mike Davis describes how he
would quote luridly chronicle the racism and trigger happiness of
the Blue Knights towards ordinary blacks. Gates, the third Parker
protege in a Road to command, the laped ridiculed these
charges and the liberals who listened to them. Soon afterwards

(43:12):
came the police killing of Yulia Love, a thirty nine
year old black widow, in default of her gas bill.
Community outrage was so great that WATS Assembly member Maxine
Waters demanded Chief Gates, we want you out. Gates defended
the twelve thirty eight caliber holes in missus Love's body
before a Cowed police commission. Several hundred black clergy members
petitioned the Carter administration to intervene. They asked the Justice

(43:33):
Department to probe a pattern of systematic abuse of non whites,
including more than three hundred police shootings of minority citizens
in the last decade. Meanwhile, the Coalition Against Police Abuse
collected tens of thousands of signatures calling for the establishment
of a civilian police review board. So what you have
here isn't just the birth of militarized policing. It's the
start of this great clash between cops and their elected

(43:56):
allies who say we have to just let our heroes
do what they need to do to fight the bad guys,
and all the regular people being like, but they're just
saying whoever they hate is the bad guys. And a
lot of the times this like thirty nine year old
widow that they shot twelve times because she got angry
that her gas bill wasn't paid. Why did guys with
guns have to show up to that? Is that the
solution to a lady who's not paying her gas bill

(44:16):
and yells at the gas man, is that did that
make it better? Right? No, but that's not what these
people are thinking. And part of Gates's genius, unfortunately, is
that he is very good at politicking during this period
of time, and he manages to fight off these attempts
at oversight of the labed in large part two to
the fact that he makes this very intelligent, strategic alliance

(44:39):
with Mayor Bradley, who was eyeing a run for governor, and,
as Davis writes, quote, wanted to preclude any stance that
could be interpreted by white voters as anti police to
continue from city of courts. Thus insulated from police accountability,
Chief Gates was only emboldened to taunt the black community
with increasingly contemptuous or absurd excuses for police brutality. In

(44:59):
nineteen eighty two, for example, following a rash of lapd
choke hold killings of young black men in custody, he
advanced the extraordinary theory that the deaths were the fault
of the victim's racial anatomy, not excessive police force. We
may be finding that in some blacks when the Karatei
choke hold is applied to the veins or arteries, they
don't open up as fast as they do want normal people.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Oh my god, they normal that today.

Speaker 1 (45:21):
Literally, Like, so I see is the birth of it?

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Yeah, like, I have sickle cell trade. And they'll if
anything ever happens to me, I know, the first thing
they'll say.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
As well, did have sickle cell trade?

Speaker 1 (45:32):
Sickle cell anemia? Right, this is excited delirium, Right, this
is the first No, no, no, it's not the fault
of the cops joking. This guy, his body's wrong. It's
not normal. If it was normal, he'd still be alive.

Speaker 4 (45:46):
So fucked.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
And also so it's it's I see that they're they
don't want to say we kill them because they were black,
but they're the explanation. It's so, I mean almost they've
come up with something that sounds a little less. They
weren't normal.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
You know what I'm saying. It's hardly even a dog
with ale.

Speaker 1 (46:05):
Yeah, it's just a whistle, right, Yeah, it's just a whistle. Now,
this should have saying like this should have seen him
forced out, flung into the sun, I might say, but
unfortunately for all of us, his years in power coincide
with something that's going to supercharge his ability to get
not just white community leaders, but black community leaders on

(46:25):
his side, which is the crack epidemic.

Speaker 4 (46:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (46:29):
And this the fact that this is so bad, that
the damage crack is doing to communities, you know, in
black neighborhoods is so severe. A lot of local black
community organizations are like, well, as bad as this guy is,
maybe we do need more cops. Maybe that's preferable to
continue letting the crime and drug situation spiral out of control. Right.

