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Editor\u2019s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we are featuring Los Angeles<\/a> as our theme this month. This is our second post; you can see others from this month as they are published as well as past pieces on the city here<\/a>. In addition, check here<\/a> for information on the conference, including accommodations. <\/strong><\/p>\n By Aaron Stagoff-Belfort<\/em><\/p>\n In 1992, Daryl F. Gates published Chief: My Life in the LAPD<\/em>\u2014a retrospective, and often unapologetic, defense of his controversial tenure as head of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Gates, who led the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, was the department\u2019s second-longest tenured chief and his influence on policing in Los Angeles was profound. Chief<\/em> was one of the first major autobiographies by a celebrity police chief\u2014stylized, image-conscious, and deliberately curated\u2014foreshadowing the rebrands of former police commissioners qua public intellectuals like Bill Bratton, who would find himself on the cover of Time<\/em> only four years later.<\/p>\n As LAPD Chief, Gates initially embraced novel community-police partnerships (like founding the D.A.R.E. program in 1983) but soon pivoted away from community policing, instead reshaping the department\u2019s image toward a more militarized and impersonal style of law enforcement. Never one to shy away from the spotlight or a chance to defend the department\u2019s record, Gates became notorious for incendiary public remarks, once testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that casual drug users \u201cought to be taken out and shot.\u201d When questioned by a reporter about the LAPD\u2019s high rate of chokehold deaths compared to other departments, he famously responded that this might be the case because Black people\u2019s \u201carteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Gates was a key architect in the transformation of American policing, an innovator of policing technologies whose tactics were widely adopted by departments across the country during his tenure in Los Angeles. And there is perhaps no figure more responsible for embedding militarization into the DNA of the modern municipal police department. Gates\u2019 most enduring legacy may lie in his role as co-creator and popularizer of Special Weapons and Tactics teams\u2014SWAT\u2014with LAPD officer John Nelson during his tenure as inspector overseeing the Watts neighborhood. In a revealing passage in Chief<\/em>, he discusses the origins of SWAT, recalling with pride the genesis of its iconic name:<\/p>\n One day, with a big smile on my face, I popped in to tell my deputy chief, Ed Davis, that I thought up an acronym for my special new unit.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s SWAT,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, that\u2019s pretty good. What\u2019s it stand for?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSpecial Weapons Attack Teams.\u201d<\/p>\n Davis blinked. \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n There was no way, he said dismissively, he would ever use the word \u201cattack.\u201d I went out, crestfallen, but a moment later I was back. \u201cSpecial Weapons and Tactics,\u201d I said. \u201cOkay?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo problem. That\u2019s fine,\u201d Davis said. And that was how SWAT was born.[2}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The birth of SWAT is a story of the LAPD\u2019s response to the growing set of racialized social upheavals that marked Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. The Watts Uprising and the Delano Grape Strike, which both erupted in 1965, were foundational in shaping Gates\u2019 worldview and to the department\u2019s evolving posture toward protest and civil unrest. As scholar Donna Murch argues, the LAPD\u2019s development of the first SWAT team helped catalyze a \u201cmartial turn\u201d in policing nearly a decade before the dramatic rise in prison populations and the onset of mass incarceration. For Murch, SWAT exemplifies how militarization operates not merely as a set of weapons, technologies or strategies, but as a governing ethos <\/em>that required various \u201ccrisis-driven\u201d rationales to justify itself. The ethos of militarization views urban space and highly segregated Black neighborhoods as battlegrounds, treating moments of social crisis (real or manufactured) like crack, the Black Panthers, and labor militancy, as justification for occupation and escalation.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n At the time of the Watts uprising, Gates was a 39-year-old inspector rapidly ascending the LAPD\u2019s ranks, and he was tasked with overseeing the department\u2019s intervention. The experience was formative. The protests were sparked when California Highway Patrol officers pulled over a Black motorist and arrested his family in front of a crowd, an incident that lit a powder keg of resentment under Police Chief William Parker\u2019s LAPD. The National Guard were deployed, and public officials framed the events not merely as civil unrest, but as a new form of urban governance crisis. Parker compared the rebellion to Viet Cong insurgency, insisting a \u201cparamilitary\u201d response was necessary, while Governor Pat Brown described the events as \u201cguerrillas fighting with gangsters.\u201d[4]<\/a> For Gates, Watts crystallized the stakes of what he saw as America\u2019s spiraling \u201curban crisis\u201d: the specter of disorder, Black insurgency, and the perceived loss of police control over racialized cityscapes. He later recalled in Chief<\/em>:<\/p>\n We had no idea how to deal with this\u2026We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails\u2026it was random chaos, in small disparate patches. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare. Rather than a single mob, we had people attacking from all directions\u2026 The streets of America\u2019s cities had become foreign territory.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The Delano Grape Strike began just weeks later. In the San Joaquin Valley, largely Mexican and Filipino farm workers launched a years-long campaign against exploitative labor conditions. With the arrival of C\u00e9sar Ch\u00e1vez 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\u2019s crowd control tactics and surveillance strategies. Intrigued, they reached out to Delano officials to observe the program firsthand.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n After Watts, Delano, and a series of high profile shootouts that drew negative media attention, Gates began searching for tactical models that could minimize police fatalities while more effectively managing what he perceived as increasingly ungovernable urban terrain and forms of unrest and resistance that exceeded traditional policing capabilities. He turned to the U.S. military, \u201creading everything we could get our hands on concerning guerrilla warfare,\u201d and became familiar with counterinsurgency (COIN) strategies being developed in the early years of the Vietnam War.[7]<\/a> He consulted with Marines at the Naval Armory in Chavez Ravine.[8]<\/a> It was out of a belief in counterinsurgency\u2019s ability to discipline the metropole\u2014where domestic unrest could be neutralized like insurgencies abroad\u2014that SWAT was born.<\/p>\n\n
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