← Behind the Bastards
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- [00:02]
A
Call Zone Media. Welcome back to a podcast that you've been listening to and this is the second episode. So you're not, you're not starting there, right? You know, because that would be crazy. You're. You're continuing here, you know, you know what show this is? It's behind the Bastards, a podcast about the worst people in all of history. Now Bridget, are you ready to learn more about Daryl Gates?
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B
You bet your ass I am. Let's do it.
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A
Do you want to tell people where they can find you on the old Internet? So far right now, you can find.
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B
Me at my podcast. There are no girls on the Internet or on Instagram @bridgetmarieindc.
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A
Hell yeah. Well, find Bridget on the Internet and find Daryl Gates in this podcast where you'll learn more about them right now. Right? Let's do it. Let's hear from this motherfucking guy. You know? This is an iHeart podcast. Season two of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions is here. Hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are going deeper than ever with bold new conversations, fresh guests and unfiltered takes on queer sex and cruising. This season they're also looking out for the community covering smart cruising in a chaotic world, including information on prep and yes, they've even added a brand new call in segment for your wildest cruising confessions. Tune into Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, with new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Shop Abercrombie in the app online and in stores. Okay, so when we left off with the story of Darrell Gates, it was 1965 and he had become one of the youngest inspectors in Los Angeles police history. He's in like his mid-30s at this point and he's overseeing all of the patrol officers in Watts. Right. And that is 1965. And Watts, you know, as I said, should start the dun dun dun music in your head, you know. And we're about to talk about why. Because on the Evening of Wednesday, August 7, 1965, a 21 year old black man named Marquette Fry is driving home drunk with his stepbrother Arnold. Right, so these are, these are two guys driving a little bit buzzed, which isn't great. But it's 1965. The cops aren't sober on the road. Nobody is. It's the 60s, right? There's no seatbelts, there's barely laws. Having a road soda is the most normal thing. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying they are not outliers here. We just talked about how the chief of police couldn't drive himself cause he was too drunk at all times. Right. Just trying to really set up that this is not like a weird thing. These guys are not like, you know, bad dudes or whatever. They're doing the same thing Most you've watched Mad Men. We all know what life was like in this period of time. Yeah.
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B
The cops would pull you over and you'd be blind drunk and they'd be.
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A
Like, why are you drunk? I'm drunk.
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B
Okay, drive straight home.
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A
Well, you drive. I want to see that. You can stay right in the middle line. Get in that car. No, you're not sober enough. Do a shot of snobs before you get back in that car. You gotta light your lint, your head up. Come on now. So Marquette and Arnold, his stepbrother, they're driving back home and an LAPD motorcycle cop pulls them both over. Right? Fry fails a field sobriety test that I'm sure the cop would have failed too. And the cop, Officer Minicus radioed for backup and A patrol car because he's going to book Marquette. Now, Fry, he says, is initially quiet and compliant. He's like, ah, fuck. Like, okay, I just gotta keep quiet and, you know, whatever. I'll deal with. The sixties. Drunk driving consequences aren't that bad at this point in time, right? They're gonna take my fucking license. Otherwise no one would be able to drive in Los Angeles. Things get worse, though, because his stepbrother gets out of the car and again, everything's different. The cops would just be like, oh, you're just passenger. Yeah, you just walk home, buddy, you know, like, walk home drunk. I don't give a fuck yet. Right? And so his stepbrother walks home and gets their mom and tells them what happened. And Marquette's mom is like, the fuck is he doing? He's drinking. And so she shows up and she starts yelling at her son. Now it's a hot August night. AC Isn't really a thing from a. Especially in Los Angeles for people. So everyone hangs out outside anyway, right? And there's fuck all to do because it's the mid-60s. So you see some people get pulled over and you hear yelling. You. What happens next? Everyone shows up, right? And how drunk is everybody? About as drunk as Marquette and his stepbrother. Right. And presumably the cop and his mom, Right. Like everyone's. Everyone's, I'm assuming at a roughly equivalent level of toasted, you know?
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B
Yeah.
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A
So across this crowd and across the pd decision making is going to be at about like, let's say a 3 out of 10 for everyone involved in this. Right. No one is their best self on a hot August night in 1965, you.
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B
Know, and when you hear a commotion that brings everybody out to be like, oh, what's going on?
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A
Let's all get out there. Fuck it. And the cops are the same way. Like, hey, man, put down your schnapps. Let's go. We gotta deal with these fucking crowds. Right? Grab a shotgun, put whatever in it. I don't care.
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B
By the way, your old timey drunk cop impression, 10 out of 10, everyone drunk.
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A
Everyone, right? So a crowd gathers around the arrest. At this point, again, the situation gets out of control in the way that things do. And the book L A Noire describes what happens next. By the time Marquette got angry, a crowd of roughly 100 bystanders had gathered. Some of them started to murmur angrily. Minicus's partner slipped off and radioed a code 1199, officer needs help. He returned with a baton used for riot control. The officer in the patrol car grabbed his shotgun. The crowd, now numbering perhaps 150 people, was starting to turn hostile and hit those blue eyed bastards. A voice yelled. While one highway patrol officer waved his shotgun at the crowd. The two motorcycle police officers attempted to grab Marquette. A scuffle broke out as California Highway Patrol reinforcements arrived at the scene. Marquette was struck by a baton and collapsed on the ground. Mrs. Fry jumped onto the back of the arresting officer, screaming, you white southern bastard. Little brother Ronald got into the mix too. By 7:23pm, all the fries were under arrest. The crowd was now screaming. And what do we see here? A crowd who are not their best selves. And a bunch of cops show up with weapons and start hitting people. And everything gets much worse because the cops showed up and started hitting people, right?
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B
Yeah. Way to de escalate cops.
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A
Yeah, sounds great. Glad a guy with a shotgun and a baton came into this situation.
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B
That always calms things down.
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A
The best thing to have shown up right then would have been like, I don't know, the local pastor with a pot of coffee and like everyone, shut the hell up, drink some coffee and go the fuck back to your stoops. Come on. What the fuck are you doing? Right? That's what this situation needed, you know. Things just get worse from here on out, right? The fries get hauled off and more cops start showing up because again, everyone's drunk and everyone's fighting now. And the cops start hitting everybody with nightsticks. Fry is beaten badly in the process of being taken away. This angers the crowd even more. As he's taken off, more officers arrive and they just start beating members of the crowd because someone thinks they get spit on. It may just be everyone's yelling and kind of drunk and they're spittle flying because people are yelling at each other. He spit on me, I spit on him. And then they just start beating the fuck out of each other, right? The cops pulled back at around 7:40pm but the crowd doesn't disperse and they start throwing rocks and attacking white drivers that they see going through town, right? And one of these white people who's like showing up in plain clothes is Daryl Gates. Earl's car gets pelted with shit as he shows up because he's supposed to be looking at the scene because he's 38, he's one of the youngest inspectors in LA history, right? He had actually only been heading through Watts because he was going to a labor strike nearby when he heard over the radio that there was a civil disturbance. And he recalls that by the time he arrived, a kind of crazed carnival atmosphere had broken out. There was scattered violence, but there was no single mob. And things were mostly limited to an eight block radius. So what you have here is not a serious problem, right? People have gotten a little out of hand. The cops have beaten up some people, people are throwing rocks at cars, but it's kind of scattered and there's not like a motivating animus to what's happening. It's just a hot night and everybody's blood is up, right? And the people who know anything about the neighborhood again, like the local pastors and like neighborhood organizers, the old grandmas and stuff, are like, everyone needs to just calm the fuck down. If everyone pulls back, folks will calm down and they'll sleep it off and they'll wake up tomorrow morning and it'll be okay, right? Like, anyone who knows anything is like, just give everyone time to cool the fuck down, right? But this is not what's going to happen because Gates winds up the man in charge on the ground that night, right? And his first priority is to put a lid on the situation and stop it from spreading. And he tries to stop it from spreading by doing the same thing that had made it to spread, right? And it had started spreading because a bunch more cops showed up and started hitting people. And so he's like, well, what we need here is more cops, right? Get all of our drunkest officers at three in the morning out here with sticks, you know, some of them may have shotguns. Fuck it. You know, make sure they got enough schnapps to stay awake, right? So by, by 3 or 4am, he's like, hey, everyone's calm down. This must be because all these cops made the situation better as opposed to like, no, it's 4 in the morning, everyone fell asleep, right? And again, if the cops had left and not come back, people would have woken up hungover and been like, well, last night was kind of weird. And like, it would have been over probably, right? Mm. And the very next day, you know, the police or the media, you know, Parker has to give a press conference and the LA Times is like, so what happens? Is this a race riot? Because that was happening around this period of time in the US and he's like, no, no, no, we're not having a race riot. And he says it's not a race riot because, quote, all the rioters are Negroes, right? Can't be a race riot if it's only one race. Just. What? I don't know, man. Okay, I agree it's not a race riot. But your justification for why is really weird, right?