(46:49):
And Gates is smart enough that he knows I can't
just play the race card for the white folks, Right,
I do have to talk to these black community leaders
and be like, yeah, more cops will fix the crack epidemic. Right,
that will make your neighborhoods better, I promise, And he
realizes there's a future in playing his drive for increased

(47:10):
power and weapons to the police as part of a
broader anti gang effort. Right, you do the anti gang stuff,
and you talk about it one way to white people
to say I need more guns, and you talk about
it to black community leaders to say, well, these gangs
are doing so much damage, you need more cops in
your neighborhoods. Right, And he's able to do both of
these things very effectively throughout the nineteen eighties. And you

(47:32):
know another thing that kind of helps to charge his
power during this period. A situation he very effectively utilizes
is the nineteen eighty four Olympics, which are hosted in
Los Angeles. The LAPDS Olympics liaison is going to be
the guy who later leads the department's drug and gang
policing unit, and they use this massive security budget that
they get for the Olympics to get machine guns, infrared

(47:56):
like sighting devices, and V one hundred armored vehicles like
you know, basically tanks, and a lot of this equipment
winds up in the hands of the SWAT teams after
the Olympics, and it's never useful for the Olympics, right,
But the fact that the Olympics goes off without a
hitch that it's not violent is like, well, obviously, giving
these guys tanks is necessary, and they rebrand these Vietnam

(48:19):
era armored personnel carriers as the LAPD rescue vehicle, even
though it's equipped with this like fourteen foot battering ram.
You know, like there's a there's a very famous incident
right after the Olympics where they take one of these
tanks and they use it to smash down what they
call the rock house and Pacoima and the officers there
find two women and three kids with ice cream but

(48:41):
there's a little bit of marijuana. Now there's no guns,
there's no rock, there's no crack. There's a tiny bit
of pot. Two women and three kids, and they crush
this house with a tank, and Daryl Gates is like,
this is a great tactic. This is gonna make all
the rock houses shut down. The crack app it's gonna
go away because we have a tank now, right, And
unfortunately enough community leaders are like, well, maybe this is

(49:04):
what we need. That he's able to build, He's able
to keep enough of a coalition together to keep support
for this. Right. It's a very depressing story, but it
does work.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
And I hate I mean, I keep I promise I'll
stop trying to draw parallels to today. But the way
that Trump talks about, particularly when it comes to black
women community leaders, and I think he's making this up
to be clear, but you know, exploiting the very real
harms in black communities and then turning that into oh,
we have beautiful black women in maga hats in Chicago

(49:38):
running out under the street saying bring the National Guard,
bring whoever you want, as long as you can fix
the crime. It Really, I can just draw such a
straight line from what you're describing to this what's happening now?

Speaker 1 (49:49):
Yep, yep, it's and it's I mean, that's part of
why Gates is so relevant, right, is that he's writing
the playbook for everyone who's going to fall in. It
works really fucking well. Unfortunately, you know what else works well?
The Products and Services Sponsor podcast and we're back. So

(50:16):
On Good Friday nineteen eighty seven, Darryl Gates gave a
press conference celebrating the success of his program at ending
street crime. Right, the fact that we're doing all these
mass arrests. Right, they've launched this in the you know,
after the Olympics, they start launching these these huge like raids,
these mass police rates. Will they send two or three
hundred officers into a neighborhood as part of an anti

(50:38):
gang sweep, right, and these big sweeps, these are evolutions
of the sweeps against homeless encampments that the LAPD had
been de using for years. They were like, let's take
this same thing we've already been doing on homeless people
and do it in black neighborhoods right under the aegis
of the gang related active trafficker Suppression system. So called
drug neighborhoods would be raided by groups of two hundred
or more heavily armed officers who are told to stop

(51:01):
and interrogate anyone they suspect it of being in a gang.
Such suspicions could be justified by something as simple as
the use of gang hand signals, which is like did
a guy use his hands? Did he do anything with
his hands? It's a hand signal. Does he have red shoelaces?
Only gangmers have red shoelaces, Pick them up, search him,
beat him up if you gotta right. And you know

(51:23):
it's the start of this. We're seeing this now with
the trendy Aragua right where they're like, oh, yeah, these
are gang tattoos. This autism speaks or whatever tattoo is
a gang sign. You know that all the gangs of
these Venezuelan gangs love these tattoos. Like this is again
a lot of this whole playbook. None of it's new
that we're seeing right now. It's all come. A lot

(51:44):
of it starts with Dearrol Gates. So he after they
start doing all these huge sweeps, you know, if this
has been going on for a little while, he gives
this big press conference on Good Friday eighty seven where
he's like, we've eradicated street crime with our mass sweeps
of drug neighborhoods. The same night that he makes this brag,
there's a drive by by the crips that kills a
nineteen year old woman, right, so he declares he does

(52:07):
a mission accomplished moment like George W. Bush. And then
there's a massive gang drive by that gets a lot,
that kills a young woman and gets a ton of publicity,
and everyone's like, it kind of seems like you're not
stopping these guys. They just shot up a neighborhood. Hey, Darryl, Darryl,
is this maybe not working like we said?

