Part Two: Daryl Gates: The Man Who Invented SWAT Teams and DARE | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

What this episode is about

The content explores the life and influence of Daryl Gates, focusing on his pivotal role in the development of SWAT teams and the DARE program, as well as his involvement in the 1965 Watts riots following the arrest of Marquette Fry. Through analyzing Gates' actions and their consequences, the discussion highlights his lasting impact on policing and community relations in America.

Key takeaways

• In 1965, a drunken driver's arrest spiraled into chaos, exposing the fragility of law and order.
• When the crowd gathers, sobriety levels hit rock bottom for everyone involved—cops included.
• A baton and a shotgun turned a routine stop into a full-blown riot without a hint of irony.
• Daryl Gates, overseeing the scene, would learn that a drunken crowd can ignite even quicker than a match.
• From road-sobering tactics to riot-control madness, 1965 LA was an unpredictable cocktail of chaos and compliance.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Robert Evans (Host) · 51 min speaking
• Bridget Marie (Guest) · 22 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Daryl Gates, Marquette Fry, General Hap Arnold, Watts
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Daryl Gates
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Caesar Chavez, Daryl Gates, Laura Anne Nelson
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Symbion Liberation Army, Daryl Gates
5. 40:00 – 50:00: Daryl Gates, Amy Lynn Bradley
6. 50:00 – 1:00:00: Daryl Gates, DARE
7. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: Amy Lynn Bradley
8. 1:10:00 – 1:13:33: Daryl Gates

Notable quotes from "Part Two: Daryl Gates: The Man Who Invented SWAT Teams and DARE | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"

• Okay. So when we left off with the story of Daryl Gates, it was 1965 and he had become one of the youngest inspectors in Los Angeles plead his history. He's in like his mid30s at this point and he's.

  about Watts · at 0:52

• 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…

  about Marquette Fry · at 5:26

• Say anymore probably for legal reasons, but oh boy. yeah. So Daryl Gates, he's 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.

  about Daryl Gates · at 19:36

• A couple of guys. And he's not the only founder of SWAT or even necessarily the a guy probably most responsible for the basic ideas that become SWAT is another LAPD officer…

  about Laura Anne Nelson · at 20:28

• Programs nationwide. Public enthusiasm grew after the high-profile 1974 standoff between the LAPD SWAT team and the Symbion Liberation Army during the Patty Hurst kidnapping…

  about Symbion Liberation Army · at 35:09

• 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…

  about Amy Lynn Bradley · at 44:20

• Came out wrong or whatever, right? We heard some [ __ ] you know. To make a long story short, DARE was a massive success and it spread to school districts nationwide and soon…

  about DARE · at 55:15

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Daryl Gates — Person · Primary subject (bastard profile) · 18 mentions · first at 0:18
  Central figure of the episode; discussed as an LAPD leader who helped create SWAT and shaped militarized policing, with major focus on Watts (1965) and the Rodney King era.
• Marquette Fry — Person · Trigger figure (referenced) · 3 mentions · first at 1:22
  Described as the driver whose 1965 arrest and subsequent escalation helped ignite the Watts uprising; used to illustrate how LAPD tactics escalated unrest under Gates’s on-the-ground command.
• Amy Lynn Bradley — Person · Political ally / enabler (referenced) · 4 mentions · first at 44:24
  Presented as a key political figure who helped insulate Gates from accountability, partly due to electoral incentives and not wanting to appear ‘anti-police.’
• Symbion Liberation Army — Person · Referenced adversary group (mis-typed entity) · 2 mentions · first at 35:17
  Mentioned as the militant group involved in the 1974 televised standoff that boosted SWAT’s public profile; the transcript uses it as a key example of SWAT’s ‘coming out party.’
• Laura Anne Nelson — Person · Co-creator / collaborator (referenced) · 1 mention · first at 20:35
  Identified as an LAPD officer and Vietnam veteran who, alongside Gates, helped develop the early SWAT concept and training approach after Watts.
• Caesar Chavez — Person · Labor movement figure (referenced) · 2 mentions · first at 21:14
  Referenced in connection with the Delano grape strike and the rise of the United Farm Workers, which the episode frames as part of the context motivating LAPD interest in surveillance/crowd-control tactics.
  California's labor history. Per article in the Metropole, quote, With the ariser of Caesar Chavez and the formation of the United Farm Workers, the movement rapidly expanded in…
• General Hap Arnold — Person · Supporting participant in triggering incident (referenced) · 3 mentions · first at 1:24
  Identified as Marquette Fry’s stepbrother present during the 1965 traffic stop; part of the narrative setup for how the crowd gathered and tensions escalated.
  Wednesday, August 7th, 1965, a 21-year-old black man named Marquette Fry is driving home drunk with his stepbrother Arnold. Right? So, these are two guys driving a little bit buzzed, which isn't great, but it's 1965.