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B
Yeah. It seems like a theme with this guy is just I can't follow the logic.
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A
Yeah. And it's true, again, this is not a race riot. Yet people were angry one hot night, and it's kind of calmed down by the next day. The reason why everyone's asking is this another race riot, is that 1964 had seen several race riots in major cities, Right? And Parker had been warned by leaders in the community, particularly leaders in Watts, that, like, that could happen here. Like, people are pissed. You know, everyone's blood is up as a result of the civil rights movement. As a result of what? You know, the cops beating the shit out of protesters all around. This could happen here if we're not safe, if we don't stop the police from becoming. From doing what they've been doing in places like Selma. Right. But Gates ignores the warnings, right? He tells all these local leaders who say, hey, we need to keep the cops out of Watts for a while and give people a chance to cool down. He's like, we don't need to do that. Los Angeles has never seen, quote, an insurgency situation, and it never will. If we know, if I know one thing is Daryl Gates about the city of Los Angeles. It's never going to see an insurgency against the police. Los Angeles will forever be known as the calmest city. Yeah.
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B
Never any problems.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
It's interesting to me that had he listened to these local leaders, I almost wonder if the fact that these local leaders, the old ladies and pastors and community leaders, that they were saying, what we don't need is police making the situation worse and escalating. If that seemed kind of threatening, like, oh, you won't tell me where police can and can't go.
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A
Right? And again, I'm not a big community policing will save all of our problems thing. But if the cops in Watts had been, like, mostly black officers from Watts, that also might have called because they probably would have been like, hey, man, no, we shouldn't have a bunch of guys out because my mom just told me, don't do that. Right? Or like, my pastor's like, hey, man, we don't need you guys here right now. Calm the fuck down. Right? But that's not the way the LAPD works either, right? So that's just not happening. These are white officers who don't live in Watts who are being told, you're going into a very dangerous situation. Keep your guard up because these people are animals, right? That's what they're being told. Right?
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B
Right.
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A
Now, part of why things are going to get a lot worse is that, you know, Gates is the man on the ground, but Parker is running the department. And the year before in 64, as all these race riots are happening across the country, park had gone on a right wing radio show to warn that he thought a slow motion socialist revolution was occurring throughout the country. So the guy in charge of everything is like, we have to always be on guard and respond violently to anything that smells like a protest because it could be part of this USSR backed commie revolution. Right? So that's how the boss is thinking about things now again, the day after things kick, the day after the fries get arrested. And there's that first night of. It's not even really rioting, but like some scattered, you know, fighting and you know, whatnot. It seems like things are gonna sputter out, right? There are a bunch of community meetings, local leaders are getting everyone, trying to turn down the temperature and all these again, as I said, they're being like, please keep the cops out of town. We can handle this. And Parker ignores them. Right. He actually says in a press conference, he calls them the so called leaders of the black community. And he accuses them of trying to relieve the Negro people of any responsibility for what had happened that night. Right. Ugh, yeah. Cool guy. To make a long story short, he ignores the requests of these local leaders to avoid sending cops back into Watts that night. And Parker and Daryl Gates sit down and they work up a plan where Gates is going to oversee the deployment of several hundred police officers into Watts that night to deter the rioters. So things have calmed down. There's still some angry people in the street, but there's no rioting. And so they're like, well, in order to make sure there continues to be no rioting, let's get like 2 or 300 cops in Watts tonight, right? Let's flood the zone with all of our armed drunk guys.
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B
Yeah, yeah. That'll calm things down.
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A
Yeah, exactly. So this does not work. This is a dismal failure. And under Gates direct leadership and Parker's overall command. I'm not trying to. This is not an episode about Parker. He does deserve a bastards, probably, but I don't want to like, Gates is the guy on the ground. Gates is like Patton and Parker is like Eisenhower. If we're making a World War II comparison here to the Watts riots, you know. So under Gates's direct leadership and Parker's overall command, the LAPD re Engages in Watts and violence sparks off again. The next six days would see more than 600 buildings damaged and destroyed and more than a thousand people injured. 34 people are killed, right? So this goes from some dudes had thrown rocks one night to a huge chunk of the city is on fire. Dozens of people are dead and more than a thousand are injured, right? It is a fucking calamity. And it becomes a fucking calamity because they flood this neighborhood with cops while everyone who knows anything about Watts is like, keep them out of here, right? In an article for the Metropole, Aaron Staghoff Belfort explains how Parker and Gates interpreted and explained what had happened. This cataclysm that erupts from their decision making. Quote, the National Guard were deployed and public officials framed the events not merely a civil unrest, but as a new form of urban governance crisis. Parker compared the rebellion to Viet Cong insurgen, insisting a paramilitary response was necessary, while Governor Pat Brown described the events as guerrillas fighting with gangsters. For Gates, Watts crystallized the stakes of what he saw as America's spiraling urban crisis. The specter of disorder, black insurgency, and the perceived loss of police control over racialized cityscapes. And these dead, these aren't cops getting killed by fucking punji stick traps. They're people getting killed mostly by the cops, right? And the National Guard. This is not an insurgency. That's not what it looks like. But this is. If we're looking at like what's happening right now, where people are talking about 50 people in front of the Ice Building in Portland, fucking third of them dressed as frogs, being described as like a militant movement, as an army, as a war zone. This is the start of that language in response to urban unrest, right? This is a war.
- [18:14]
B
It's so easy to see that through line of what you're describing and what is happening today, right now in our cities. And it's wild to think how this one person really is responsible for architecting a lot of what we're seeing today.
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A
Yeah, Parker, and Parker too, you know, his boss, but Gates, you know. And as Gates wrote in Chief about the Watts riots, we had no idea how to deal with this. We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives and Molotov cocktails. It was random chaos in small disparate patches. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare. Rather than a single mob, we had people attacking from all directions. The streets of America's cities have become foreign territory. And like the one thing that's true there is that it is foreign territory for your cops. Because they're not from there and they don't know these people and you're not listening to them.
- [19:04]
B
Wouldn't even be in this situation. If you listen to the, you know, black auntie from around the way, you might not even be in this situation.
- [19:11]
A
It is like Vietnam in that, like, yeah, if you guys just stayed out, it would have been okay, right? This would have calmed down if you'd stayed the fuck away. Right? Because then there's nothing for the angry people to get drunk and angry about, and your drunken, angry cops aren't going to be inciting more violence. Right? And again, just like, first off, this fundamental misunderstanding is part of. Part of the thinking here. And how they apply Vietnam logic to Watts kind of shows you why we lost in Vietnam. Because he's describing this, Gates's as like a military insurgency, but he also describes it as random chaos in small disparate patches. That's not what an insurgency is. The Viet Cong, the insurgents in Vietnam, were not doing random, disparate, small acts of violence. They were doing coordinated attacks, working with a functional, like, actual standardized military, the nva, as part of a strategy of tension which successfully defeated the United States. And again, the fact that you don't know this is part of why you're going to lose this and why you're going to lose in Vietnam, right. Is that we never understand what any of this is. Right? Because these people are dumb, arrogant, angry assholes with guns, and they have a.
- [20:24]
B
Real inability to look back and sort of take away things, glean things, learn lessons.