Speaker 2 (52:26):
Mission accomplished, Mission accomplished. Fuck you.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
So the fact that his heavy handed tactics had done
nothing to actually reduce violence. Weren't seen as evidence that
Daryl had been wrong. Gates successfully spun his failures into
proof that the police needed. You want to guess what
they need More guns than tanks, more guns and tanks
and less accountability.

Speaker 4 (52:46):
Baby.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
So, because he declares victory and then there's this shooting,
he announces a super sweep, the biggest sweep ever operation
all caps hammer. Now, this is just a PR stunt.
They don't know, not going into a neighborhood because it's
the head of where the crips are, because there's a
particular nexus of gang houses. They pick basically a random

(53:07):
spot and fill it with cops and guns and tanks. Right,
and Gates describes it as the lapds D Day. You know,
this is our Normandy Landings in this random neighborhood that
we picked. Unfortunately, a lot of local black elected leaders
support the chief senator. State Senator Diane Watson's press secretary
told reporters that quote in a state of war, civil

(53:29):
rights are suspended for the duration of the CONFLICTI thank you, Diane.
That's the right thing to say.

Speaker 3 (53:36):
Great, I mean, I do think we have to contend
with the ways that a lot of our black community leaders,
black elders did sort of support some of this tough
on crime policing.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
And yeah, it's just a reality. It's it's not one
that I likes.

Speaker 1 (53:53):
The truth, it's it's just a reality of the situation.
And it's you know, it's crack, is scary, and a
lot of what's known now about the involvement of the
federal government and some of that is not known fully
at the time. Right, That does take a while to
really percolate out. But so there's I can extend, I
can understand who a degree why this is a scary
you do have to understand, which I don't say to

(54:16):
absolve any of these local leaders of accountability. But there's
a fog of war, right. I hate I'm now adding
to the problem by describing this war. But people don't
have perfect information about what's going on, right, I know
what you mean. People are making the decisions they have
based on incomplete data, as they always are, right, and
Daryl is taking advantage of that very effectively. While most
of his political work and work efforts are focused on

(54:38):
getting more guns, more power, and less accountability, he always
maintained a high degree of skill at manipulating public perception,
and perhaps his most lasting success in this arena came
with his creation of an organization and I'm going to
guess impacted the education of basically everyone listening to this show, DARE. Right,
let's talk about where DARE comes from. In nineteen eighty three,

(55:00):
Gates sat down with LA school district officials to sketch
out the dimensions of a hybrid police public school program
drug abuse resistance education. For the few people listening who
didn't undergo DARE classes. They involved uniformed cops coming into
classrooms and lecturing kids about the dangers of drugs, both
the supposed deadly realities of different substances and liberal use
of hard nosed life on the street. Anecdotes from these

(55:22):
cops as supposed backgrounds. Right, I was in a crack
house and saw crack babies and yeah, yeah, this is
how scary these drugs are. And everyone was smoking the
marijuana and that's why their babies came out wrong or whatever. Right,
we heard some shit, you know. To make a long
story short, DARE was a massive success, and it spread
to school districts nationwide and soon corporate sponsors. Because Darryl

(55:44):
is like, you know, police departments shouldn't pay for this,
and the schools don't have money to pay for this.
Let's have corporations sponsored DARE, and that way corporations can
pay for police officers to be doing police work in schools.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
The scam within the scam.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
Right, right, And again this is the start of law
enforcements funded and supported by business interests. You know, this
is where that becomes it. Not that it had never
happened before, but this really institutionalizes it in a major way. Now,
there's a lot of data that shows DARE did not
work at its intended goal. A significant amount of information

(56:22):
suggests that among teens who attended DARE programs, drug use
increased during the period of time that that DARE was
in effect. Right, and some evidence even suggests that a
number of students were more likely to experiment with drugs
if they had attended DARE programs. Right, And perhaps your
host is one of those students, you know, maybe maybe

(56:44):
who's to say, certainly not my DARE officer.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
I remember my DARE officer very well.

