Daryl F. Gates, L.A.P.D. Chief in Rodney King Era, Dies at 83
Daryl F. Gates, whose aggressive approach to law enforcement as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department was both admired for its innovation and criticized for the racial unrest it provoked, died Friday at his home in Dana Point, Calif. He was 83.
In a statement, the Police Department said he died after “a short battle with cancer.”
Mr. Gates began his police career in 1949 as a Los Angeles patrolman. It ended when he was forced to resign in June 1992, after 14 years as chief, in the wake of riots that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the highly publicized beating of Rodney King.
The years in between were a raucous era in which Los Angeles almost doubled its population while becoming overwhelmed by drugs, gangs, guns and a tide of violent crime.
Mr. Gates, who embraced the tough, principled and inflexible strategy of his mentor, William H. Parker, the former Los Angeles police chief, responded to that climate by stressing discipline in the ranks of his 8,000-strong department, enlarging the police presence in the streets and developing new policing tools.
Mr. Gates pioneered the use of police helicopters to fight crime across the nearly 470 square miles of his city, and he helped develop the Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT, unit, made up of elite mobile teams of highly trained officers.
SWAT teams deployed sophisticated surveillance equipment, assault weapons and paramilitary skills to neutralize threats. Hundreds of police departments in the United States and around the world have since developed SWAT units. In Los Angeles, they had a prominent role in maintaining order during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, a period widely regarded as the high point of Mr. Gates’s career.
Another initiative was DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a program, begun in the early 1980s, in which officers go into schools to teach students how to resist peer pressure to use drugs, join gangs and engage in violence. Millions of American students now receive the DARE curriculum each year.
But as Los Angeles grew more dense and diverse, as crime increased and as cultural mores and racial attitudes shifted in the ’80s, Mr. Gates’s oversight of the department came under mounting criticism. Black and Hispanic residents accused the police of treating them harshly and Mr. Gates of doing little to rein in his officers. They said the department’s emphasis on making arrests invited confrontation and discouraged good will in minority neighborhoods....
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In a statement, the Police Department said he died after “a short battle with cancer.”
Mr. Gates began his police career in 1949 as a Los Angeles patrolman. It ended when he was forced to resign in June 1992, after 14 years as chief, in the wake of riots that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the highly publicized beating of Rodney King.
The years in between were a raucous era in which Los Angeles almost doubled its population while becoming overwhelmed by drugs, gangs, guns and a tide of violent crime.
Mr. Gates, who embraced the tough, principled and inflexible strategy of his mentor, William H. Parker, the former Los Angeles police chief, responded to that climate by stressing discipline in the ranks of his 8,000-strong department, enlarging the police presence in the streets and developing new policing tools.
Mr. Gates pioneered the use of police helicopters to fight crime across the nearly 470 square miles of his city, and he helped develop the Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT, unit, made up of elite mobile teams of highly trained officers.
SWAT teams deployed sophisticated surveillance equipment, assault weapons and paramilitary skills to neutralize threats. Hundreds of police departments in the United States and around the world have since developed SWAT units. In Los Angeles, they had a prominent role in maintaining order during the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, a period widely regarded as the high point of Mr. Gates’s career.
Another initiative was DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a program, begun in the early 1980s, in which officers go into schools to teach students how to resist peer pressure to use drugs, join gangs and engage in violence. Millions of American students now receive the DARE curriculum each year.
But as Los Angeles grew more dense and diverse, as crime increased and as cultural mores and racial attitudes shifted in the ’80s, Mr. Gates’s oversight of the department came under mounting criticism. Black and Hispanic residents accused the police of treating them harshly and Mr. Gates of doing little to rein in his officers. They said the department’s emphasis on making arrests invited confrontation and discouraged good will in minority neighborhoods....