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A
Yeah. Like the fact that this all goes as bad as it could have gone, exactly as these community leaders predicted is like, well, maybe I should change everything I think about how policing should work. But that is not the lesson that Daryl Gates is going to learn from the Watts riots. You know, if he were an intelligent and thoughtful man, he might have been like, well, shit, I fucked up. Our response was clearly disaster. Maybe we need to fundamentally rethink how the police respond. He does decide. He does come to the conclusion, like, we do need to fundamentally rethink how police respond to civil unrest. Right? But he doesn't think maybe by having them de escalate these situations rather than show, instead he's gonna be like, no, no, no, we need more cops with more guns. That would have calmed this shit down.
- [21:14]
B
More guns, more schnapps.
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A
Right? More schnapps, more guns. That's Daryl Gates policy. Right?
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B
Which if we're not talking about police, it actually doesn't sound like a bad time.
- [21:25]
A
No, no, no no. For loyal people, you should in fact have more schnapps and more guns. I'm always telling people this, right? More schnapps and more guns. It makes everything better, right? Speaking of being heavily armed and drunk as hell, let's see if any of our sponsors are relevant to that.
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E
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Lenovo okay, if you thought season one of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up. Season two is here and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper. They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff. This season they're also hitting the road, literally. From NYC to rural cruising scenes to overseas hookups, no stone is left unturned. And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze. So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate. Oh, and this year they want to hear your stories. Yep, they've got a new call in segment where they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air. No pressure. So if you're ready for round two, just push play Sniffy's Cruisin Confession. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. And we're back. So I'm giving you, I gave you a slow clap for that one. Thank you, Sophie. Thank you. I'm glad we turned down the one gun manufacturer that ever offered to advertise on this podcast. Sophie knows what that story is. I can't say anymore, probably for legal reasons, but. Oh boy.
- [25:56]
B
Yep.
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A
Yeah. So Daryl Gates, you know, he's decided what we need in the LAPD is more armed men with bigger guns, right? And the new tactics we need are making them get more violent, more faster. You know, Gates would devote large portions of the remainder of his life and career to figuring out how to get the LAPD bigger guns and more men so that they could respond to any given situation with a team of goons who had more weapons than the National Guard, you know, heavier hardware. And this, Bridget, is where SWAT teams come from. Because Daryl Gates next big move is being the co creator of the very first SWAT team. Right? This is before he's the chief of police. Immediately after Watts, he starts sitting down with a couple of guys. And he's not the only founder of swat, or even necessarily a guy probably most responsible for the basic ideas that become SWAT is another LAPD officer, John Nelson, who's a Vietnam veteran and a former Marine who joins the lapd. And Nelson and Gates are both united in their opinion that the department had fucked up in response to the Watts riots in 65 and that we need a new unit with special weapons and tactics that can crack down on urban insurgencies. Right? That's the birth of SWAT teams. Now, Watts isn't the only reason why they decide they need this new team. Within weeks of the Watts riots, large numbers of Mexican and Filipino agricultural laborers had gone on strike in the San Joaquin Valley. This became known as the Delano Grape strike. And it was a seminal moment in California's labor history, per an article in the Metropole. With the ariser of Cesar Chavez and the formation of the United Farm Workers, the movement rapidly expanded in size and national visibility. Back in Los Angeles, LAPD personnel watched with interest as television reports highlighted the Delano Police Department's crowd control tactics and surveillance strategies. Intrigued, they reached out to Delano officials to observe the program firsthand. And this, combined with Watts and some other high profile shootings that take place at the time, are all kind of fuel for this idea that what LA needs is its own Special Forces unit to take on gang crime. Right. And that's part of what this big part of what's happening here is. We're seeing the use the first deployment of Special Forces in a big way in Vietnam. And a lot of these former military guys you get in the LAPD are like, you know what's definitely gonna win the war in Vietnam? Special Forces guys. We can win the war on crime if we add Special Forces guys.
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B
And I have a question for you. I don't know if this is a question you can answer, but the way that people today, the way that people, you know, it's a conservative talking point that, oh, we're at war with our own citizens, yada, yada, yada. Do you think that this was. Was also the beginning of thinking about, you know, black folks in LA or Watts as kind of enemy combatants? Like talking about them like you're talking about a foreign enemy. Do you think this was also coinciding with that kind of attitude?
- [28:52]
A
Yes. And again, it's never, you can never with these things, say, and this is the very first time, because you can even find Evidence of that around the turn of the century and like the 20s and 30s in the gangster era, there's talk like that from law enforcement. There's talk like that from law enforcement in response to around the turn of the century when anarchist terrorism is a really big deal in the US and elsewhere. Right. So all of these things, they have earlier precursors, and I'm not even saying that those are the very first examples, but this is the first time that that's really happening in a very modern way. And where they're saying the response to this is we need to take this idea that's new in the military of these Special Forces units, and we need spec ops units for American cities. Right. That is very new and modern. And that does start exactly here. Right. And it is, to a degree, building on things, you can draw a line again from the birth of SWAT 2 back to the hunt for John Dillinger and, you know, these FBI units that are going after gangsters. Right. This is not entirely disconnected from that stuff in the past. Right. But it's Watts and the Delano Grape Strike that really are the direct inciting influences for the birth of swat. Right. And for the birth of this idea that our cops are at war in American cities and we need to take the tactics that we're using in these colonial wars overseas and bring them home. This is really when that. That gets started in an organized way. Now, if you know anything about SWAT units, you know the name stands for Special Weapons and Tactics. Or did you know that, Bridget?
- [30:21]
B
I did know that, yeah.
- [30:23]
A
Yeah. So that's. That's like what the actual. Like that's the current acronym for, or that's what it stands for. But initially SWAT was always the acronym, but that's not what it stood for initially. And to give that story, I'm going to quote from Gates book Chief. One day, with a big smile on my face, I popped in to tell my deputy chief, Ed Davis, that I'd thought up a new acronym for my special new unit. It's swat. I said, oh, that's pretty good. What's it stand for? Special Weapons Attack Teams. Davis blinked. No, there was no way, he said dismissively, that he would ever use the word attack. I went out crestfallen, but a moment later I was back. Special Weapons and Tactics. I said, okay, no problem. That's fine. Davis said, and that's how SWAT was born.
- [31:07]
B
I have an important question for you. Have you ever seen the terrible movie SWAT with Samuel L. Jackson from 2003?
- [31:14]
A
I have, yes. And that is a God awful movie.
- [31:18]
B
I saw it in the theater.
- [31:19]
A
Yeah. And this is, by the way, the fact that there are TV shows and movies about swat, as I'll talk about, is a huge factor in the birth of Copaganda that's happening at the same time SWAT is being born. And I'll talk about that in a little bit later. Right. And quite frankly, I do like Gates. I wish we'd used the original name for SWAT that Gates came up with. Cause it's truer to what they do. They're teams with special weapons who attack American citizens. Right. That's what SWAT is. You know, crediting the guys who are best known today for throwing flashbangs into children's cribs and lighting babies on fire. Like, I don't know if tactics is what I'd call that. I guess you could say it's a tactic. You know, I like what Gates original acronym is at least. Honest. Right. But it's bad optics. You know, Davis is his co chief or his deputy chief is probably right. That like, nah, we don't want to attack in there. Right. Come on, bro. That's kind of fucked up. Yeah. So the broader strategic impulse behind the creation of the first SWAT team is essentially cribbing from how the US military was handling Vietnam. And this is coming to be in like the late 60s, early 70s as it's become clear that we're losing in Vietnam and that this, this idea of, well, we have these small teams that are super hyper trained for doing very specific acts of targeted violence. It's not working. We're not winning. Because just having some guys who are good at killing, really good at killing, doesn't win wars. Cause wars aren't mostly about how good you can train a small number of dudes to kill. They're about whether or not you have a plan for victory. Right? We didn't win World War II because our men, man to man, were the best killers man to man. German soldiers were generally better fighters than their counterparts in most theaters. Not to the extent that this is usually claimed, but generally this is the case. Right? And they lost badly because we had all of the resources and the logistics. And that's what wins wars. Having gasoline and steel wins wars. Knowing where to move men and where not to waste their lives wins wars. Individual dudes being really good at shooting other individual dudes doesn't win wars. It just doesn't. It never has and it never will. What wins wars is having a plan for how to win that fucking war.
