Controversial LAPD T-Shirt Threatens Police Commissioner's Career

LOS ANGELES, CA — Almost 27 years after the Los Angeles riots tore the city asunder, the Rodney King beating is still taking its toll. In a sign of a community still coming to grips with those dark days in the city's history, a former Los Angeles Police Department officer is seeing her meteoric rise through the ranks jeopardized with recently surfaced 25- year-old photographs of her wearing a T-shirt that reads "LAPD: We Treat You Like a King," a mocking reference to the 1991 Rodney King beating.

Now Philadelphia's acting police commissioner, Christine Coulter is facing calls for her resignation as outrage over the photos grow. A quarter-century after donning the shirt, Coulter is alternatively apologizing and defending her choice. She simply didn't get the joke, Coulter explained during a Philadelphia City Council meeting on Tuesday after publicly apologizing for wearing the shirt.

"I sincerely hope that a careless decision that I made over 25 years ago doesn't overshadow the work that I've done," Coulter said. "I am profoundly sorry for the pain that the shirt and the picture has caused, not to me, but to the city and the communities that we serve."

She said wearing the shirt "was a bad decision on my part, and I would not wear that shirt today."

But she denied insinuations that the shirt is indicative of her being insensitive toward minority communities.

"There's folks in this room who I have served in their communities who know my heart and know that for 30 years I have served in black and brown communities with all that I ever have to give, never treating people unfairly or unjustly because of their race," Coulter said during the council hearing, according to media reports out of Philadelphia. "Even people I've had to arrest, I treated like gentlemen or gentle ladies going through the process."

Coulter went onto claim she didn't see the link between the slogan on the shirt and the widely publicized videotaped beating of King, a black motorist, by Los Angeles Police Department officers.

However, her critics weren't buying it. Philadelphia City Councilwoman Cindy Bass called on Coulter resign, saying it is "inconceivable that she was unaware (of) the T-shirt reference of a widely publicized brutal beating of a citizen by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department."
Since the Rodney King beating and it's deadly aftermath, the Los Angeles Police Department has taken pains to transform the department's relationship with the community. LAPD officials also issued high-profile apologies for how it handled the riots.

On the 25th anniversary of the riots, then chief Charlie Beck issued a public apology, saying he believed the department's us vs. them culture of the 80s and 90s, set the stage for the LA riots.
"In the preceding decade, our style of policing was aggressive, confrontational and above all, ineffective. And I was a part of it," he wrote. "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...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."

City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report.