Products & tech

• DARE — Product · Case study · 3 mentions · first at 55:20
  Drug Abuse Resistance Education program created by Daryl Gates, discussed for its impact on drug education and police presence in schools.

Places & events

• Watts — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at 5:56
  Neighborhood in Los Angeles where significant events like the Watts riots occurred, central to the discussion on police tactics and community relations.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 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, cuz that would be crazy. You 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?

0:25 You bet your ass I am. Let's do it. Do you want to tell people where they can find you on the old internet so far? Right now,

0:31 you can find me at my podcast, There are no girls on the internet, or on Instagram at Bridget Marie in DC.

0:38 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 let's hear from this [ __ ] guy, you know? Okay. So when we left off with the story of Daryl Gates, it was 1965 and he had become one of the youngest inspectors in Los Angeles plead his history. He's in like his mid30s 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 theun dun dun music in your head, you know. Um, and we're about to talk about why. Because on the evening of Wednesday, August 7th, 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.

1:35 The cops aren't sober on the road. Nobody is. It's the 60s, right? There's no seat belts. 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 because 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 they're doing the same thing most you've watched Madmen. We all know what life was like in this period of time.

2:09 Yeah. The cops would pull you over and you'd be blind drunk and they'd be like,

2:12 "Are you drunk?" I'm drunk. OKAY, DRIVE STRAIGHT HOME. WELL, you drive is 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 schnops before you get back in that car. You got to light your lighten your head up. Come on now.

2:34 Um, 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 fi failed, too. And the cop, officer Micas, radioed for backup in a patrol car cuz he's going to book Marquette. Now, Fry, he says, is initially quiet and compliant. He's like, "Ah, fuck." Like, "Okay, I just got to keep quiet and, you know, whatever. I'll deal with the the 60s. his drunk driving consequences aren't that bad at this point in time, right?

3:04 They're going to take my [ __ ] license. Otherwise, no one would be able to drive in Los Angeles. Things get worse, though, because his 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." Yeah. Right. Um and so his stepbrother walks home and gets their mom and tells them what happened. And Marquette's mom is like, "The [ __ ] 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 especially in Los Angeles for people. So everyone hangs out outside anyway, right? And there's [ __ ] all to do cuz it's the mid60s. So you see some people get pulled over and you hear yelling. What happens next? Everyone shows up, right? [gasps] And how drunk is everybody? About as

3:57 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? Yeah. So, across this crowd and across the PD, decision-m is going to be at about a like let's say a three out of 10 for everyone involved in this, right? No one is their best self on a hot August night in 1965. You know,

4:24 and and WHEN YOU HEAR A commotion that brings everybody out to be like, "Oh, what's going on?

4:28 [ __ ] it. And the cops are the same way. Like, "Hey man, put down your snaps. Let's go. We got to deal with these [ __ ] crowds." Right? Grab a shotgun. Put whatever in it. I don't care.

4:39 By the way, your old timey drunk cop impression, 10 out of 10. Everyone, drunk everyone, right? So, a crowd gathers around the arrest at this point, and again, it, you know, the situation gets out of control in the way that things do. And the book La Noir describes what happens next. By the time Marquette got angry, a crowd of roughly a hundred bystanders had gathered. Some of them started to murmur angrily. Minus'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. "Hit those blue-eyed bastards!" a voice yelled.

5:21 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 officers, screaming, "You white southern bastard." Little brother Ronald got into the mix, too. By 7:23 p.m., 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.

5:53 And everything gets much worse because the cops showed up and started hitting people right?

5:59 Yeah. Way to deescalate cops. Yeah, sounds great. Glad a guy with a shotgun and a baton came into this situation down.

6:09 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 [ __ ] back to your stoops. Come on. What the [ __ ] are you doing?" Right? That's what this situation needed. you know, um 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 cuz that someone thinks they get spit on. It may just be everyone's yelling and kind of drunk and they're spittlef flying because people are yelling at EACH OTHER. HE SPIT ON ME, I SPIT ON HIM. AND THEN THEY just

6:57 start beating the [ __ ] out of each other, right? The cops pulled back at around 7:40 p.m. 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 plane clothes is Daryl Gates. So Daryl's car gets pelted with [ __ ] as he shows up because he's supposed to be looking at on, you know, the scene cuz 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, quote, "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

7:43 problem, right? People have gotten a little out of hand. The cops have beating 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 [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] down, right? But the 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

8:30 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 3:00 in the morning out here with sticks. You know, some of them need to have shotguns. [ __ ] it." You know, make sure they got enough schnops to stay awake, right? So by by 3 or 4:00 a.m. he's like, "Hey, everyone's calmed down. This must be because all these cops made the situation better as opposed to like, no, it was 4:00 in the morning. Everyone fell asleep." Right? And again, if the cops had left and not come back, people would have woken up, hung over, and been like, "Well, last night was kind of weird." And like it would have been over probably right?

9:15 And the very next day, you know, the police or the the media, you know, Parker has to give a a press conference and the LA Times is like, "So, what happens? Is this a race riot?" Cuz that was happening around this period of time in in the US. And he's like, "No, no, no. We're not having a race riot." Um, and he says it's not a race riot because quote all the riers are negroes, right? Can't be a race riot if it's only one race. Like just I I don't know, man. Okay. Like I agree it's not a race riot, but your justification for why is really weird, right?

9:45 Yeah. It seems like a theme with this guy is just I I can't follow I can't follow the logic.

9:51 Yeah. And it 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 lead 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 [ __ ] out of protesters all around. This could happen here if 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

10:36 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 as Daryl Gates about the city of Los Angeles, it's never going to see an insurgency against the police.

10:49 Los Angeles will forever be known as the calmst city. Yeah. Never any problem. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting to me that had he listened to these local leaders, I almost wonder if the fact that these local leaders, the the old ladies and and pastors and community leaders, but they were saying what we don't need is police making the situation worse and escalating. If that if that seemed kind of threatening like, oh, you won't tell me where police can and can't go,

11:16 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 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 [ __ ] 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.

11:54 Right. Um 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 USSRbacked commie revolution." Right?

12:28 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 whatot it seems like things are going to sputter out right there are a bunch of community meetings local leaders are getting everyone together 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 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.

13:07 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 riers. 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 two or 300 cops in Watts tonight, right? Let's flood the zone with all of our armed drunk guys." Yeah.

13:43 Yeah. That'll calm things down. Yeah. Exactly. So, this does not work. This is a dismal failure. And under Gates's direct leadership and Parker's overall commit, and I'm not trying to This is not an episode about Parker. He does deserve a bastards probably, but I I do 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 if we're making a World War II comparison here to the Watts riots, you know. Um 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.

14:32 Dozens of people are dead and more than a thousand are injured. Right? It is a [ __ ] calamity. And it becomes a [ __ ] calamity because they flood this neighborhood with cops while everyone who knows anything about Watts is like them out of here. Right? In an article for the Metropole, uh Aaron Staggh Belffort 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 frame the events not merely a civil unrest, but as a new form of urban governance crisis, Parker compared the rebellion to Vietkong insurgency, insisting a paramilitary response was necessary." While Governor Pat Brown described the events as gorillas fighting with gangsters, for Gates, Watts crystallized the stakes of what he saw as America's spiraling urban crisis, the spectre of disorder, black

15:21 insurgency, and the perceived loss of police control over racialized cityscapes. And he's dead. These aren't cops getting killed by [ __ ] puny 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, [ __ ] third of them dressed as frogs being described as like a militant movement, as an army, as a war zone.

15:51 This is the start of that language in response to urban unrest, right? It's so easy to see that throughine of what you're describing and what what is happening today right now in in our cities. And

16:03 yeah, it's wild to think how this one person really is responsible for architecting a lot of what we're seeing today.

16:10 Yeah. Parker and Parker too, you know, his boss, but Gates, you know, and um 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, disperate 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 cuz they're not from there and they don't know these people and you're not

16:43 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.

16:51 It is like Vietnam and 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 [ __ ] away, right? because then there's nothing for the angry people to get drunk and angry about and your drunk and 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 is as like a military insurgency, but he also describes it as random chaos in small disperate patches.

17:26 That's not what an insurgency is. The Vietkong, the insurgents in Vietnam were not doing random, desperate, 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 you we never understand what any of this is, right? Because these people are dumb, arrogant, angry [ __ ] with guns.

18:03 It's and they have a real inability to look back and take and and sort of take away things, glean things, learn lessons.

18:11 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 like 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, [ __ ] I [ __ ] 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 that like we do need to fundamentally rethink how police respond to civil unrest, right? But he doesn't think maybe by having them deescalate these situations rather than show instead he's going to be like, "No, no, no. What we need is more cops with more guns." That more guns, more schnaps,

18:55 right? More schnaps, more guns. That's Daryl Gates's policy, right? Which if we're not talking about police, it actually doesn't sound like a bad time.

19:03 No, no, no, no. For normal people, you should in fact have more schnops and more I'm always telling people this, right? More schnops and more guns. It makes everything better, right?

19:13 Speaking of being heavily armed and drunk as hell. Let's see if any of our sponsors are relevant to that.

19:20 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.

19:34 Sophie knows what that story is. I can't say anymore probably for legal reasons, but

19:39 oh boy. Uh, yeah. So Daryl Gates, you know, he's 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. [snorts] And this, Bridget, is where SWAT teams come from because Daryl Gates's 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 the a guy probably most responsible for the basic ideas that become SWAT is another

20:37 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 [ __ ] up in response to the Watts riots in ' 65 and that we need a new weapon, 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 Sanwaqin Valley.

21:09 This became known as the Delano grape strike and it was a siminal moment in California's labor history. Per article in the Metropole, quote, "With the ariser of Caesar 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.

21:35 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 that's a 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 who get in the LAPD are like, you know what's definitely going to win the war in Vietnam? special forces guys. We can win the war on crime if we add special forces guys. 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, conser, 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

22:27 Watts as kind of enemy combatants, like talking about them like you're talking about a foreign uh enemy? Do you think this was also coinciding with that kind of attitude?

22:36 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 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

23:23 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 where really when that that gets started in an organized way.

23:58 Now, if you know anything about SWAT units, you know the name stands for special weapons and tactics. Or did you know that, Bridget?

24:05 I did know that. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's that's like what the actual like that's the current acronym for for or that's what 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's 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.

24:36 No, there was no way, he said dismissively, that he would ever use the word attack. I went out crestfallen, but 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. I have an important question for you. Have you ever seen the terrible movie SWAT with Samuel L. Jackson from 2003?

24:59 I have. Yes. And that is a do a god-awful movie. Um I saw the theater. Yeah. And this is by the way the the fact that there are TV shows and movies about SWAT as I'll talk about is a huge factor in the birth of propaganda that's happening at the same time SWAT is being born. I'll talk about that in a little bit later. Right. And quite frankly, I do like Gates's I wish we'd used the original name for SWAT that Gates came up with cuz 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. Um I like what G Gates's original acronym is at least honest, right? Um but it's bad optics.

25:57 You know, Davis is is his co-chief or deputy chief is probably right that like, no, we we we don't want to attack in there, right? Come on, bro. Like that's kind of [ __ ] up. Um 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 late60s, early '7s as it's become clear that we're losing in Vietnam. And that this this idea of well, we have we have these small teams that are super hyperrained for doing very specific acts of targeted violence and it's not working. We're not winning. Cuz just having some guys who are good at killing, really good at killing, doesn't win wars. Because wars aren't mostly about how good you can train a small number of dudes to kill.

26:45 They're about whether or not you have a plan for victory, right? We didn't win World War II because our men, manto man, were the best killers. Manto 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 [ __ ] war.

27:40 Also, let's say that it did. Why would you want to take the tactics of a war that didn't go well?

27:45 That we get our It's very obvious by the late '60s. Oh [ __ ] none of this has worked well. Right. That's what's constantly amazing to me when everyone's like, "What we got to do is what we're doing in Vietnam. Why?

27:56 Why?" [gasps and sighs] So, uh, Gates though is reading obsessively from US military counterinsurgency manuals and he's he's he's learning about coin, you know, counterinsurgency strategies in the early Vietnam war period and the fact that those strategies had failed was immaterial to him. As Erin Staggh Belelfford 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.

28:27 Now, shockingly, his the other higherups 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. Stagghford describes it as an unsanctioned experiment. And they start by bringing in this is part 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.

29:02 Eventually, they graduate to training with the Marines at Camp Pendleton, which feels like a violation of the spirit of Posy Kamatus, 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,

29:19 found a little workaround. 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 LA. 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 the Black Panthers to to turn themselves in peacefully?

29:50 I can't imagine it did. No. 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 [ __ ] 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 sold don't 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.

30:42 Not firing for effect. Like, well, I didn't hit him, but looked pretty cool, didn't they? But I filled that whole area with [ __ ] bullets, right? And that is in war. That is what you do. In war, very few bullets, I think in the Iraq war, 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 cuz bullets keep going, right? Like it's bad to do this in a neighborhood filled with people.

31:14 It's a It's a miracle that no one dies during this gunfight, right? It is a [ __ ] miracle. Um, 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 [ __ ] courts are judges and or juries are like, "What the [ __ ] This is nuts."

31:50 Right? These guys aren't guilty of most of the things that you accuse them of. Um Gates himself later admitted that 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.

32:07 Yeah, maybe something's not going right. Maybe this didn't work. Maybe this was a miserable failure. You'd get spend all this time and money training these guys to be super soldiers and some panthers in their house fight him to a standill 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. Um, 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 Comm. Right.

32:46 He's like the 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.

32:54 Yeah. 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? [ __ ] No one's praising our restraint, though. 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 [ __ ] guy. Um, 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 and tell them that they're members of a special elite unit, cuz that's like a drug. It's like giving cocaine to a 9-year-old. Like, oh boy, this is going to just make everything about this kid more of a problem, right?

33:43 Like, and the problem is that after this [ __ ] 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. Uh 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 Santelli to head the agency. Now Donald's not going to be along a ter 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 Nexon

34:36 should resign. But before he resigns, he turns the newly minted LEA into an organ for funding and supporting the spread of the ideas that Gates and his fellows had used to justify the creation of the first SWAT team. The LAA LEA 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 LAA, federal funds and surplus military equipment were funneled into police 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 Symbion Liberation Army during the Patty Hurst kidnapping case. And have you heard much about the SLA and the Patty Hurst case?

35:26 I know a little bit about it, but I don't know the I I know the broad strokes. Yeah, I probably learned about this from a [ __ ] cartoon that I watched in the early 2000s for the first time. Yeah,

35:35 the SLA isn't super wellnown today, but from 1973 to75, 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 like anarchist, you know, but they weren't necessarily always using the term terrorism back in that time. We're talking the turn of the century, right? But like our president is assassin assassinated by an anarchist and there's the FBI gets a lot of its early power cracking down on that. So, you know, 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

36:25 left-wing militant group. Probably the most infamous thing about them is that they kidnapped Patty Hurst, who was heir to the Hurst 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 2-hour long firefight in which six SLA militants died at the hands of Gates's 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 [ __ ] against

37:17 the Symbian 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 Symbian 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?

37:39 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

37:45 and these are mostly white militants, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. Like I could see how you could watch this stuff unfold and think we need to have that here. Like I I bet we're watching this like with a [ __ ] boner.

37:57 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 propaganda. 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 standin for Los Angeles. The SWAT TV show's theme song reaches number one on the Billboard Top 100 in 1976. Um, a former LAPD SWAT officer, Richard Kellbaugh, is the show's technical consultant. And it has these these very nice looking navy blue uniforms and, you know, they've got SWAT, you know, written across their their all of their gear and everything and it helps make SWAT into a a a household name, right?

38:47 You know, and as 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 gates.

39:00 Yo, WE HAVE YOU HAVE TO FIND THIS GAME AND PLAY IT. Oh yeah, I really need to get a copy of this [ __ ] and look at that son of a [ __ ] right? Like, oh my god. Um, but this is huge, right? The and this is again propaganda 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, you know, nationwide at the same time as this TV show that really hypes up the supposed capabilities of the unit, right? And as a result, Daryl is swept into office as the LAPD police chief himself in 1978. You know, 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 going to happen with um the

39:58 special like investigatory units that use like science and [ __ ] CSI. 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 what all of this fancy new science can do, right? 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 maybe this is actually part of the problem, right? But

40:53 the way it gets carried in the news and the way Gates frames it is look at how crime keeps rising. We got to 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.