- [33:55]
B
And also, let's say that it did. Why would you want to take the tactics of a war that didn't go well, that we get our.
- [34:01]
A
It's very obvious. By the late 60s, oh, shit, none of this has worked well. Right? That's what's constantly amazing to me, when everyone's like, what we gotta do is what we're doing in Vietnam. Why? Why? So Gates, though, is reading obsessively from US Military counterinsurgency manuals, and he's learning about coin, you know, counterinsurgency strategies in the early Vietnam War period. And the fact that those strategies had been failed was immaterial to him. As Aaron Staghoff Belfort writes, he consulted with Marines at the Naval Armory in Chavez Ravine. It was out of a belief in counterinsurgency's ability to discipline the metropolis where domestic unrest could be neutralized like insurgencies abroad, that SWAT was born. Now, shockingly, the other higher ups at the LAPD don't immediately embrace this idea. So Gates and a couple other people have to work in their own time kind of clandestinely to set up the SWAT team. They're initially doing this sort of unsanctioned. Staghoff Belfort describes it as an unsanctioned experiment. And they start by bringing in. This is partially, maybe apocryphal, but the story is they're like, who is best at shooting in the whole department? Let's get the 20 best sharpshooters we got, and those will be our first LAPD SWAT team. And they carry out these clandestine training operations on farms in the valley. Eventually, they graduate to training with Marines at Camp Pendleton, which feels like a violation of the spirit of posse comitatus if not the letter of the law. Right. Army's not supposed to engage in policing, but we can have them train the cops, right? Why is that a problem with anybody? You know?
- [35:34]
B
Found a little workaround.
- [35:35]
A
Found a little workaround. So ultimately, they gain approval to execute their plan. And the first SWAT team officially starts working near the end of 1969. And its inaugural action is a raid on the Black Panther Party headquarters in South Central Lake. Officers show up with a warrant, and they bring grenade launchers, dynamite, and other heavy weapons with them. Shockingly, Bridget, do you think this is going to deescalate tensions and get the Black Panthers to turn themselves in peacefully?
- [36:04]
B
I can't imagine it did, no.
- [36:07]
A
When an army shows up at their door, they respond as if an army has shown up at their door. In the firefight that follows, more than 5,000 rounds are exchanged. Now, despite all of their Training and gear. The SWAT cops don't perform notably better than the Panthers. Four police officers are injured and four Panthers are injured. And again, no one dies. Which is wild for how many bullets are flying in this fucking thing, right? Part of this is just that this is kind of a thing that you learn if you study the history of like gun training. People don't know how to shoot back then by and large, like even experienced soul are not accurate with their guns. That's not what training is about. It's about firing for effect, right? It's not about hitting individual people. And by God, everyone sucks ass with guns back in the day.
- [36:57]
B
Not firing for effect. Like, well, I didn't hit him, but looks pretty cool, didn't.
- [37:01]
A
But I filled that whole area with fucking bullets, right? And that is in war, that is what you do in war. Very few bullets. I think in the Iraq it's an average of like 50,000 rounds fired by coalition forces for every person killed, you know, because nearly every bullet that's fired in war is for suppression. But you shouldn't do that for policing because bullets keep going, right? Like it's bad to do this in a neighborhood filled with people. It's a miracle that no one dies during this gunfight, right? It is a fucking miracle. And in the end, this massively violent and insane use of force accomplishes nothing. The cops don't even succeed by their own standards. They arrest six Panthers who are acquitted on most of the charges against them. Because again, the cops don't do anything by the law. They just show up and there's immediately a gun battle in South Central. And then the fucking courts are the judges and our juries are like, what the fuck? This is nuts, right? These guys aren't guilty of most of the things that you accuse them of. Gates himself later admitted the department was roundly criticized by its brutal activity. And he complains even though our injuries are worse than theirs. And again, maybe that's evidence that your training doesn't work.
- [38:21]
B
Yeah, maybe something's not going right.
- [38:24]
A
Maybe this didn't work. Maybe this was a miserable failure. You get sent all this time and money training these guys to be super soldiers and some Panthers in their house fight them to a standstill. Damn near, right? And you don't even, you don't even win in court against them because you did this big insane, violent thing. And Gates complained later in his autobiography, nobody, not even the media, ever learned the whole truth. And the whole truth is that in a nondescript military vehicle parked on a side street Sat one very frightening military grenade launcher primed and ready to blast the house to kingdom come, right? He's like, the press never knew that we had a grenade launcher that we could have used to blow everything up and we didn't. And I'm like, do you see that? That makes it worse.
- [39:09]
B
Yeah.
- [39:10]
A
Should the lesson not have been, my God, what a nightmare that we had this thing there, Jesus, can you imagine? This whole thing ended without anyone dying and we might have blown up half the neighborhood. Fuck.
- [39:20]
B
No one's praising our restraint, though.
- [39:23]
A
No one's praising that we didn't even. We asked to use it and the National Guard said no. We wanted to use it, but they didn't let us and no one died. And that wound up being fine. God, can you imagine? Like, again, never learns a lesson, this motherfucking guy. And you know, the lesson from all of this should have been, well, I guess we probably shouldn't give Daryl Gates and his cops access to military grade weaponry and tell them that they're members of a special elite unit, because that's like a drug. It's like giving cocaine to a nine year old. Like, oh boy, this is going to just make everything about this kid more of a problem, right? Like, and the problem is that after this fucking SWAT raid, SWAT teams spread like a drug across the country. Because every other police department and all of the, you know, mostly white citizens watching this, they see how cool these guys look and they're like, I need, we need SWAT teams where we live. I feel like I'm not safe without a SWAT team. Now a big part of the inciting reason why SWAT teams are going to have the funding that they are is that in 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson had signed an omnibus crime bill into law. And among other things, this crime bill created the leaa, or Law Enforcement Association Administration. When Nixon succeeded lbj, he appointed a guy named Donald Santarelli to head the agency. Now Donald's not going to be along around a terribly long time. He has to resign in 74 because he leaked like the news leaked reports that after the Watergate break in, he said that Nixon should resign. But before he resigns, he turns the newly minted LEAA into an organ for funding and supporting the spread of the ideas that Gates and his fellow justify the creation of the first SWAT team. The LEAA used federal funds to push more police departments to follow Los Angeles and to start treating policing as not the maintenance of law and order, but as counterinsurgency. From that article in the Metropole through The leaa, federal funds and surplus military equipment were funneled into local police departments, facilitating the expansion of SWAT programs nationwide. Public enthusiasm grew after the high profile 1974 standoff between the LAPD SWAT team and the Symbionese Liberation army during the Patty Hearst kidnapping case. And have you heard much about the SLA and the Patty Hearst case?
- [41:39]
B
I know a little bit about it.
- [41:40]
A
But I don't know the.
- [41:41]
B
I know the broad strokes.
- [41:42]
A
Yeah, I probably learned about this from a fucking cartoon that I watched in the early 2000s for the first time. The SLA isn't super well known today, but from 1973-75 it was a militant left wing terrorist organization. It's sometimes called the first recognized by law enforcement. Left wing terrorist organization. I don't know if that's entirely accurate if you want to look at kind of the history of anarchist. But they weren't necessarily always using the term terrorism back in that time. We're talking the turn of the century, right? But our president is assassinated by an anarchist and the FBI gets a lot of its early power cracking down on that. So you can kind of argue that point. But that's one thing that the SLA is sometimes called. And this group, they rob banks, they assassinate the superintendent of Oakland Public Schools. They're a messy group of people, right? Their name is a reference to the word symbiosis. And they are ostensibly a united front kind of left wing militant group. Probably the most infamous thing about them is that they kidnapped Patty Hearst, who was heir to the Hearst publishing fortune. And depend on who you. Depending on who you listen to, they either brainwashed Patty or radicalized her into participating in a bank robbery. In the late spring of 74, a petty crime led LAPD investigators to a home in South LA where the SLA had set up shop. This unfurled into an attempted raid and then a siege which became a two hour long firefight in which six SLA militants died at the hands of Gates SWAT officers. He had field command during the entire incident which is filmed and broadcast live and it acts as the coming out party for these fancy new SWAT officers and the public's broader awareness, right? This is when most Americans become aware of the SWAT team is this massive videotaped gunfight with automatic weapons and shit against the Symbionese Liberation army, right? This group of communist insurgents trying to overthrow the government. And the fact that again, the cops showing up with all these weapons turns this into an even worse situation than it might have been. The fact that the symbionese Liberation army had never been a real threat to the government. None of that matters as much as the footage that comes out of this, Right?
