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Well, you're right. The last decent chief we had was Gates. The guy was a little quirky, but I had a lot of respect for him. More importantly, his men did too

Maybe the men had respect for him, but as a public face of the department, he was a nightmare. When there was a spate of black men killed because of then-standard-policy chokeholds, he suggested in one interview that blacks had more crushable larynxes, and if that wasn't enough, he finished the sentence, "than normal people." He was also the living descendant of the old Chief Parker plan of holding down the city with a very minimal number of cops (1/10 NYCs?) by using massive response in place of community patrolling. But when the big crisis came, instead of responding with overwhelming force at ground zero of the riot, Florence and Normandie, he withdrew all the cops from the area. It wasn't the cops who rescued Reginald Denny from being beaten to death on live TV, it was a guy from the neighborhood who saw it on TV, then went out to stop it. The allegation at the time was that Gates was making a point about the Rodney King case; "If you don't like cops, see what happens when they aren't around." Yeah, that's a good chief.

I was here for the riots, and I watched as looters came around in groups, with trucks, three times to try to break into the appliance store four doors down from my apartment building. But before that I saw the way the cops interacted with the citizens they were supposed to "serve and protect," and it wasn't nice. I came from Chicago, and back there you wouldn't think twice about walking up to a cop and striking up a conversation. In L.A., no one does that. Everyone, even law-abiding people, fear the police here. And the ensuing scandals, particularly Rampart, have done nothing to change things.

What they really need to do here is hire lots and lots more cops, to really institute community based policing like they keep paying lip service to instead of actually doing. I live in the valley now, and I'm in favor of secession just because we'll get to create a new police force. (Well, there are other reasons, too.)