Chief Beck on LA Riots Anniversary: 'We Will Never Fail You Again'

LOS ANGELES, CA — Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck writes in an op-ed published Friday that the 1992 riots stemmed in part from the excessively aggressive attitude then harbored by the LAPD and vowed: "We will never fail you again."

In an article appearing in the online version of the Los Angeles Times, Beck writes that Daryl Gates, who was chief of police at the time of the riots, attributed the violence to the leadership failures of just two individuals in the LAPD and did not view it as an organizational issue.

"I very respectfully disagree with my former chief on this issue: I think the Los Angeles Police Department as an organization had everything to do with those awful days in the spring of 1992," he wrote. "In the preceding decade, our style of policing was aggressive, confrontational and above all, ineffective. And I was a part of it."

The chief noted that the police department waged what it regarded as a war on gangs and a war on drugs.

"We truly believed that we were at war and that more arrests and tougher policing was the solution to the plague of violence sweeping through the city.

...Unfortunately, when we declare war, several things happen. We cause collateral damage, which erodes whatever moral high ground led to the declaration. ... This is what we did when we declared war on our own communities during the 1980s and 1990s. That is what we risk doing today, when we declare war on our own immigrant communities."

Beck writes that "after years of trying to arrest our way out of the problem, it became obvious that our efforts only contributed to the violence. Worse yet, they alienated the policed to the point that, in retrospect, the riot was inevitable."

The chief says the 1992 riots, triggered by the acquittal in state court of the officers who had beaten Rodney King, altered the way he thinks about policing.

"We now believe that there is no true safety without public trust, that serving the Constitution by protecting the rights of individuals is the ultimate goal of policing, and that relationships and partnerships are essential to policing in our city.

The LAPD and I were forever changed by the 1992 riots. Sometimes change can occur only because of crisis. It is my promise to Los Angeles that we will never forget those lessons so dearly learned and that we will never fail you again."

City News Service; Photo by Renee Schiavone