- [43:51]
B
I'm sure if you are living in a. If you're a white person living in a white suburb where this kind of. Where this kind of like.
- [43:58]
A
And these are mostly white militants, by the way. Yeah, yeah.
- [44:01]
B
Like, I could see how you could watch this stuff unfold and think, we need to have that here. Like, I bet you're watching this, like, with a fucking boner.
- [44:09]
A
Absolutely. Absolutely. And in 1975, right around the same time, a police procedural show, SWAT comes out for the first time, right? And this is one of the very first pieces of Copaganda. It's not exactly the first, but it is this heavily dramatized, like, image of the SWAT team, right? And it's set in a fake city in California that's clearly a stand in for Los Angeles. The SWAT TV show's theme song reaches number one on the Billboard top 100 in 1976. A former LAPD SWAT officer, Richard Kelbaugh, is the show's technical consultant. And it has these very nice looking navy blue uniforms, and they've got SWAT written across all of their gear and everything. And it helps make SWAT into a household name, right? And it's kind of a side effect. Later in his life, after leaving the lapd, Gates will consult on a series of SWAT video games called Daryl F. Gates Police Quest swat, where he's a character in the video games.
- [45:12]
B
Yo, you have to find this game and play it.
- [45:15]
A
Oh, yeah, I really need to get a copy of this motherfucker. And look at that son of a bitch. Right? Like, oh, my God. But this is huge, right? And this is, again, Copaganda had existed. You could talk about the show Dragnet, but this is the first time you have both a new police unit with access to military weapons that rolls out starting in LA and then nationwide at the same time as this TV show that really hypes up the supposed capabilities of the unit, right? And as a result, Darryl is swept into office as the LAPD Police Chief himself in 1978. He has turned himself into a celebrity by co creating SWAT and by making it not just at the same time as it becomes an actual unit in police departments across the country, it becomes an idea in American heads through this TV show. And that's a very new concept, right? The same thing's gonna happen with the special investigatory units that use Science and Fox.
- [46:15]
B
Oh, CSI.
- [46:16]
A
CSI, right. The same thing happens with CSI in, like, the early 2000s, I think. Late 90s, early 2000s, right, where. Right. As CSI teams are becoming more of a thing in law enforcement, there's this TV show that really hypes up with all of this fancy new science can do, right? Yeah. It's the same playbook that Gates is really writing in this period of time, you know, and individual pieces of this had existed prior to Gates, but he puts them together for the first time right now. Despite the fact that you have all of this money coming into cops, that cops are getting more guns and more funding than ever, gun crime and gang violence only rises, Right? And again, thoughtful people responded to this, should have by being like, oh, this probably doesn't help. Like, maybe doing all this is bad. Maybe this is actually part of the problem. Right? But the way it gets carried in the news and the way Gates frames it is look at how crime keeps rising. We gotta have more cops and guns, huh? Crime rose again. We need even more cops and guns. Right? And Gates successfully positions himself as the public face of militarized law enforcement. He is declaring war on the thugs and radicals who, in the eyes of conservative white America, were responsible for everything that was going wrong in the country. Well, it's not that these policies are bad or that adding more men with guns to the situation isn't working. It's that we don't have enough men with guns. Come on, give us some more. We promise. Just one more man. Just one more gun. Just one more guy. You know, it's the same thing you have, like, highways in major cities, like one more lane, one more lane. It'll fix it. It'll fix it. But never quite works that way.
- [47:50]
B
It's such a frustrating conversation because people who continue to beat the drum that we need more police, more cops, More like the police need more money. We need more jails. How much is enough to show it's not working?
- [48:02]
A
When is it gonna work? Not yet, huh? All right, now, there are some other reads of the situation, right? As Darryl becomes police chief in 78, a month after he's sworn in, he speaks before a Latino civil rights organization. And he notes that black officers, in his opinion, were more proactive in trying to get promoted than Latin Latino officers. He claimed to have talked with a Mexican American police lieutenant who failed the captain's exam. And he tells this guy, well, you didn't pass because you're lazy. And the news reports this as like, he's being racist against Latinos, which is pretty accurate if you ask me. And this is the first time there's calls for his resignation. It's this, this thing that happens. He talks out of pocket right after he becomes the chief and people are like, this guy should quit. He does not. Now, around the same time as he becomes chief, a white former cop starts showing up on local TV news shows wearing a mask, right? And like talking about the LAPD as an insider. In City of Quartz, the great Mike Davis describes how he would, quote, luridly chronicle the racism and trigger happiness of the Blue Knights towards ordinary blacks. Gates, the third Parker protege in a row to command the LAPD ridiculed these charges and the liberals who listened to them. Soon afterwards came the police killing of Yulia Love, a 39 year old black widow, in default of her gas bill. Community outrage was so great that Watts Assemblymember Maxine Waters demanded. Chief Gates, we want you out. Gates defended the 1238 caliber holes in Mrs. Love's body before a cowed police commission. Several hundred black clergy members petitioned the Carter administration to intervene. They asked the Justice Department to probe a pattern of systematic abuse of non whites, including more than 300 police shootings of minority citizens in the last decade. Meanwhile, the Coalition Against Police Abuse collected tens of thousands of signatures calling for the establishment of a civilian police review board. So what you have here isn't just the birth of militarized policing. It's the start of this great clash between cops and their elected allies who say we have to just let our heroes do what they need to do to fight the bad guys. And all the regular people being like, but they're just saying whoever they hate is the bad guys. And a lot of the times there's like 39 year old widow that they shot 12 times because she got angry that her gas bill wasn't paid. Why did guys with guns have to show up to that? Is that the solution to a lady who's not paying her gas bill and yells at the gas man? Is that, did that make it better? Right? No. But that's not what these people are thinking. And part of Gates genius, unfortunately is that he is very good at politicking during this period of time. And he manages to fight off these attempts at oversight of the lapd, in large part due to the fact that he makes this very intelligent strategic alliance with Mayor Bradley, who was eyeing a run for governor, and as Davis writes, quote, wanted to preclude any stance that could be interpreted by white voters as anti police to continue from City of Courts. Thus insulated from police accountability, Chief Gates was only emboldened to taunt the black community with increasingly contemptuous or absurd excuses for police brutality. In 1982, for example, following a rash of LAPD chokehold killings of young black men in custody, he advanced the extraordinary theory that the deaths were the fault of the victim's racial anatomy, not excessive police force. We may be finding that in some blacks, when the carotid chokehold is applied to the veins or arteries, they don't open up as fast as they do on normal people.
- [51:18]
B
Oh, my God, they still pull that today. Literally, like, so I.
- [51:22]
A
This is the birth of it.
- [51:24]
B
Yeah. Like, I have sickle cell trait. And they'll. If anything ever happens to me, I know the first thing they'll say is, well, I did have sickle cell trait.
- [51:32]
A
Sickle cell anemia, right? This is excited delirium, right? This is the first. No, no, no, it's not the fault of the cops choking this guy. His body's wrong. It's not normal. If it was normal, he'd still be alive.
- [51:45]
B
So fucked.
- [51:46]
A
Yeah.
- [51:47]
B
And also so it's.
- [51:48]
A
It's.
- [51:48]
B
I see that they're. They don't want to say we killed them because they were black, but the explanation, it's so. I mean, almost like they come up with something that sounds a little less. They weren't normal, you know what I'm saying? Like, it just. It's hardly even a dog whistle.
- [52:04]
A
Yeah, it's not. It's just a whistle, right?
- [52:07]
B
Yeah, it's just a whistle.