Speaker 3 (56:51):
He I mean, I do have to wonder because I
was like a pretty sheltered kid at this point, and
I was hearing about drugs for the first time from
IDA officer, and he didn't make them sound.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
Boring, oh man, make them. He didn't make them sound
like something I really want to sing.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
You say it feels so good. People ruin their lives
over it. Well, I might want to feel that good.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
I want to see what all the fuss is about.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
Yeah, these drugs sound interesting. Now, this fact, I will say,
one of the errors people make when they criticized there
is they just read the fact that, like, well, students
who attended DARE may have been more likely to use drugs,
and guy say may have because none of these studies
is suggestive as they are of that fact. None of
this is like proof of that.

Speaker 4 (57:35):
Right.

Speaker 1 (57:35):
Studies could be flawed in a number of ways. Drug
use could have just been increasing unrelated to DARE. But
there's no evidence that DARED decreased drug use, right, And
there's evidence suggestive that it did increase drug use.

Speaker 4 (57:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (57:47):
And unfortunately that fact leads a lot of people to
just dismiss DARE as a failure, as oh, what a
waste of time and money, This was a bad idea. Right,
That is not I do say it's a failure. If
you're talking about it from a standpoint of decreasing drug use.
That's not primarily why Daryl Gates likes the DARE program,
and it succeeds from his point of view in its goal.

(58:08):
And to describe how that is the case, I went
to quote now from a study in the Cambridge University
Press by Max Felker cantor quote the DARE officer helped
normalize and legitimize the police as a feature of the
school environment, and alongside the just say no message, helped
embed schools into the carcerral state. As a police led

(58:28):
drug education program, DARE developed broad based appeal among policymakers, educators,
and law enforcement, driving home the message that solving youth
drug use was best left to law enforcement rather than
social services or public health. DARE was promoted as a
non punitive and preventative program to help students resist drugs
by learning how to say no, recognizing the consequences of
their choices, and agreeing to the importance of personal responsibility

(58:51):
and the moral values of right and wrong. But employing
cops as teachers and promoting a zero tolerance message tried
drug education to a carceril frame. Indeed, dear officials and
policy makers. Use of the term drug abuse to describe
any substance use whatsoever, constituted a rejection of all alternative
approaches to drug education, such as responsible use, and constituted
a key part of the effort of drug warriors, ranging

(59:13):
from law enforcement officials to Secretary of State William Bennett
to President Ronald Reagan, to insist that the only correct
decision was to avoid drugs or face the consequences.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
So mission accomplished.

Speaker 1 (59:25):
Kind of yeah, it gets cops in schools and makes
that normal. It makes people think drugs and kids using
them is a law enforcement problem. Right, It's not an
education problem. It's not something social services solve. A cop
with a gun needs to solve kids using drugs. Right,
And the data shows that there are drug education programs

(59:46):
that reduce drug abuse. And the kind of drug abuse
that's a problem because you know, it's not a problem.
Is a kid trying pot once, It's not even that
bit of a problem. If a kid tries coke or
a fucking oxy once. What's a problem is number one,
people getting stuff that's tainted and can kill them and
not knowing what to do if a friend od's And
the other problem is people not feeling like there's any

(01:00:07):
resources if they do start to have a problem, and
if you do, start a drug education by saying this
stuff is best avoided, certainly while you're young, but you
also include and if you have a friend using and
it looks like they're not breathing, right, here's where you
get narcan or if you call nine one one and
get an ambulance, they will not arrest you. Right, Like,

(01:00:27):
these are the kinds of things I'm not saying that
I'm not giving. This is not a comprehensive look, but
this is the kind of stuff that works. And it
doesn't work because it stops everyone from using every drug.
It works by understanding that some people will use drugs
and in addition to trying to tell them that they should,
you know, avoid that stuff, especially when they're young, you
should tell them what to do if people do, and
if something goes wrong and that stops them from dying.

