Pubdate: Sun, 15 Nov 2009
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Page: Front Page, continued on page A22
Copyright: 2009 Los Angeles Times
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/bc7El3Yo
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Joel Rubin
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/LAPD
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rampart.htm (L.A. Rampart Scandal)

AS THE LAPD EVOLVED, SO DID HE

The Incoming Chief, Who Lived Its 'Dark Days,' Hopes to Change How 
Every Cop Thinks.

In 1974, Charlie Beck -- the man poised to become the next chief of 
the Los Angeles Police Department -- was 21 years old, unemployed, 
unfulfilled and adrift.

He had spent his teenage years training as a professional dirt 
motorbike racer but reluctantly walked away after failing to compete 
at the sport's elite levels. For the first time in his life, he gave 
serious consideration to the profession his father, a high-ranking 
officer in the LAPD, had chosen.

Beck took a job assisting detectives with their office work and, 
intrigued by what he saw, joined the force as a part-time reserve 
officer. His first days with a badge on the streets of the 
department's Rampart area were something approaching an epiphany.

"I knew it was what I wanted to do. I was sure of it," he said. "I 
wasn't going to be the richest guy in the neighborhood with this job, 
but I knew I would be the guy that had a job that was important, that 
made a difference. And you add with that the fact that it was 
challenging. I loved the thrill of it, I loved the adrenaline. I 
loved the hunt, I loved the capture. I loved the whole thing."

The raw enthusiasm of a young cop would grow into something far more 
complicated in the years that followed. As the city devolved into a 
period of chaos and violence amid a drug epidemic and soaring crime, 
the LAPD descended along with it. Trained to follow orders and think 
of themselves as an occupying force, cops fell back on an aggressive 
style of policing that sometimes slipped into the realm of abuse.

It was a strategy, Beck would come to realize, that held no hope.

Ups and Downs

After a few years as a reserve officer, Beck returned to the LAPD's 
training academy and emerged as a full-fledged cop in 1977. It was a 
time of flux, as Chief Ed Davis stepped down and Daryl F. Gates, a 
hard-line LAPD veteran, took over. Davis had flirted with the idea 
that police should build close ties with the communities they serve, 
but under Gates the department shifted back to an entrenched, 
paramilitary mentality.

As a still-green patrol officer, Beck took assignments in Rampart, 
South L.A., Hollywood and the Westside.

By the mid-1980s, with the crack cocaine epidemic in full swing and 
the city suffering a homicide rate three times what it is today, Beck 
had been promoted and was supervising cops in narcotics and anti-gang 
units in the thick of the chaos in South L.A.

With far too small a force to adequately police the city, 
heavy-handed, one-dimensional strategies prevailed, leading often to 
claims of excessive force and racism.

It was a time filled with troubling scenes. Beck recalled responding 
to a house his gang officers had raided to find children handcuffed 
and splayed on the street.

"They weren't evil people . . . they were doing what they were 
taught," he said of the officers. "There was no room for independent thought."

And there were deployments such as "Operation Hammer," when "we 
brought in all the gang units in the city and all the extra patrol 
units and just tried to get as many arrests as possible. It was 
untargeted, it didn't matter what it was. It was a declaration of 
war. It was supposed to be a declaration of war on gangs, but people 
saw it as a declaration of war on the community."

The 'Dark Days'

In recent interviews and speeches, Beck has shied away from talking 
in detail about specific incidents he witnessed or took part in, but 
he has not tried to shun responsibility for being a part of the force 
during what he refers to as the "dark days."

"I saw it not working, but I didn't have the maturity yet as a person 
or professionally to recognize it and to understand why," he said in 
a recent interview.

The 1992 riots following the verdict in the Rodney King beating were 
a turning point for Beck, solidifying his feeling that the LAPD's 
harsh policing methods were not only failing to make streets safer, 
but also helping set the stage for the eruption.

"I started trying to look at the job differently. I figured there had 
to be a way to be an effective police officer without alienating the 
people you were policing."

It would be a decade, however, before Beck found himself in a 
position to try out some of the ideas that had been taking shape in his head.

Soon after being hired as chief in 2002, William J. Bratton 
identified Beck, by then a captain in the department's rough Central 
Division, as someone who he believed had potential.

He sent Beck to run the Rampart Division, which was still recovering 
from a corruption scandal, and tasked him with one of the 
high-profile assignments aimed at winning back some of the public's confidence.

MacArthur Park, which over the years had become an open-air bazaar of 
drug dealing, prostitution and violence, had come to symbolize the 
LAPD's continued inability to maintain order, and Bratton wanted to 
take it back.

Initiating Change

Beck seized the chance. He reached out to a nascent core of local 
business owners and leaned on other city agencies to return the 
park's lighting, sports facilities and landscaping to working order.

Specialized crime suppression units that had been aimlessly making 
hundreds of arrests in the park each month were ordered to stand 
down, and Beck instead placed the fate of the park at the feet of his 
own officers.