41:37 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?

41:49 When is it going to work? Not yet, huh? All right. Now, there are some other reads of the situation. Right as Daryl becomes police chief in 78, a month after he 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 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 it's 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 he talks out of pocket right after he becomes the chief. And people are like, "This guy should quit." He does not.

42:31 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 Julia Love, a 39-year-old black widow in default of her gas bill.

43:04 Community outrage was so great that Watts Assembly member Maxine Waters demanded, "Chief Gates, we want you out." Gates defended the 12 38 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 Ause abuse collected tens of thousands of signatures calling for the establishment of a civilian police review board. So, [snorts] 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

43:51 they're just saying whoever they hate is the bad guys." is. And a lot of the times there's like 39year-old widow that they shot 12 times cuz she got angry that her gas bill wasn't paid. Why do 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.

44:09 Um, no. But that's not what these people are thinking. And part of Gates's 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 ing a rash of LAPD chokeold 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

44:59 may be finding that in some blacks when the corateed chokeold is applied to the veins or arteries, they don't open up as fast as they do on normal people.

45:07 Oh my god. They still feel that today literally like so I this is the birth of it.

45:12 Yeah. like I have cickle cell trait and they'll if if anything ever happens to me I know the first thing they'll say is well he did have cickle cell trait

45:20 cickle cell anemia right this is excited delirium right this is the first no no it's not the fault of the cops joking this guy his body's wrong it's not normal if it was normal he'd still be alive

45:33 so [ __ ] and also so it's it's I see that they're they don't want to say we killed them because they were black but there the the explanation It's so I mean almost like they've 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.

45:52 Yeah. It's not it's it's just a whistle, right? Yeah. It's just a whistle. Now, this should have saying [ __ ] 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 this 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.

46:43 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.

47:18 Um, 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 unit. And they use this massive security budget that they get for the Olympics to get machine guns, infrared like like sighting devices, and V100 armored vehicles. these like you know 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 uh even though it's equipped with this like 14 ft battering ram you

48:14 know like there's a there's a 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 uh in Pakoma 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 cuz 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." Uh, and I hate I mean I keep I I'm I promise I'll stop trying to draw parallels to

49:07 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 a straight line from what you're describing to this what's happening now.

49:37 Yep. Yep. It it's and it's I part of why Gates is so relevant, right? Is that he's writing the playbook for everyone who's going to follow and it works really [ __ ] well, unfortunately. Um, you know what else works well? The products and services sponsor podcast. 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? The fact that we're doing all these mass arrests, right? They've they've launched this in the, you know, after the Olympics, they start launching these these huge like raids, these mass police raids where they'll send two or 300 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

50:30 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 him. Beat him up if you got to. Right.

51:03 And you know, it's the start of this. We're seeing this now with the Trindar, right? Where they're like, "Oh yeah, these are gang tattoos. This autism speaks or whatever tattoo is a gang sign." you know, the 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. Um so he he after they start doing all these huge sweeps, you know, 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 of drug neighborhoods." The same night that he makes this brag, there's a driveby 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 driveby that gets a lot that kills a

51:55 young woman and gets a ton of publicity and everyone's like kind of seems like you're not stopping these guys. They just shot up a neighborhood. Hey, hey, Daryl. Daryl, is this maybe not working?

52:08 Like we said, mission accomplished. Mission accomplished. [ __ ] 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?

52:25 More guns and tanks. 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.

53:02 Unfortunately, a lot of local black elected leaders support the chief. Senator, 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."

53:14 Yikes. Thank you, Diane. That's the right thing to say. Great. I mean, I do think we have to contend with the ways that a lot of our like black community leaders, black elders did sort of support some of this tough on crime policing. And uh yeah, it's just a reality. It's I It's not one that I like. I mean, it's just the truth.

53:37 It's It's just a reality of the situation. And it's, you know, crack is scary. What's 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

53:51 so there's to I can I can understand to a degree why this is a scary you 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 I'm now adding to the problem by describing it as war, but people don't have perfect information about what's going on.

