Los Angeles riots: 20 years later, has LAPD reformed?

“Bratton really went out of his way to say what was needed, [and] also to show up at our meetings and talk to us all the time,” says Mr. Hutchinson. “There was a mandate from within to hire more women, Latinos, Asians, and gays, and a personal demonstration from him and other leadership that he meant everything he said. I’d have to say it has worked.”

Local black activist Najee Ali likewise gives the LAPD an “A” for what it has achieved. He says police regularly come into the neighborhoods for formal discussions with residents and have improved response times dramatically, which makes residents feel the police are for them rather than against them.

“They have a senior lead officer assigned directly to work with each neighborhood so that when some complaint or nuisance report comes in, it’s usually dealt with within 24 hours,” he says. Those reports include complaints such as vagrancy, gang activity, drug dealers, and graffitti.

The board of directors of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, however, suggests that these reforms are not the product of the riots.

“Many of these retrospectives have included analyses that overstate the riots’ role in the evolution of the Department,” the league says in a release. “Any balanced analysis must recognize that policing in general has evolved across the nation. Changes in the Department were part of a larger national trend of evolving approaches to policing.”

The league says that even though officers of Hispanic descent now account for 42 percent of the police force, “this change is as much a result of the changing community demographics as it is of any single event in the city’s history.”

It also points out that many LAPD officers working today were not on the job two decades ago: of the 9,940 officers on the force, only 2,641 were on the job in April 1992.  

But with the exit of Bratton, Hutchinson and others say they are concerned that old habits could be returning. The killing of an unarmed black man in 2011, a 90-bullet shootout with a suspect after a car chase in April, and revelations that an officer racially profiled Latinos are among the concerns. 

Hutchinson notes that current Chief Charlie Beck has come under fire from the current police commission for his reluctance to reprimand officers the commission found used excessive force.

“There are still some of the old troubling signs,” says Hutchinson. “Officers that overuse deadly force or commit acts of misconduct must be punished. Without it, it reinforces the notion that officers can administer street corner justice. This is the practice that got the LAPD into so much hot water in years past.”

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