(01:00:49):
That can make a mistake go from something that ends
a life from something that's just a mistake that someone
gets over.

Speaker 4 (01:00:55):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:00:57):
But I can see how in this dare program dynamic
the only resource in scare quotes is carcorle is police
is you know, your friend getting locked up. That's the
only thing they're offering.

Speaker 1 (01:01:10):
Yeah, exactly, exactly, and that just doesn't I will say,
you know, in Texas, where I grew up in Plano,
for a big chunk of my childhood, we had something
called the Texas Heroin massacre, which is what the Rolling
Stone called it, which is when I think six kids
odd in one night because an extra strong batch of
horse got into the supply and Plano, you know, parts
of Plano at least, are more affluent, so kids had money,
and so they were able to afford to do heroin.

(01:01:32):
And that's why you had a bunch of these kids
odeing in this you know, boring suburban area where there
wasn't a lot to do besides drugs, and kids had
pocket money. And one of my teachers, Miss Gross, my
health teacher, when I was in high school. Her son
hadn't died, but two of his friends had and he
had had permanent brain damage when he oweded. She was
the only good anti drug speech I ever had, cause

(01:01:52):
she was like, you will experiment as young adults, almost
certainly most kids do, and I'm not going to tell
you what to do, and I'm not going to lecture you.
What I will say is, for the love of God,
don't inject anything. And I never did you know, Gross, Yeah,
thank you missus. Gross. Yes, don't shoot up stuff kids,

(01:02:14):
and you know fentanyls and the shit. Now that make
the test your shit. If you're gonna do stuff kids
or whatever. I'm not telling you to do drugs, but
some people are going to learn how testing kids work.
Getting arcade from Dance.

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
It's an organization that gives you test kits.

Speaker 1 (01:02:28):
Yeah, Project Dance Safe and yeah, avoid injecting. You're not
a nurse. Don't shoot stuff into your body kids, right, Like,
test your stuff, stick to snortables or whatever, you know,
smoke whatever. Don't shoot things into your body kids. Please.
Maybe if we keep it to that, we can stop
some of this.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:49):
So, there is some mixed evidence as to whether or
not DARE programs made kids more or less trusting of police.
Some of the studies I've seen suggests that white kids
trusted police more because of DARE, and black kids trusted
them meet less. But this is an entirely consistent you know,
we don't have perfect data on this. What DARE does
do is it keeps Gates's name in the news, and
it ensures him regular invitations to high society and government

(01:03:12):
events in DC and elsewhere. As crime escalated, so did
incidents of horrific police violence, generally against non white people.
Per an article in the La Times, there came a
rash of LAPD scandals, and WISH officers were accused of
cavorting sexually with teenage Explorer scouts, getting drunk in police
station parking lots, sorting with prostitutes, and stopping motorists to
rob them of their wallets. Two members of a special

(01:03:34):
LAPD burglary unit pleaded guilty to stealing electronic equipment from
a shop in Hollywood.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
Fratinizing with teens wasn't just a prank of some sort?

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):
Rank, Yeah, maybe there were fake Maybe there's some more
of those joke rape complaints, right, that Darryl is such
a fan of Gates got much of the blame from
the media, citizens and politicians, including Mayor Bradley. Several high
ranking officers even suggested privately that Gates should step down.
Said he Hall trimmed his budget request and required him
to hire more women, minorities, and civilians. He struggled to

(01:04:05):
police the nation's second largest city with a force that
was too small for its size compared to other major cities.
At the end of his tenure, Gates said Los Angeles
had two officers per thousand residents, in contrast with New
York and Chicago's four per thousand. So, you know, things
are as the eighties turned into the nineties. They're not working.
The shit that used to work don't work no more.
For Darryl Right, he's starting to have more and more

(01:04:27):
problems because it's become impossible to hide that what he's
doing isn't helping, you know. And the other thing that's
happening is that as this decade transitions, Daryl's ability to
manipulate local leaders and organizations is on the Wayne right.
Society is waking up more and more to systemic racial injustices,
and Daryl, who's racist as hell, has failed miserably at

(01:04:49):
adapting to the times. He's also maintained this very hardline
McCarthy esque attitude on left wing political organizing, pushing for
the creation of the LAPD's Public Disorder Intelligence Division, which
surveilled subversives who were entirely left wing and primarily or
labor organizers. Chicano civil rights lawyers and journalists and the ACLU.