- [52:09]
A
Now this should have. Saying shit like this. Should have seen him forced out, flung into the sun, I might say. But unfortunately for all of us, his years in power coincide with something that's going to supercharge his ability to get not just white community leaders, but black community leaders on his side, which is the crack epidemic. Right. And the fact that this is so bad that the damage crack is doing to communities, you know, in black neighborhoods is so severe, a lot of local black community organizations are like, well, as bad as this guy is, maybe we do need more cops. Maybe that's preferable to continue letting the crime and drug situation spiral out of control. Right? And Gates is smart enough that he knows I can't just play the race card for the white folks. Right? I do have to talk to these black community leaders and be like, yeah, more cops will fix the crack epidemic. Right. That will make your neighborhoods better. I promise. And he realizes there's a future in playing his drive for increased power and weapons to the police as part of a broader anti gang effort. Right? You do the anti gang stuff and you talk about it one way to white people to say, I need more guns. And you talk about it to black community leaders to say, well, these gangs are doing so much damage, you need more cops in your neighborhoods. Right? And he's able to do both of these things very effectively throughout the 1980s. And, you know, another thing that kind of helps to charge his power during this period, a situation he very effectively utilizes, is the 1984 Olympics, which are hosted in Los Angeles. The LAPD's Olympics liaison is going to be the guy who later leads the department's drug and gang policing units. And they use this massive security budget that they get for the Olympics to get machine guns, infrared sighting devices, and V100 armored vehicles. These basically tanks. And a lot of this equipment winds up in the hands of the SWAT teams after the Olympics. And it's never useful for the Olympics. Right? But the fact that the Olympics goes off without a hitch, that it's not violent, is like, well, obviously giving these guys tanks is necessary. And they rebrand these Vietnam era armored personnel carriers as the LAPD rescue vehicle, even though it's equipped with this 14 foot battering ram. You know, there's a very famous incident right after the Olympics where they take one of these tanks and they use it to smash down what they call a rock house in Pacoima. And the officers there find two women and three kids with ice cream, but there's a little bit of marijuana now. There's no guns, there's no rock, there's no crack. There's a tiny bit of pot, two women and three kids, and they crush this house with a tank. And Daryl Gates is like, this is a great tactic. This is going to make all the rock houses shut down. The crack epidemic is going to go away because we have a tank now, right? And unfortunately, enough community leaders are like, well, maybe this is what we need that he's able to build. He's able to keep enough of a coalition together to keep support for this. Right? It's a very depressing story, but it does work.
- [55:15]
B
And I hate. I mean, I promise I'll stop trying to draw parallels to today, but the way that Trump talks about, particularly when it comes to black women, community leaders, and I think he's making this up, to be clear. But, you know, exploiting the very real harms in black communities and then turning that into, oh, we have beautiful black women in MAGA hats in Chicago running out onto the street saying, bring the National Guard, bring whoever you want, as long as you can fix the crime it really I can just draw such a straight line from what you're describing to this. What's happening now.
- [55:49]
A
Yep, yep. It's. And it's. I mean, that's part of why Gates is so relevant, right? Is that he's writing the playbook for everyone who's gonna follow. And it works really fucking well. Unfortunately. You know what else works well? The Products and Services Sponsor Podcast this.
- [56:10]
E
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- [57:19]
D
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A
Okay, if you thought season one of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up. Season two is here and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper. They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff. This season they're also hitting the road, literally. From NYC to rural cruising scenes to overseas hookups, no stone is left unturned. And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze. So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate. Oh, and this year they want to hear your stories. Yep, they've got a new call in segment where they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air. No pressure. So if you're ready for round two, just push play Sniffy's Cruisin Confession, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. And we're back. So On Good Friday 1987, Daryl Gates gave a press conference celebrating the success of his program at ending street crime. Right at the fact that we're doing all these mass arrests, right? They've launched this in the, you know, after the Olympics they start launching these huge like raids, these mass police raids where they'll send two or three hundred officers into a neighborhood as part of an anti gang sweep, right? And these big sweeps, these are evolutions of the sweeps against homeless encampments that the LAPD had been using for years. They were like, let's take this same thing we've already been doing on homeless people and do it in black neighborhoods, right? Under the aegis of the gang related Active Trafficker Suppression System. So called drug neighborhoods would be raided by groups of 200 or more heavily armed officers who were told to stop and interrogate anyone they suspected of being in a gang. Such suspicions could be justified by something as simple as the use of gang hand signals, which is like, did a guy use his hands? Did he do anything with his hands? It's a hand signal. Does he have red shoelaces? Only gang members have red shoelaces. Pick them up, search em, beat em up if you gotta, right? And you know, it's the start of this. We're seeing this now with the Trinity, Aragua, right? Where they're like, oh yeah, these are gang tattoos. This autism speaks or whatever tattoo is a gang sign. You know, all the gangs, these Venezuelan gangs love these tattoos. Like this is again a lot of this whole playbook, none of it's new that we're seeing right now. It's all come. A lot of it starts with Daryl Gates. So after they start doing all these huge sweeps, after this has been going on for a little while, he gives this big press conference on Good Friday 87 where he's like, we've eradicated street crime with our mass sweeps of drug neighborhoods. The same night that he makes this brag, there's a drive by, by the Crips that kills a 19 year old woman, right? So he declares, he does a mission accomplished moment like George W. Bush. And then there's a massive gang drive by that gets a lot. That kills a young woman and gets a ton of publicity. And everyone's like, it kind of seems like you're not stopping. These guys. They just shot up a neighborhood. Hey, Darryl, Darryl, is this maybe not working?
- [62:13]
B
Like we said, mission accomplished.
- [62:15]
A
Mission accomplished. Fuck you. So the fact that his heavy handed tactics had done nothing to actually reduce violence weren't seen as evidence that Daryl had been wrong. Gates successfully spun his failures into proof that the police needed. You want to guess what they need?
- [62:30]
B
More guns and tanks.
- [62:31]
A
More guns and tanks and less accountability, baby. So because he declares victory and then there's this shooting, he announces a super sweep. The biggest sweep ever. Operation all caps Hammer. Now this is just a PR stunt. They don't know they're not going into a neighborhood because it's the head of where the Crips are. Because there's a particular nexus of gang houses. They pick basically a random spot and fill it with cops and guns and tanks, right? And Gates describes it as the LAPD's D Day. You know, this is our Normandy landings in this random neighborhood that we picked. Unfortunately, a lot of local black elected leaders support the chief. State Senator Diane Watson's press secretary told reporters that quote, in a state of war, civil rights are suspended for the duration of the conflict.
- [63:19]
B
Yikes.
- [63:20]
A
Thank you, Diane. That's the right thing to say. Great.
- [63:26]
B
I mean, I do think we have to contend with the ways that a lot of our black community leaders, black elders, did sort of support some of this tough on crime policing and yeah, it's just a reality. It's not one that I like. I think it's just the truth.
- [63:42]
A
It's just a reality of the situation. And it's. You know, crack is scary. And a lot of what's known now about the involvement of the federal government and some of that is not known fully at the time. Right. That does take a while to really percolate out. But so there's. I can understand to a degree why this is a scary. You do have to understand, which I don't say to absolve any of these local leaders of accountability. But there's a fog of war. Right. I hate I'm now adding to the problem by describing it as war. But people don't have perfect information about what's going on. Right.
- [64:13]
B
I know what you mean.
- [64:14]
A
People are making the decisions they have based on incomplete data, as they always are. Right. And Daryl is taking advantage of that very effectively. While most of his political work and work efforts are focused on getting more guns, more power and less accountability, he always maintained a high degree of skill at manipulating public perception. And perhaps his most lasting success in this arena came with his creation of an organization that I'm gonna guess impacted the education of basically everyone listening to this show. DARE. Right. Let's talk about where DARE comes from. In 1983, Gates sat down with LA school district officials to sketch out the dimensions of a hybrid police public school program. Drug abuse resistance education. For the few people listening who didn't undergo DARE classes, they involved uniformed cops coming into classrooms and lecturing kids about the dangers of drugs. But the supposed deadly realities of different substances and liberal use of hard nosed life on the street. Anecdotes from these cops as supposed backgrounds. Right. Of I was in a crack house and saw crack babies and yeah, yeah, this is how scary these drugs are. And everyone was smoking the marijuana and that's why their babies came out wrong or whatever. Right. We heard some shit. You know, to make a long story short, DARE was a massive success and it spread to school districts nationwide and soon corporate sponsors. Cause Darrel is like, you know, police department shouldn't pay for this and the schools don't have money to pay for this. Let's have corporations sponsored dare. And that way corporations can pay for police officers to be Doing police work in schools.
