LAPD's reforms since Rodney King beating offer hope amid police violence
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Version 0 of 1. Last October, a 22-year-old black man named Clinton Alford Jr was riding a bicycle in south Los Angeles when someone yelled at him to stop. When that someone yanked him off his bike, he ran – realising only subsequently that his pursuers were uniformed police officers investigating a nearby robbery. The officers quickly caught up with him and ordered him to lie on the ground with his hands behind his back. He offered no resistance. What happened next is part of a depressing pattern of police incidents that have shaken the US from coast to coast. According to surveillance video footage from a local business that has been seen internally by the Los Angeles police department but not yet made public, a heavyset officer named Richard Garcia stepped out of a patrol car and kicked or stomped Alford several times until the young man’s body went limp. One official who has seen the footage told the Los Angeles Times it was like watching “a football player kicking a field goal”. Alford himself has said he remembers being kicked repeatedly and attacked with a Taser before losing consciousness. Twenty-four years ago, a similar episode in Los Angeles – the videotaped beating of Rodney King by four uniformed LAPD officers – turned the city into a cauldron of racial and socio-economic tensions that boiled over into days of rioting. In April 1992, the LAPD was a law unto itself, feared and reviled by black and Hispanic communities as much as the police departments under scrutiny in Ferguson, Missouri and North Charleston, South Carolina are now. But things have changed dramatically in Los Angeles – pointing, perhaps, to a way forward for police departments and cities across the country. Alford was briefly detained for resisting arrest but never charged with any crime. Garcia, by contrast, has just been arraigned on felony assault charges, making him one of three LAPD officers currently being prosecuted for excessive use of force. He pleaded not guilty. In events that starkly contrast with those of the early 1990s, when the LAPD stood by its officers through thick and thin, Garcia has been subject to withering criticism from his own chief, Charlie Beck, who called the district attorney’s office himself and urged prosecutors to file charges. Chief Beck told reporters last week he was shocked when he saw the video and said Garcia’s actions “were not only beyond departmental policy but were in fact criminal”. Garcia and the other officers involved were put on administrative leave as soon as the video went up the chain of command. “The department is far, far better in terms of dealing with officer use of force and officer-involved shootings,” said Joe Domanick, the author of acclaimed books about the LAPD. “Charlie Beck has vowed that if there’s ever another riot in Los Angeles, it won’t be on his watch. He’s really sincere about these things.” Beatings and police shootings still occur regularly in Los Angeles, as they do elsewhere, and sometimes lead to public anger and open protest. Domanick said the shift in the culture was due less to the attitude of patrol cops than the ubiquity of cameras making it much harder for the LAPD to protect its own, even if it wanted to. Nonetheless, Beck and his immediate predecessor and mentor, current New York police commissioner Bill Bratton, have done much of the slow and painful work of reforming the LAPD since the riots and a major police corruption scandal that broke out in one of its elite anti-gang units a few years later. Police chiefs are no longer untouchable but serve at the pleasure of the civilian police commission and the mayor. A number of reforms mandated by the federal government in the wake of the corruption scandal have now been completed. Los Angeles has also largely bucked the much-criticised trend toward militarisation of police units. Officers now receive special training on encounters with mentally disturbed civilians – a shocking number of whom have become victims of police shootings in southern California and other parts of the country. Eric Garcetti, the Los Angeles mayor, announced in a keynote speech this month that all patrol officers will soon be kitted with bodycams as a deterrent to rogue behaviour. Related: The uncounted: why the US can't keep track of people killed by police Since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown and the rioting that followed in Ferguson last summer, Chief Beck, a career LAPD cop who witnessed the 1992 riots first-hand, has made extensive efforts to head off the risk of similar unrest in Los Angeles. Last month he held a closed-door meeting with community leaders and other regional police chiefs to discuss the risk of a Ferguson-type powder keg blowing in the vast concrete jungles of south LA, which remains poor, underserved by businesses and city services and rife with racial divisions. Such efforts at community outreach have gone a long way to mitigate criticisms of department policies such as “stop and frisk”, which has caused an uproar in New York, or the continuing use of injunctions limiting the civil rights of gang members. Earlier this month, Beck went out of his way to condemn the police shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina – a continent away – saying he too would have arrested the officer involved. In addition to Garcia’s, two other LAPD excessive force cases are working their way through the courts. Jonathan Lai, who was caught on tape using his baton to hit a man already on his knees with his hands on his head, and Mary O’Callaghan, accused of kicking a woman to death after she was in handcuffs, have court appearances in early May. Domanick noted that over the 20-30 years before the Rodney King case, only one LAPD officer was prosecuted for acts of violence. “Back then, the chief would have been defending the officer and blaming the victim,” he said. “Now, Beck doesn’t want to be caught defending something indefensible.” |