(01:05:09):
This is all so fucking illegal that it is eventually
forced to disband right now again. Gates remains popular in
many circles with conservatives and even to the end of
his life with rank and file officers. But his tendency
to like shoot from you know, he's this he talks.
We've talked a lot about how he like says shit
you know that he shouldn't be saying. Probably the most

(01:05:31):
famous example of this is in nineteen ninety Gates testifies
before the US Senate Judiciary Committee and claims casual drug
users ought to be taken out and shot. And you
know who related to him is a casual drug user.
He gets arrested repeatedly for possession of drugs. His kid,
Oh cool guy, sweet dad of the ear. Yeah. Now,

(01:05:58):
this all comes to a head in nineteen ninety one
when a fella named Rodney King is pulled over after
a high speed chase that ends in a place called
lake View Terrace. And there's a video filmed and a
lot of people don't know this. If you've seen Terminator two,
the villain is an LAPD officer. I mean it's a

(01:06:19):
robot wearing the skin of an LAPD officer. But it's
not an accident that this movie made after the LA
riots or made like durret sorry during because the first
Terminator is filmed before the LA Riots, and the guy
who films the Rodney King video is out with a
video camera to film Terminator being filmed, like he's taking
footage of that, and as he's coming home, he sees

(01:06:39):
the cops beating the absolute shit out of this guy
and he films that. And so the Terminator movies are
just kind of intimately tied to the police violence in
Los Angeles, which is fascinating to me.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 3 (01:06:54):
The end of the Terminator A Terminator two when the
cops Fimare is like, hey have you seen this kid?
And his friend's like, no, I don't know. Now that
is embedded in my brain.

Speaker 1 (01:07:03):
And with this kid saves humanity by instinctively lying to
the LAPD.

Speaker 2 (01:07:07):
Yeah, lie to a cop. Saved humanity.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
Yeah, beautiful stuff. So Bridney King doesn't get charged with
anything because the police beat him nearly to death. Right,
he has a fractured skull, he's broken leg. In his
own autobiography, Gates is like, oh, I was horrified when
I saw the video. He calls the incident an aberration,
and he sought sort of apologizes to King, but then
he's like, but also, this guy has a long arrest record.

(01:07:31):
Right now, this doesn't help anything, and it kind of
inflames tensions. There are calls immediately for him to resign,
right and Gates refuses, and so there's like this increasing fight.
After the video comes out, the Police Commission puts him
on paid leave for a while, but he's reinstated a
little bit later. On July tenth, nineteen ninety one, there's

(01:07:54):
an investigative panel headed by Warren Christopher, who becomes the
Secretary of State later that issues this report on the
LAPD and says that it has quote too many patrol
officers who view citizens with resentment and hostility, and who
treat the public with rudeness and disrespect. The problem of
excessive force in the LAPD is fundamentally a problem of supervision,
management and leadership, the commission concludes, and it calls for

(01:08:17):
fundamental change with laped values and a new chief. The
la Times also calls for a new chief, and for
like the next year, Gates is fighting for his life
right right as this trial for these officers who beat
Rodney King is churning up, so Gates is kind of
fighting to maintain his position as everyone in LA is
holding their breath to be like, are these cops? Is

(01:08:39):
anything going to happen to them?

Speaker 4 (01:08:41):
You know?

Speaker 1 (01:08:42):
And so because he's so unpopular with Mayor Bradley, they're
not talking. On April twenty ninth, nineteen ninety two, when
four laped officers, the guys indicted and the King beating
are acquitted by a jury in Ventura County, And almost
as soon as this happens, people take to the streets.
Right there are fires, there's looting, there's attacks, there's I mean,

(01:09:02):
people flip the fuck out for very understandable reasons, right
because they've seen this hideous video and these cops got
off scot free, and fucking Gates isn't even initially in
the state, right like, he flies back right as this
starts to happen, and he like skips an event in DC.
But even while the rioting starts in Florence and Normandy Avenue,