54:08 I know what you mean. People People are making the decisions they have based on incomplete data as they always are. Right. Um 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 going to 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

54:57 dangers of drugs, both 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 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 [ __ ] you know. To make a long story short, DARE was a massive success and it spread to school districts nationwide and soon corporate sponsors cuz Daryl 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 sponsor DARE and that way corporations can pay for police officers to be doing police work in schools.

55:42 The scam within the scam. Right. Right. And again, this is the the start of law enforcement's funded and supported by business interests. You know, this is where that becomes it it 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 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.

56:30 I remember my dare officer very well. He I mean I do have to wonder because I I 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.

56:46 Oh man. He didn't make them he didn't make them sound like something. You say it feels so good people ruin their lives over it. Well, I might want to feel that good.

56:57 I want to see what all the fuss is about. Yeah, these drugs sound interesting. Now, this fact I I I will say one of the errors people make when they criticize 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

57:43 why Daryl 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 carcereral state as a policeled 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 preventive 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 of personal responsibility and the moral

58:34 values of right and wrong. But employing cops as teachers in promoting a zero tolerance message tried drug education to a carceralereral frame. Indeed, DARE officials and policymakers used 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.

59:07 So, mission accomplished kind of. Yeah. It gets cops in schools. It makes that normal and 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 pro the kind of drug abuse that's a problem. Because you know what'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 [ __ ] 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 OD's. And the other problem is people not feeling like there's any resources if they do start to have a problem. And if you you do start drug education by saying this stuff is best avoided certainly while

59:58 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 I'm I'm 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?

1:00:40 But I can see how in this DARE program dynamic, the only re resource in scare quotes is carceral. It's police is, you know, your friend getting locked up. That's the only thing they're offering.

1:00:54 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 odied in one night cuz an extra strong batch of horse got into the 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 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 ODed. She was the only good anti-drug speech I ever had cuz she was like, "You will experiment as young adults. Almost certainly most kids do.

1:01:42 And I'm not going to tell you what to do and I'm not going to lecture you. What I will say is for the love of God, don't inject anything." And I never did, you know.

1:01:52 Shout out to Miss Gross. Yeah. Thank you, Mrs. Gross. Yes, don't shoot up stuff, kids. And you know, fentinels and [ __ ] now that make test your [ __ ] if you're going to 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 narc. It's an organization that gives you test kits.

1:02:12 These are 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? Um, 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 less, but this isn't entirely consistent. You know, we don't have perfect data on this. What Dare does do is it keeps Gates's name in the news and it ensures him regular invitations to high society and government events in DC 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

1:03:03 rash of LAPD scandals in which officers were accused of coorting sexually with teenage explorer scouts, getting drunk in police station parking lots, cons sorting 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.

1:03:22 Are you sure them fratinizing with teens wasn't just a prank of some sort? It might have just been a prank.

1:03:26 Yeah, maybe they were fake. Maybe there's some more of those joke rape complaints, right, that Daryl is such a fan of. [gasps] Gates got much of the blame from the media, citizens and politicians, including Mayor Bradley. Several highranking officers even suggested privately that Gates should step down. City Hall trimmed his budget request and required 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.

1:04:01 So, you know, things are as the 80s turn into the 90s, they're not work. The [ __ ] that used to work don't work no more for 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, Daryl's ability to manipulate local leaders and organizations is on the Wayne, 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 organizing, pushing for the creation of the LAPD's public disorder intelligence division, which surveiled subversives who were entirely left-wing and primarily or labor organizers, chako civil rights lawyers and journalists, and the ACLU. This is all so [ __ ]

1:04:54 illegal that it is eventually forced to disband. Right. Um, now again, Gates 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, you know, he's this he's this he talks, we've talked a lot about how he like says [ __ ] you know, that 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

1:05:24 you know who related to him is a casual drug user who gets arrested repeatedly for possession of drugs? His kid.

1:05:32 Oh, cool guy. Sweet. Dad of the year. 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 Lake View Terrace. And there's a video filmed and f 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 cuz the Terminator 2 is like filmed I think or sorry, the first Terminator is filmed during the LA riot or 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 [ __ ] out of this guy and he films that and so the Terminator movies are just kind of intimately tied to the like police

1:06:38 violence in Los Angeles which is fascinating to me right oh my gosh the end of the Termin 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's that that is like embedded in my brain

1:06:51 this kid saves humanity by instinctively lying to the LAPD. Yeah. Lie to a cop, save humanity.

1:06:58 Yeah. Beautiful stuff. Um, 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, this doesn't help anything. and it kind of inflames tensions. There are calls immediately for him to resign, right? Um 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 10th, 1991. There's an investigative panel head by 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

1:07:51 many patrol officers who view citizens with resentment and hostility and who treat the public with rudess and disrespect. Uh 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, right? Right as this trial for these officers who beat Rodney King is is churning up. So Gates is kind of fighting to maintain his position as everyone in LA is holding their breath to be like, are these cops?

1:08:27 Is anything going to happen to them? you know, um, and so because he's so unpopular with Mayor Bradley, they're not talking on April 29th, 1992, when four LAPD officers, the guys indicted in the King B 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 [ __ ] out for very understandable reasons, right? because they've seen this hideous video and these cops got off scot-free and [ __ ] he 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. Um, but even while the rioting starts in Florence and Normandy Avenue, he's at a a pl 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,

1:09:24 you know, and by the time he h 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 sure he's more focused on defeating this ballot reform measure than dealing with the start of the riots. He just [ __ ] up at every stage of this. And he tries to throw the blame onto like some of his like lower ranking guys. He was like, "No, it was these dudes who [ __ ] up." But there's this panel led by former FBI and CIA director William Webster that blames Gates 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.

1:10:14 Right? And this all culminates on June 28th, 1992 when Gates steps down as the chief of police. Right? Uh 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 [ __ ] job, man. You [ __ ] up, right? You got to get out of here. Um, and yeah, that's basically the story of Daryl Gates. You know, the four officers who beat Rodney King and were acquitted in Seami Valley are retrieded in federal court uh 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. Uh, he spends like a year as a talk show host on a local AM radio network. Um, and he's a security consultant. He's in some video games. He

1:11:09 has he he shows up in films. He has some cameos in movies at the time. Cuz if you've watched like 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 uh 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 all National Guard got cops and riers fighting in the background of every scene. [gasps] Um it's pretty funny. Um but yeah, and this is part of why, you know, um so he never winds up. He kind of tries he he he he he toys with the idea of trying to become chief again or trying to like become uh you know get another political position but it never works out for him. Um ultimately uh he passes on in 2010 at his home in Dana Point uh with his family by his side of bladder cancer, you know. And that's the story of Daryl Gates.

1:12:04 I'm sure he said some pretty wild [ __ ] on that radio show. Oh boy. I can only imagine the [ __ ] he was saying.

1:12:11 I People say he was surprisingly like quiet and kind of reserved, which I 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 on there for 15 months. He's not a very good radio host, right? But

1:12:25 that's nice. Cool stuff. Well, that's the story. We still don't know why he changed the spelling of his name.

1:12:33 Still don't know. That's the great mystery of the Daryl Gates story. That's his citizen cane.

1:12:38 Yeah. Sled thing. Like what? Like what? What is the reason? Dare L. Yeah. If only he hadn't changed his name.

1:12:47 So funny. Well, Bridget, where can people find you on the internet? You can find me at Instagram on Bridget Marie and DC. 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.

1:13:02 Mhm. Cool. You can find Bridget there. We can listen to season two of Sad Oligarch by Jay Canrahan, which just came up. And 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 relist to this one. You know, memorize it. Memorize every word of it.

1:13:24 Bye.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Part Two: Daryl Gates: The Man Who Invented SWAT Teams and DARE | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

Robert Evans (Host), Bridget Marie (Guest).

What is "Part Two: Daryl Gates: The Man Who Invented SWAT Teams and DARE | BEHIND THE BASTARDS" about?

The content explores the life and influence of Daryl Gates, focusing on his pivotal role in the development of SWAT teams and the DARE program, as well as his involvement in the 1965 Watts riots following the arrest of Marquette Fry. Through analyzing Gates' actions and their consequences, the discussion highlights his lasting impact on policing and community relations in America.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

9 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Daryl Gates, Marquette Fry, Watts, Amy Lynn Bradley, DARE, Symbion Liberation Army. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Part Two: Daryl Gates: The Man Who Invented SWAT Teams and DARE | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

The episode runs 1 h 14 min; the transcript is about 14,332 words in 148 timestamped sections.

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