how i got involved in covering the lapd and while was so fascinated with it when i first came to los angeles in 1975. >> first became interested when i moved from manhattan to a los angeles in the mid-70s. i was a public-school teacher working in a junior high in the bronx with a wild discord of the streets outside and at dusk on the subway ride back to manhattan with subway car would go through some of the most violent neighborhoods without a cop in sight. backbend n.y.p.d. and

counterpart's transit police never seem to be around when you wish there were and when they were too could not notice the slump of the shoulders sanders to shell filled appearance in showy the disillusionment with their job. when i arrived in los angeles and was astounded how different they were. first was clear they had not given up. the tailored motorcycle officers looked like the prototype model that they were for the film robo cop and acted the part. like the rest of the lapd trained to seek out crime and confront and command a suspect in the aloof and intimidating and every commander. even if the suspect only committed a minor infraction or done nothing at all wrong, that attitude alone seemed to start more trouble than it stopped and if you

were black it was worse and more frequent. every politician in in town seemed to kowtow to do the lapd to get into a public spat with a succession of chiefs number not afraid of anyone for cry wanted to understand the source of their extraordinary power and i wrote my first book as a way to find that out and understand that. protect and to serve was essentially a narrative history of the lapd written in the same way this book has been written through to characters that i take through the entire book. but it really started in

1877. the book starts with the of los angeles riots 1992. about the first 70 pages i use that to talk about the people who were around and other people to talk about them and their careers to introduce my characters and a sergeant so i pick it up there all the way through until he becomes chief. that is about it if you want to know more read the book. [laughter] >> when my friend asked me to appear i went to the book

but first let me have a plug for the book and i have lived in los angeles my entire life saliva's year for the 66 riots and the first encounter with the lapd was a ticket when i was 18. that is the only real contact. i plead guilty to that one. but four years later through

2011 and the epilogue brings that current but then the history part to through 2011 for what we see from the "l.a. times". now he says for years later people continue to ask me if the lapd is really reformed. to that answer compared to what? gerald gates the eric it combative years as chief than what you call the decade of drift under bernard parks than many other police departments have the reply is is yes. emphatically.

so summarize how has the lapd changed from 1992 through 2011? >> bill gates was the inheritor of the attitude pardon me. in the succession of the lapd chief starting with parker who became chief 1950. when he became chief he was heralded as a great reformer and he was indeed because at that time los angeles like other many big city departments, was a department on the take. if you were stopped you would pay the kerbside find - - time. [laughter] people would take money from gamblers and prostitution and, etc..

it was corrupt in that way but bill parker said no. we will not do that anymore. this stops now. the credo was after parker parker, if you get in trouble or involved in the shooting were beating up somebody that needed to me we will protect you but if you take 1 penny your ass is ours. that is history since then. so parker did some day that started a lot of problems or for the lapd he agreed to have a small police department on the cheap to be mobile with 470 square miles and to be in a patrol

car looking around, faceless not making contact with anybody unless they saw somebody doing something and very often in ghettos of the barrios is where they suspected people doing something all the time. and that was an attitude that we will stop people and put the fear of god into them. parker believed if people are nice to the police it meant they wanted something. there were not supposed to be nice there were supposed to be aloof and be better and believe that they were better than you. can you repeat your question? [laughter] i am rambling. >> that period of time in

1992 the last year of the gates chief through the department as we see that today, how has it changed? is a reformed? obviously it has changed for the better. >> has and a number of reasons. one was the reforms they did not go far enough but they enabled the chief of police to not be rehired after five years. he had no intention to go anywhere until he was forced out then the police

commission decides a there want to hire or not. because then williams and parks were not rehired for various reasons. that is an important reform. the lapd, or the chief of police had to be more politically aware and is due to willing to deal with the rest of the power structure of the city the was not willing to in the past. second to come read the inspector general came into the picture but before that nobody internally was watching the lapd the general was to be the eyes and ears of the police commissioner to tell the public what was going on in

terms of malfeasance and abuse within the department. is a works sometimes depending on who the police commissioner is. but probably the two most important thing is what started is some of the reforms is the scandal occurred and that caused so much attention the lapd put it on the front page day after day deliberately because they wanted people to pay attention there were editors who lived through decades iran to there wanted

this to matter. instead of doing a story over the weekend there was on the front page every day. that got the u.s. department of justice to force the city of los angeles into a consent decree that was very important because it had very strong metrics in terms of not violating civil liberties. said there was said judge that was on the commission and acutely aware it had not gone far enough. and he held the city and the lapd feet to the fire to make changes that were necessary. finally, the mayor and

police commissioner hired the most famous police reformer of the 20th-century to come in and complete the job. in fact, to your question the biggest change was the attitudinal change their mission as i saw it before bretton was to keep people in their plays to deal with this courage of the game so they could not really do because they would double down on what they did and it had not worked for decades. so bratton visited the aclu

aclu, he visited all prominent african-american meters and essentially said the understand the situation i know what is going on i will listen to you if it is something that should be done i will be happy to do it. he opened parker center to a lot of different people. so that was important when it came time for him to be reappointed the aclu wrote a letter to favor his appointment. he also did something very important. he encouraged innovation. not just what he thought of but that his captains in the field thought of. he told the captains in the field i want you to prevent crime. nobody in this department talks about is preventing

crime just putting people or arrest as many as you can to get a reputation for that you will get promoted. but that doesn't working and bratton understood that. he told his captains to do what they thought they needed to do to get lower crime to get the of legitimacy for the offices to police in those neighborhoods and tried to start to do that. and a number of captives, a charlie back most prominently, started to do that. they came up with their own community policing pray god that is the future but he did a fantastic job so committed the policing is a

big legacy of the lapd and that continues under bratton and under back gain interventionist beginning intervention academy was started almost primarily of acts getting members but serious players at the time and the lapd said we will support this academy and we will use them so they are not snitches because then they're not effective but when there are gang wars, a lot of what happens is someone shoots another but then they want retaliation so the nation and another

one the interventionist would stop the retaliatory killings which resulted in so much crime and death. those were the major accomplishments and the training everybody tells me those john officers there really captains get it with what needs to be done within the framework of the police department that we have better agents of containment. so that is how the lapd has been reformed i think. how has it not? twenty-five people were shot this year. 13 have died. chief back has promised transparency and he started off very transparent

seemingly to make every move instinctively that was right. you could tell that was the right thing to do and brought joy to my heart. because i knew charlie and i had interviewed him many times with this book. i had the highest respect for him more than any other public official. but now with these shootings he has trouble with the police commissioner. he is not being transparent. for example,, by the cameras he introduced to this commission a body kerry policy that is not transparent. you cannot find out what happened if there is something caught on tape the

lapd will decide if they will release it or not. the officers are allowed to view the tape before they make their official statements to internal affairs. we hear nothing about the shootings even one waved him down and rashad. so the tactics are not enforced and charlie back is caught between a rock and a hard place to pacify the troops and people like me who want them to be accountable and transparent. >> let me ask a question about the shootings.

so look at the last 20 years where the number of police shootings were higher we only have nine months but on the annualized basis and there are years it is over and it varies. day using things are worse today in terms of the of police use of force? >> no. i think it is better because previously under chief parks and williams to the care with no position and gates automatically tells the press what is a billion did to get themselves shot by the police that was the attitude. there was a lot more of that

and less accountability but lost the angeles has changed and it is the complexion of the city has changed dramatically as has the income gap between the wealthy and the very poor. so what we see with the crime rate and the crime rise that people are getting desperate a lot of crime is caused by the homeless. the lapd should not have to deal with the homeless they are the least prepared by trading and instincts by wanting to have control to deal with the people who were heavily drug addicted

and mentally ill. and living on the street is going up because of gentrification and people are pushed out and they are desperate for girl. >> and last day question of the ada to be less transparent now they and when he came into office fall 2009. and i will go back to the point you made earlier when i first got on to do the police commission as an assistant chief there are three, , i was told the most important thing that

happened in the lapd and the 25 years was the consent decree that never would have reformed itself because then once they got used to that mitt -- models it builds on itself but the strict oversight the judge had over the department is what forced the change. so that consent decree expired eventually after being extended one time but the judge lifted it 2008. and as you point out in the book pave the way for bratton to exit on a high note. but after that there was a transition agreement, three years which gave the police

commission greater oversight and also into the background was the department of justice to monitor the department further at a moment's notice go back to save a violated the transition agreement we have to go back to the consent decree and it was always hanging in the balance. the three years i was on the commission and nova chief is very out -- and anxious to get out under that. in 2011 it was lifted. i wonder if that is the time in which that attitude of the chief started to do change and things became less transparent? day you have a sense of that?

>> i don't necessarily but i can tell you what i know about charlie. unlike gates that was parker's driver was put on the road to chief he was a real cop a gang cop in the south tyrol. he was hard-nosed. he had a partner literally die in his arms in a crowd of people surrounded him and his partner and started to shout at him. wire you trying to help him? help of black guy over there who ran into the car with the officer that got killed was in the car. those were searing events for him at one time he had

to leave the southeast bureau to play in a transfer because he was starting to hate everybody this is the dilemma working in the ghetto for so long. research you hate to the people and don't make differentiation is between law-abiding citizens or kids acting out and serious criminals to be arrested. that is another reason why community policing is so important see you can get to know the people. the cops need to be part of the neighborhood to build that not just to arrest everybody insight. >> what causes the lack of transparency? >> in my mind there

200 million guns in america but that makes the distinction between somebody who is a rootless cop to shoot somebody for really no reason and he doesn't have what it takes to be a cop like i wouldn't so to assess the situation to use the right tactic but he doesn't have that ability or he is frightened, he doesn't know how to read black people because he has never known them. those and shoots somebody. back has a lot of time before those officers to think not only should they not be punished but also be retrained and people disagree with that.

>> and i think he understands the big constituency a chief of police always pass to consider his own troops. gates made the mistake of considering his troops was the only constituency but back is much smarter than that but he doesn't want to be known as somebody to give up his guys. >> now we will talk about where we're going in terms of the future. come on up. [laughter]

>> it is hard to be a cop right now. what i found so fascinating about your book is i know the players now. a lot of my time is on the psychology of why they act how they act and why they do what they do where is it coming from? they're background or experience and your book helped me with that because things make sense to me now that were perplexing. but i will tell you my observations. number one, the greatest thing that i learned, a community policing is from the bottom up now. these cops actually believe in community policing to

spend time that 21 police stations and community sanders there are libraries they are welcoming the officers are trained to be welcoming. we have so many programs that cadets program has 6,000 kids don't come from this neighborhood, they are kids that are standing up strong against all these forces to say i will take this fourth year of the road. what i see, in the book you mentioned two things i agree with him on a lot of things we usually tell the newspaper first. [laughter] but what was really important in this but

charlie talks about the bank of trust when i talk to the officers every monday morning i go. after 100 monday's with the roll call and the officers officers, i mentioned the bank of trust to talk about just like a grown bank accounts you have to have money in there so when things get tough you can pull from that but the problem with the officers is they make all the deposits but the people with the atm card making withdrawals are in cleveland and ferguson and new york and baltimore and all these cities and they have a huge impact on the republic the aclu and immediate deals with our lapd number to the crime rate has gone up and all the stars are an alignment it

will be for a long time. there is no middle class anymore. so the upper 10 percent has no empathy for the lower 45% they don't support this service providers to keep people off of the conveyor belt. i thought that was interesting but to modify that a little bit he says people get on and the cops just get them when they fall off the more people keep getting on. i do agree with that but i think think of it as the freeway to prison. we have to you give them

ways to get off the freeway what gets you off? a job. a father. a program. somebody that cares, a good education. what happens? they cannot watch the lakers or dodgers on television anymore. that is three hours there on the street. everything is moving away towards them 65 kids and their class at school. then we wonder the reciprocity is 70% within three years? reducing crimes that were felonies not to be then releasing them into the street without any training or place to go so they have a 70 percent recidivism rate because we just let out

5,000 people that means 3500 will be going back to gerald and we wonder why the crime rate goes up? >> i could not agree with you more that is a terrific summation of what people don't understand you can reform the police they can get better and have the impact but unless he looked up the structural problem that you were talking about, all the issues you mentioned are not being taken care of or even talked about because we don't want to spend the money and people don't understand that we have not even started to do that but once we start we may not see the results 15 years because the problem has been going on so long. there are riots 1964?

>> things are repeating now as in the past to create big crime and i am shocked. synthetic marijuana. it doesn't cost $10 it is a mass marketing drug taking people with any sort of mental issues to put them up two or three levels but people in other cities their answer to the homeless problem is to give them a bus ticket to los angeles. just go down to the bus station but i will leave that alone because lapd has to do things better prepare everybody talks about the word transparency. i think it is over use the word we need to focus is the escalation.

how do we keep things from occurring and these happens into with three seconds. so we have to go back to retrain these officers. and it isn't like a vaccination for your whole life, we have to keep going back and training and double down. what worries me is the cynical officers. but he joins the force they do wear their seat belt and understand that is a bunch

of bull should. and we all get a little cynical i am smart enough that i am quite you don't have to spread your cynicism to somebody else. i don't want to save the problems at lapd is perfect because policing is changing dramatically. i do the community like the back of my hand. i love their diversity and their people so we asked a number of you. what should i focus on? i read the descent decree and the transition agreement

led to the need to focus on? over and over is these cameras can really be important because the preliminary results is a 90% decrease. 50 or 60% decrease with officer use of force and that is only half of that. the other half is what doesn't escalate because they are no there being filled? i am not saying some things are now because i know all your films. take every single person that is stopped but it changes the mentality to keep things from happening. i am too old to let the world the fine meet because it takes too long so i will

get the cameras your id 18 months because of 18 years because it took that long. and i think it will be an important factor. >> [inaudible] >> had one of the things we saw with the christopher commission with community policing to have the of very small part of it to talk about gender and a the discrimination within the department but also the excuse of women in larger

numbers because they show extraordinary ability but it in the book we able to follow women or to get those issues in the book? >> the answer is no. . .

i want to be a cop. >> we have these times, a couple times a year, when we buy guns back. two things that are just off limits as far as cops are concerned, when somebody has a gun on the streets, number one. number two, they're selling drugs to kids. our guys don't go for that. they'll community police it up but when cross the lines -- >> we had a buyback, 700 guns purchased. semi automatic weapons, unbelievable. the people who war driving in

kind of lye like in n out, were moms and grandmas, because they would wait -- my kid is asleep. i took it right out from under the bed. they have this ability to just go in and be -- to very very strong, and i find that the women officers we have can relate a lot of times, in intervention and understanding the psychology and be very, very helpful, and you got to respect charlie for promoting people that deserve to be promoted, and keeping diverse balance in the department. >> his daughter is an l.a.p.d. officer, as you know. >> let me ask a question for both of you. in -- in 1992, there were over 1,000 murders in the city of los angeles.

the party one violent crimes were over 300,000. and before this recent uptick in the last couple of years, murders have gotten down to close to around 250, part one violent crimes, down to about 100,000. and now we're seeing a fairly significant uptick, and you both identified some of the reasons why we're seeing that. let me ask this question. in the reaction to the crime that we saw in the 1980s and year 1990s, california passed three-strikes law, federal government passed mandatory minimums. jurisdictions throughout the country started to enhance the sentences, many more people, particularly minority, and

african-americans, went to prison for minute longer periods of time. and then more recently we have seen the -- 47, which has resulted in the reduction of many of the crimes and as steve pointed out, some of the revolving door. we have ab109, the solution to overcrowding to force the nonviolent offenders back into the jails who then get out because the jails are overcrowded. they then commit property crimes which they don't get punished for, et cetera, et cetera. have we gone too far in that direction and did those significant -- what many people call draconian penalties, have any impact on the reduction in crime from then 1990s to 2012? >> it's hard to know. what criminallologists will tell

you is 15% of the reduction in crime we have seen might be attributed to that, but you know, new new york's crime rate- new york city's crime race has fallen every year for 20 years, and that has happened prisons are closing in new york state. the prison population is much lower than it was ten years ago or 20 years ago, while california was building up their prison system, so we were spending $11 billion a year to put people in jail under three strikes laws for things like walking into a safeway and opening a bottle of vodka, taking a sip and walking out. that was a third strike and that person wound up sentenced to 25 years before he could be released or go on parole. so, three-strikes law i don't think had any effect other than

to just destroy more lives without doing anything to make the situation better but making it worse because when people get out of prison, they are so screwed up. they are -- it's just a horrible experience if you go into apron and see what's going onment very difficult to come out of that with your sanity intact. now, defelonnization of possession of so-called hard drugs i think is a good thing. i don't think people should go to prison because they have some cocaine in their pocket or their doing other drugs. even though i -- drug problem in this country is very severe. it's very severe. but it's a mental health issue, and it's a socialologial issue in terms of all of the stress that we live in, in this society, and the more -- the

poorer you are,ow more stress that you're under, and the more you want to do drugs. so, drugs are a very difficult thing, but i think it was very good about the defelonnization of hard drugs. so, i'm a big fan of prop 47. >> you don't see any correlation between the drop in crime and the kinds of draconian sentences, which if somebody is in prison they're not committing crimes on the street, and then the reaction that we have seen, and there are good reasons for the reaction, but at the same time, we have also seen an uptick in crime. >> not sure i answered your question. a very good one. >> i don't have much to add to what joe said, except for a couple of things in l.a., it's going to take another year or year and a half because the "the

times" did an expoe showing the classifications in some cases weren't 100%. now the classifications are better, even nationally people are more in tune to that. so we'll see. so, a lot of our uptick may have been through reclassification. i think that's one issue. >> could i please comment on that? one of the things that shocked me when i was writing my book, and really pointing out all the good things that beck was doing with the community policing, et cetera, how he had done everything right in the first years, was that this occurred -- what occurred was due to an incredibly fine investigation by "the los angeles times." i don't know how many of you remember that. but what "the los angeles times" found out that was doing 2013,

the l.a.p.d. had miss-classified 1200 violent felonies. the kind of crimes we fear the most. getting mugged and beaten up, man beating a woman almost to death. who he is living with, et cetera. they weremy miss-classified as misdemeanors and that made it appear that crime was going down when in fact it was going up. and i think that was a severe break in the trust between our police department and our public, and i agree we still don't know -- we still don't know what is being reported now with the crime going up, that may have been covered up in 2008 and 2009 and 2010. >> the think that is different

now, because of the iphones and everything else, that the public feels empowered to wise off at the officers. over and over -- officers, every single officer will tell you, every time they give somebody -- what do you mean, it's my word againstor word. i'm going to take your veining -- from the privileged all the way down, people with cam ares and trying to goat the officers into doing something, and the-for-feel like they're under siege from the general public and that's new, and that is not -- i think it's not good. and so we have to train -- they have to live with it. that's the way it is. >> but establishing legitimacy in these poor communities of color, for the l.a.p.d., is their task, and you don't --

establishing trust is a long-term project. you can't -- if you pull away from it at all, then they start to mistrust the officers again and they start to hate them. >> the best thing that ever happened, and i'm sure their -- these other cities should wish they were put under consent decrees. gives the chiefs and the mayors the chance to say, it's my my fault. it's the feds doing this. i think the consent decree was a great thing. now we don't have it, and now the commission is not under the transition agreement. now there isn't that role. so we have to guard against slippage and that makes everybody -- >> let me ask that question. i got president of the police commission, president of the police commission, and is the

police commission an effective model for oversight, civilian oversight of the police department? we were all part-time, we're all volunteers, we all have other jobs, we all are restricted by the brown act so we can only talk to one of our fellow commissioners. is that really an effective model to ensure we don't have the slippage that -- charlie's lack of transparency suggests maybe we're seeing. >> well, history has proven in los angeles that it's not effective, although, since the christopher commission, we have seen some police commissions who were effective. gary greenbaum's police commission. focused on willy william and in

effect fired willie williams. i think that was right. same thing with chief parks. they didn't re-hire chief parks because the mayor, james haun, didn't want them to. >> that was exactly the point i was going to make. the reason why ultimately chief parks didn't get re-hired is because mayor jimmy haun in an act of political courage we haven't always seen in this city, decided that he didn't want to see bernie parks retired, and that's the -- rehired, not because the police commission made the decision but jimmy haun cost himself the next election. >> how hard was it to for you to get information? how difficult was it for you to

tell some captain to do this thing and unless you wrote it down and you kept after it, you got it. it's very, very difficult, and when you're part-time, and the -- the name of the judge, federal judge on the ninth circuit right now -- yeah, line rhinehart, called them the masters of the half truth. has that been your experience? >> this is simple for me. commissioners need training. they nigh need training to know when they're being bull shitted, and training to know it's not a level situation. you're climbing a hill like this. human nature doesn't want oversight. human nate tower -- five more people don't know anything about law, a total of stenmonths worth

of law enforcementster e d law enforcement experience? in order to make the system work you have to know how to maneuver the system, manipulate the system. i would say some police commissions may be great at that and -- depends who the police commissioners are. i believe the way to motivate and to get things done is through positive reinforcement. you can have a gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, or you can have -- you can try and motivate that way. so, i think it's a balance. but it's not an easy job, and i think it does take training, and i think there should be more training in psychology. i don't even think we need the law enforcement. it's psychology of getting people to want to succeed and to keep moving forward, and that's not an easy thing, and there is no better way than through citizen oversight. >> i know you don't want to say anymore but i just have to

say -- >> i got that impression. >> i think it's an antiquated system from the era of good government and the -- it's designed so that gentlemen can come in one day a week and oversee the police department. that's nonsense. the police chiefs should serve at the pleasure of the mayor. >> a lot more we could talk about. a lot more questions, but one of my jobs is to get us back to our business, which is to sell books. but i really want to thank everyone. it was really interesting to hear. >> go to the drug store and get a swig of vodka. >> we have one -- book signing and other books to sell, and i want to give everyone a big applause. [applause]