- [65:48]
B
The scam within the scam.
- [65:50]
A
Right, right. And again, this is the start of law enforcement funded and supported by business interests. You know, this is where that becomes. Not that it had never happened before, but this really institutionalizes it in a major way. Now, there's a lot of data that shows DARE did not work at its intended goal. A significant amount of information suggests that among teens who attended DARE programs, drug use increased during the period of time that DARE was in effect. Right. And some evidence even suggests that a number of students were more likely to experiment with drugs if they had attended DARE programs. Right. And perhaps your host is one of those students. You know, maybe. Maybe. Who's to say? Certainly not my DARE officer.
- [66:36]
B
I remember my DARE officer very well.
- [66:39]
A
He.
- [66:40]
B
I mean, I do have to wonder because I was like a pretty sheltered kid at this point and I was hearing about drugs for the first time from my dear officer and he didn't make them sound boring.
- [66:51]
A
Oh, man.
- [66:53]
B
He didn't make them sound like something I could do.
- [66:54]
A
You seem really interesting. You say it feels so good, people ruin their lives over it. Well, I might want to feel that good.
- [67:02]
B
I want to see what all the fuss is about.
- [67:04]
A
Yeah, these drugs sound interesting. Now this fact, I will say one of the errors people make when they criticize danger DARE is they just read the fact that like, well, students who attended DARE may have been more likely to use drugs. And again, I say may have because none of these studies, as suggestive as they are of that fact, none of this is like proof of that. Right. Studies can be flawed in a number of ways. Drug use could have just been increasing unrelated to dare. But there's no evidence that DARE decreased drug use. Right. And there's evidence suggestive that it did increase drug use. Right. And unfortunately, that fact leads a lot of people to just dismiss DARE as a failure, as, oh, what a waste of time and money. This was a bad idea. Right. That is not. I do say it's a failure if you're talking about it from a standpoint of decreasing drug use. That's not primarily why Darrell Gates likes the DARE program. And it succeeds from his point of view in its goal. And to describe how that is the case, I want to quote now from a study in the Cambridge University Press by Max Felker Cantor, quote, the DARE officer helped normalize and legitimize the police as a feature of the school environment and alongside the just say no message, helped embed schools into the carceral state as a police led drug Education program, DARE developed broad based appeal among policymakers, educators and law enforcement, driving home the message that solving youth drug use was best left to law enforcement rather than social services or public health. DARE was promoted as a non punitive and preventative program to help students resist drugs by learning how to say no, recognizing the consequences of their choices, and agreeing to the importance of personal responsibility and the moral values of right and wrong. But employing cops as teachers and promoting a zero tolerance message tried drug education to a carceral frame. Indeed, DARE officials and policymakers use of the term drug abuse to describe any substance use whatsoever constituted a rejection of all alternative approaches to drug education such as responsible use, and constituted a key part of the effort of drug warriors ranging from law enforcement officials to Secretary of State William Bennett to President Ronald Reagan to insist that the only correct decision was to avoid drugs or face the consequences.
- [69:11]
B
So mission accomplished, kind of, yeah, it.
- [69:15]
A
Gets cops in schools. It makes that normal. It makes people think drugs and kids using them is a law enforcement problem. Right. It's not an education problem. It's not something social services solve. A cop with a gun needs to solve kids using drugs, Right. And the data shows that there are drug education programs that reduce drug abuse and the kind of drug abuse that's a problem. Cause, you know it's not a problem is a kid trying pot once. It's not even that big of a problem if a kid tries coke or a fucking oxy once. What's a problem is, number one, people getting stuff that's tainted and can kill them and not knowing what to do if a friend ods. And the other problem is people not feeling like there's any resources if they do start to have a problem. And if you do start drug education by saying this stuff is best avoided, certainly while you're young. But you also include. And if you have a friend using and it looks like they're not breathing, right, here's where you get Narcan, or If you call 911 and get an ambulance, they will not arrest you. Right? Like, these are the kinds of things I'm not saying that I'm not giving. This is not a comprehensive look, but this is the kind of stuff that works. And it doesn't work because it stops everyone from using every drug. It works by understanding that some people will use drugs and in addition to trying to tell them that they should, you know, avoid that stuff, especially when they're young, you should tell them what to do if people do and if something goes wrong and that stops them from Dying that can make a mistake, go from something that ends a life, from something that's just a mistake that someone gets over. Right.
- [70:44]
B
But I can see how in this DARE program dynamic, the only resource in scare quotes is carceral, is police, is, you know, your friend getting locked up. That's the only thing they're offering.
- [70:58]
A
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that just doesn't. I will say, you know, in Texas, where I grew up in Plano, for a big chunk of my childhood, we had something called the Texas Heroin Massacre, which is what the Rolling stone called it, which is when I think six kids OD'd in one night. Cause an extra strong batch of horse got into the supply. And Plano, you know, parts of Plano at least, are more affluent. So kids had money and so they were able to afford to do heroin. And that's why you had a bunch of these kids ODing in this, you know, boring suburban area where there wasn't a lot to do besides drugs and kids had pocket money. And one of my teachers, Ms. Gross, my health teacher when I was in high school, her son hadn't died, but two of his friends had, and he had had permanent brain damage when he OD'd. She was the only good anti drug speech I ever had because she was like, you will experiment as young adults, almost certainly most kids do, and I'm not gonna tell you what to do and I'm not gonna lecture you. What I will say is, for the love of God, don't inject anything. And I never did, you know, shout out to Ms.
- [71:56]
B
Gross.
- [71:57]
A
Yeah, thank you, Mrs. Gross. Yes. Don't shoot up stuff kids. And you know, fentanyls and shit. Now that makes test your shit if you're gonna do stuff kids or whatever. I'm not telling you to do drugs, but some people are going to learn how testing kits work. Get narci.
- [72:12]
B
You can get them from Dance Safe. It's an organization that gives you test kits.
- [72:16]
A
Yeah, Project Dance Safe. And yeah, avoid injecting, you're not a nurse. Don't shoot stuff into your body, kids. Right, like test your stuff. Stick to snortables or whatever, you know, smoke, whatever. Don't shoot things into your body, kids, please. Maybe if we keep it to that, we can stop some of this. Right, so there is some mixed evidence as to whether or not DARE programs made kids more or less trusting of police. Some of the studies I've seen suggest that white kids trusted police more because of DARE and black kids trusted them eat less. But this is an entirely Consistent. You know, we don't have perfect data on this. What Dare does do is it keeps Gates name in the news and it ensures him regular invitations to high society and government events in D.C. and elsewhere. As crime escalated, so did incidents of horrific police violence, generally against non white people. Per an article in the LA Times, there came a rash of LAPD scandals in which officers were accused of cavorting sexually with teenage Explorer Scouts, getting drunk in police station parking lots, consorting with prostitutes, and stopping motorists to rob them of their wallets. Two members of a special LAPD burglary unit pleaded guilty to stealing electronic equipment from a shop in Hollywood.
- [73:27]
B
Are you sure them fraternizing with teens wasn't just a prank of some sort?
