![]() ![]() The drunk husband, who was still beating his wife when we arrived, came straight at me with a machete. One summer night, we responded to a domestic-violence call in a crowded apartment complex. ![]() Right: And another Pacific Division officer responds to a separate call. Left: A Pacific Division officer talks with a woman in Venice Beach. ![]() We met some who got a kick out of posing for the camera and others who couldn’t stand the sight of us some who took their oath seriously and others who were what some politicians today call “bad apples.” Rodríguez captured the entire range of police officers we encountered. And I see the disregard that some of the officers showed for those they were supposed to be helping. I see the thousand-yard stare they would assume when they were trying to dissociate from their current situation. I see the strain in the officers’ faces in his pictures, the sheer strangeness and tension of their day-to-day. That’s the dynamic shown so vividly in Rodríguez’s photographs. I saw how they so quickly filtered their interactions through an us-versus-them lens, the Thin Blue Line versus civilians whom many officers viewed as a pain in the ass. (Four years later, Rampart CRASH would be at the center of a damaging scandal involving corruption and abuse.)Ī man bleeding on the floor of his home tells the responding Rampart Division officers that he was shot by an alleged gang member.Ĭops live in a world that most people strive to avoid, full of stress, where almost every situation is confrontational. People using drugs and those without homes huddled in the boarded-up rooms. The cracked and emptied swimming pool in the center teemed with rats. The building had no water or power feces and filth were everywhere. We spent a few days with Rampart CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), the anti-gang unit, and accompanied it as it raided an abandoned apartment complex. 22 handgun and a kid with a MAC-10 machine gun. We witnessed a shoot-out between an aging florist with an old. We watched as they tried to engage more with the community. We were with the cops at scores of traffic stops and when they responded to murders and other deaths, domestic-violence calls, robberies, assaults, and rapes. We simply rolled up to Rampart and climbed into the back of a police car. We were, by the end, so much a part of the scenery that we didn’t need permission to go on ride-alongs. ![]() We secured a remarkable degree of access, taking a deep dive into the LAPD. Rodríguez and I worked three precincts: Venice, 77th Street, and Rampart, a precinct at the edge of downtown with an especially high level of crime. Rampart police officers comfort the family of a man who was choked to death, while trying to ascertain what happened. The country as a whole is still dealing with the question of what, exactly, the role of the police should be in our society. Looking at these photographs now in Rodríguez’s new book of his work, which is also in an online exhibit at the Bronx Documentary Center, though, I was struck by how little has changed. Although this was a freelance gig, it became an obsession. The New York Times Magazine asked me and the photographer Joseph Rodríguez to embed with the police to see if Williams could actually reform the department.įor several months, Rodríguez and I went on ride-alongs with the police. A commission that year concluded that the LAPD was too quick to use excessive force and dangerously hostile to the community. Williams, the agency’s first Black chief, had been brought in from Philadelphia to make changes after LAPD officers beat Rodney King in 1991, the incident that ultimately led to the Los Angeles riots. “Police work is doing what people in the city want done,” Willie Williams, the Los Angeles Police Department chief, told me in 1994. ![]()
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