(01:09:23):
he's at a place. He's in Brentwood and like a
rich neighborhood at like a fundraiser to oppose a police
reform ballot measure, and he doesn't show up for hours
after the riots start, you know, and by the time
he gets there, the LAPD has lost control of huge
chunks of the city. Right, the National Guard has to

(01:09:44):
be called in. It takes two days for anything that
resembles order to be established, and like fifty three fifty
five people are killed. I think there's these slightly differing numbers. Now,
Gates isn't there for the start of it. He's sure,
he's more focused on defeeding this ballot reform measure than
dealing with the start of the riots. He just fucks
up at every stage of this, and he tries to

(01:10:05):
throw the blame onto like some of his like lower
ranking guys. He was like, no, it's these dudes, you
fucked up. But there's this panel led by former FBI
and CIA director William Webster that blames Gates and says
that he didn't have any kind of plan or training
for his officers to control the disorder. He had no
idea what to do. There was no way they were
ever going to stop this, right, and this all culminates

(01:10:26):
on June twenty eighth, nineteen ninety two, when Gates steps
down as the chief of police, right, he insists that
this was his choice he made on his own, although
the city council president, John Ferraro is the guy that
is like, you, really, you have to do this right.
This city is going to keep burning until you're off
the fucking job.

Speaker 4 (01:10:42):
Man.

Speaker 1 (01:10:43):
You fucked up right, you got to get out of here.
And yeah, that's basically the story of Darryl Gates. You know,
the four officers who beat Rodney King and were acquitted
in seem Valley are retried in federal court for violating
Kings of civil rights too, are convicted and go to prison,
So there's some justice. King gets a three point eight

(01:11:03):
million dollars settlement from the city eventually, and Darryl Gates
he does alright. In his retirement, he spends like a
year as a talk show host on a local AM
radio network, and he's a security consultant. He's in some
video games, he has, he shows up in films, he
has some cameos and movies at the time, because if

(01:11:24):
you've watched movies like Demolition Man that come out right
after the LA riots, the city has just depicted as
a war zone, right, James Cameron's Own Strange Days, which
he writes just in the background of this movie set
in ninety nine, La is a perpetual riot. It's not
even like a plot point. There's just a National Guard,
got cops and rioters fighting in the backgred of every scene.

(01:11:45):
It's pretty funny. But yeah, and this is part of why,
you know, so he never winds up. He kind of tries,
he toys with the idea of trying to become chief
again or trying to like become, you know, get another
political position, but it never works out for him. Ultimately,
he passes on in twenty ten at his home in

(01:12:06):
Dana Point with his family by his side, of bladder cancer.

Speaker 4 (01:12:11):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:12:11):
And that's the story of Darryl Gates.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
I'm sure he said some pretty wild shit on that
radio show. Oh boy, I could only imagine that shit
he was saying.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
People say he was surprisingly like quiet and kind of reserved,
which I think is a general thing about him, is
that he was like not as like loud a blow
hard as you might have guessed, I think, which is
probably ways only on there for fifteen months. He's not
a very good radio host, right, But that's nice cool stuff. Well,
that's the story.

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
We still don't know why he changed the spelling of
his name.

Speaker 1 (01:12:44):
Still don't know. That's the great mystery of the Darryl
Gates story.

Speaker 2 (01:12:48):
That's his citizen Kane. Yeah, fled thing like well what.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
Dare Well? Yeah, if only he hadn't changed his name.

Speaker 4 (01:12:58):
So funny.

Speaker 1 (01:13:00):
Well, Bridget, where can people find you on the internet?

Speaker 3 (01:13:04):
You can find me at Instagram on Bridget Murray and DC.
You can find my podcast There are No Girls on
the Internet. You can find me on YouTube. Also at
there Are No Girls on the Internet.

Speaker 1 (01:13:14):
Cool You can find Bridget there. We can listen to
season two of sad Oligarch by Jacamrahan, which just came up.
And yeah, here we are everybody. We're done. You know,
have fun with the podcasts that you listen to. You next,
which I hope are ours, just be listened to this one.
You know, memorize, memorize every word of it.

Speaker 4 (01:13:35):
Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:13:56):
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At Behind the Bastards