- [73:31]
A
It might have just been a prank, yeah. Maybe they were fake. Maybe there's some more of those joke rape complaints, right? That Daryl is such a fan of Gaetz got much of the blame from the media, citizens and politicians, including Mayor Bradley. Several high ranking officers even suggested privately that Gates should step down. City hall trimmed his budget requests and required him to hire more women, minorities and civilians. He struggled to police the nation's second largest city with a force that was too small for its size compared to other major cities. At the end of his tenure, Gates said Los Angeles had two officers per thousand residents, in contrast with New York and Chicago's four per thousand. So, you know, things are, as the 80s turn into the 90s, they're not working. The shit that used to work don't work no more for Dare Daryl, right? He's starting to have more and more problems because it's become impossible to hide that what he's doing isn't helping. You know, and the other thing that's happening is that as this decade transitions, Darryl's ability to manipulate local leaders and organizations is on the wane. Right. Society is waking up more and more to systemic racial injustices. And Daryl, who's racist as hell, has failed miserably at adapting to the times. He's also maintained this very hardline, McCarthy esque attitude on left wing political organizers organizing, pushing for the creation of the LAPD's Public Disorder Intelligence Division, which surveilled subversives who were entirely left wing and primarily labor organizers, Chicano civil rights lawyers and journalists and the aclu. This is all so fucking illegal that it is eventually forced to disband. Right now. Again, Gaetz remains popular in many circles with conservatives and even to the end of his life with rank and file officers. But his tendency to like, shoot from. Yeah, he's this. He talks. We've talked a lot about how he says shit that he shouldn't be saying. Probably the most famous example of this is in 1990, Gates testifies before the US Senate Judiciary Committee and claims casual drug users ought to be taken out and shot. And you know who related to him is a casual drug user who gets arrested repeatedly for possession of drugs? His kid. Oh, cool guy. Sweet.
- [75:41]
B
Dad of the year.
- [75:43]
A
Yeah. Now, this all comes to a head in 1991 when a fellow named Rodney King is pulled over after a high speed chase that ends in a place called Lakeview Terrace. And there's a video filmed. A lot of people don't know this. If you've seen Terminator 2, the villain is an LAPD officer. I mean, it's a robot wearing the skin of an LAPD officer. But it's not an accident that this movie made after the LA riots or made like, dur. Sorry, during. Because the first Terminator is filmed before the LA riots. And the guy who films the Rodney King video is out with a video camera to film Terminator being filmed. Like, he's taking footage of that, and as he's coming home, he sees the cops beating the absolute shit out of this guy, and he films that. And so the Terminator movies are just kind of intimately tied to the police violence in Los Angeles, which is fascinating to me.
- [76:41]
B
Oh, my gosh. The end of Terminator 2, when the cop Terminator is like, hey, have you seen this kid? And his friend's like, no, I don't know him. That is like, embedded in my brain.
- [76:51]
A
This kid saves humanity by instinctively lying to the lapd.
- [76:54]
B
Yeah, yeah. Lie to a cop saved humanity.
- [76:57]
A
Yeah. Beautiful stuff. So Rodney King doesn't get charged with anything because the police beat him nearly to death. Right. He has a fractured skull. He's a broken leg. In his own autobiography, Gates is like, oh, I was horrified when I saw the video. He calls the incident an aberration. And he sort of apologizes to King, but then he's like, but also, this guy has a long arrest record right now. Now, this doesn't help anything. And it kind of inflames tensions. There are calls immediately for him to resign. Right. And Gates refuses. And so there's like this increasing fight after the video comes out. The police commission puts him on paid leave for a while, but he's reinstated a little bit later on July 10, 1991. There's an investigative panel headed by Warren Christopher, who becomes the Secretary of State later, that issues this report on the LAPD and says that it has, quote, too many patrol officers who view citizens with resentment and hostility and who treat the public with rudeness and disrespect. The problem of excessive force in the LAPD is fundamentally a problem of supervision, management and leadership, the commission concludes. And it calls for fundamental change with LAPD values and a new chief. The LA Times also calls for a new chief. And for, like the next year, Gates is fighting for his life. Life, right? Right? As this trial for these officers who beat Rodney King is churning up, so Gaetz is kind of fighting to maintain his position as everyone in LA is holding their breath to be like, are these cops? Is anything gonna happen to them? You know? And so, because he's so unpopular with Mayor Bradley, they're not talking on April 29, 1992, when four LAPD officers, the guys indicted in the King beating, are acquitted by a jury in Ventura County. And almost as soon as this happens, people take to the streets, right? There are fires, there's looting, there's attacks, there's. I mean, people flip the fuck out for very understandable reasons, right? Because they've seen this hideous video and these cops got off scot free. And fucking Gates isn't even initially in the state, right? Like, he flies back right as this starts to happen and he like, skips an event in dc, but even while the rioting starts in Florence and Normandy Avenue, he's at a place, he's in Brentwood in like a rich neighborhood at like a fundraiser to oppose a police reform ballot measure. And he doesn't show up for hours after the riots start, you know, and by the time he gets there, the LAPD has lost control of huge chunks of the city, right? The National Guard has to be called in. It takes two days for anything that resembles order to be established. And like 53, 55 people are killed. I think there's slightly differing numbers. Now, Gates isn't there for the start of it. He's more focused on defeating this ballot reform measure than dealing with the start of the riots. He just fucks up at every stage of this and he tries to throw the blame onto, like, some of his lower ranking guys. He was like, no, it was these dudes who fucked up. But there's this panel led by former FBI and CIA director William Webster that blames Gaetz and says that he didn't have any kind of plan or training for his officers to control the disorder. He had no idea what to do. There was no way they were ever going to stop this. Right? And this all culminates on June 28, 1992, when Gates steps down as the Chief of police. Right. He insists that this was a choice he made on his own, although the City Council president, John Ferraro, is the guy that is like, you really, you have to do this right? This city is going to keep burning until you're off the fucking job, man. You fucked up, right? You gotta get out of here. And, yeah, that's basically the story of Daryl Gates, you know. The four officers who beat Rodney King and were acquitted in Simi Valley are retried in federal court for violating King's civil rights. Two are convicted and go to prison. So there's some justice. King gets a $3.8 million settlement from the city eventually. And Daryl Gates, he does all right in his retirement. He spends like a year as a talk show host on a local AM radio network. And he's a security consultant. He's in some video games, he shows up in films. He has some cameos in movies at the time. Because if you've watched movies like Demolition man that come out right after the LA riots, the city is just depicted as a war zone, Right? James Cameron's own Strange Days, which he writes just in the background of this movie, set in 99, LA is a perpetual riot. It's not even like a plot point. There's just National Guard, cops and rioters fighting in the background of every scene. It's pretty funny. But, yeah, and this is part of why, you know. So he never winds up. He kind of tries. He toys with the idea of trying to become chief again or trying to, like, become, you know, get another political position, but it never works out for him. Ultimately, he passes on in 2010 at his home in Dana Point with his family by his side of bladder cancer, you know, and that's the story of Daryl Gates.
- [82:02]
B
I'm sure he said some pretty wild shit on that radio show.
- [82:06]
A
Oh, boy.
- [82:06]
B
I can only imagine the shit he was saying.
- [82:09]
A
People say he was surprisingly, like, quiet and kind of reserved, which I think is a general thing about him, is that he was, like, not as, like, loud a blowhard as you might have guessed, I think, which is probably why he's only there for 15 months. He's not a very good radio host. Right. But that's nice, cool stuff. Well, that's the story.
- [82:30]
B
We still don't know why he changed the spelling of his name.
- [82:32]
A
Still don't know. That's the great mystery of the Daryl Gates story.
- [82:35]
B
That's his Citizen Kane sled thing. Like, what is the Reason dare l.
- [82:43]
A
Yeah, if only he hadn't changed his name. So funny. Well, Bridget, where can people find you on the Internet?
- [82:52]
B
You can find me at Instagram on BRIDGET Marie in D.C. you can find my podcast There are no girls on the Internet. You can Find me on YouTube. Also at there are no girls on the Internet.
- [83:02]
A
You can find Bridget there. You can listen to season two of Sad Oligarch by Jake Hanrahan, which just came up. And yeah, yeah, here we are, everybody. We're done. You know, have fun with the podcasts that you listen to next, which I hope are ours. Just re listen to this one. You know, memorize it. Memorize every word of it. Bye.
- [83:27]
C
Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.
- [83:30]
A
For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app app Apple Podcasts.
- [83:37]
D
Or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [83:39]
C
Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube.
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A
New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards.
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C
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