With the responsibility, though, he gave them greater discretion to 
think of ideas on their own -- a risky and nearly unheard-of 
proposition in a department that didn't encourage officers to 
innovate. His officers pursued federal grants and partnered with 
business owners to install surveillance cameras. Beck's cops 
reintroduced a sense of order to the park, making arrests and issuing 
citations for small infractions that had previously gone ignored.

"They had to own the problem," Beck said, using a favorite catch 
phrase. "I told them, 'This is our problem, we are going to fix 
this.' Everyone had to be involved. And we started talking about how 
we were going to do it. I told them, 'When we get done with this, we 
won't make any arrests in the park.'"

Every month, Beck would bring undercover officers from elsewhere in 
the city and record how long it took them to buy dope in the park. 
Within six months, he said, there was a sense of improvement. By his 
second summer in charge, the Pasadena Pops came to play a concert in 
the park, city workers stocked the pond for a kids' fishing 
tournament and the undercover cops were telling Beck they had to go 
outside the park to find drugs.

The Leader's Role

Beck left Rampart marked as a rising star in the department. That was 
when it first became apparent to him that he could move into the 
ranks of the LAPD's high command. He said it was gratifying to be 
acknowledged for his work, but he recalled with some ambiguity the 
momentum that swept him up and catapulted him forward.

Bratton promoted him quickly, and Beck returned as a deputy chief to 
South Los Angeles, where he again had success balancing an aggressive 
stance on crime with the need to rebuild the trust of still-wary 
residents. Civil rights leaders, attorneys and clergy who had clashed 
with police leadership over the years saw in Beck someone who wanted 
to hear them out. From there, Bratton brought Beck downtown to 
oversee the department's expansive detective bureau and increasingly 
depended on him to handle high-profile crises.

As he has risen through the ranks, Beck has carried with him the 
cautionary tale of his father. A year before Beck joined the 
department, George Beck, one of the highest ranking officers in the 
department, came under scrutiny for his role in the leak of 
investigative materials in a sensational murder case to an 
acquaintance who worked for a film production company and for 
accepting a personal loan from the company. He was cleared of the 
most serious charges but was disciplined and demoted for failing to 
do more to prevent the leak by others.

The embarrassment his father suffered left a mark on Beck and it is 
not lost on him that his father was at a similar point in his career 
to Beck's now. "It underscored that there is a lot of risk in being 
the boss," he said. "You are responsible for what your subordinates 
do and the relationships that you keep. And you always have to be aware of it."

That is no small thing for a man on the verge of taking over the 
entire LAPD, who considers among his most important assets his 
willingness to collaborate with people outside of traditional 
policing circles. "I have to be more circumspect," he said. "If I 
make a mistake, it will affect the whole city now."

Keeping Perspective

Beck comes across as a humble, self-effacing man comfortable in his 
own skin. He calls elected officials "ma'am" and "sir." At a series 
of town hall meetings after being nominated for chief, Beck went out 
of his way to deflect attention. "They don't know me," he said at a 
meeting in Van Nuys, where he had been showered in applause. "I am 
just a symbol for something much larger."

In an interview, Beck recalled advice his father once gave him after 
he had received a promotion. "He told me, 'Remember, you just got 
promoted, you didn't get any smarter.'"

In the few weeks since Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tapped his nominee, 
Beck has made a carefully crafted case to prove he is the right 
person to lead the department into the post-Bratton era.

While Bratton introduced badly needed reforms and pushed to rebuild 
ties with minority communities, Beck focused his attention on 
reshaping the upper ranks of the department and getting them to buy 
into his progressive ideas on policing.

Beck has presented himself as the one who will take Bratton's ideas 
and infuse them into the minds of the LAPD's roughly 10,000 
rank-and-file officers. He is, he argues, the one who understands 
what it is to be an LAPD cop, the one who has their trust and thus 
the one who can rewire the way they think.

"The future of this organization is in our hands at this moment," 
Beck said in a speech following the mayor's announcement. "We have 
come so far in the last seven years and it is so important that we 
drive those changes that we've made, that we take them and put them 
into the DNA of this organization, so that never again will it depend 
solely on the leader to make a difference."

Far from an abstraction, the future of the LAPD is a personal matter 
for Beck. His stepdaughter, whom he raised from a young age, is a 
patrol officer and his son is scheduled to graduate from the LAPD 
academy next month.

The job, Beck said, "is the core of my existence. It's who I am."

To succeed, Beck knows he will have to persuade young cops today to 
make a transformation similar to the one he has made over 32 years in 
the LAPD. It is a daunting task and one that was weighing on his mind 
as he left the town hall meeting in Van Nuys.

Stepping out into the chill night air, he headed across a dark plaza 
to the familiar confines of a nearby police station. Inside, he found 
a group of young anti-gang officers preparing for their shift.

"I respect what you do. And I understand what you do," he said, 
slipping into an impromptu pep talk. "Believe me, I get it. When I 
was sitting where you are, the only thing I believed in was 
suppression and arrests. It took me about 20 years to come to a 
different conclusion. I'm going to try to close that time period for 
you. The only thing I ask of you is that you keep an open mind." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake