Ever since former Police Chief Daryl Gates died last week, city officials have engaged in a virtual apologia about the man and the 14-year reign of terror he and his beloved Los Angeles Police Department perpetrated against minorities in this City of the Angels. Public officials and the mainstream media have been wallowing in revisionism in their attempts to paint a more heroic image of an alleged “great but misunderstood” police chief. African-American residents of Los Angeles, however, knew exactly who Gates was and understood him very well, but nobody asked them to comment upon his death. So I did, and the following is what some of them had to say.

Ronnie Cato, president of the Oscar Joel Bryant Foundation, an organization of Black police officers, said: “I’ve been a Los Angeles police officer for 29 years and I truly was not a fan of Chief Daryl Gates. I was very offended by what he said. I understand he came from a different time, but he needed to change and adapt to the sensitivities of the present time, and he didn’t. They say he loved the LAPD and his officers. But he loved them to a fault; he supported everything they did. If he loved them, he should have acted like a good parent and punished and corrected his officers when they behaved badly.

“A good chief would have been fair and would have inculcated within his officers a respect for the community. And he did not,” Cato continued. “He was a good chief when he first started, but he stayed too long and could not adjust to social changes. He operated out of a different paradigm and those racist comments he always made told you exactly how he felt. I respected his rank as chief, but I cannot get past those racist remarks he made.”

Community mainstay Kerman Maddox said: “Like many African-Americans who lived in South Los Angeles during much of Daryl Gates’ reign, I do not have fond memories of that time. I vividly remember a chief who looked the other way when his minions forced many young Black men to put their noses to the hot pavement and spread eagle in the so-called prone-out position — a tactic that would never have been considered, let alone used in most parts of Los Angeles. I remember Operation Hammer, racial profiling and the Dalton Street raid. The raid where his police officers completely destroyed a four-unit apartment complex in South L.A. in their search for large quantities of drugs only to find literally nothing. I remember Chief Gates defending his officers for killing Eula Love over an overdue gas bill. I remember the use of the police chokehold that killed African-Americans because, according to the chief, their veins functioned differently than those of normal peopIe! I remember his blatant disrespect for then-Mayor Tom Bradley and his initial defense of the police officers involved in the brutal beating of motorist Rodney King. Back in the day many of us viewed the LAPD under Chief Gates as an occupying force in South Los Angeles, not a group we expected to protect and serve us. Fortunately, police community relations have improved dramatically in South Los Angeles and the improvement began with the dismissal of Daryl Gates!”

John Mack, president of the Police Commission and who, as the Urban League’s executive director spent many years fighting Gates’ racist police tactics, said this: “Chief Gates was a hero to some, particularly with LAPD and with the White community, but he was a villain to most people in the African-American community. His leadership legacy in the Eula Love incident and the choke hold controversy — in which 21 African-American men died from the choke hold officers put on them — which Gates attempted to defend by saying there is something physically wrong with Black men — are some of the bitter lasting memories most of us will recall about Daryl Gates.”

From his prison cell, activist Najee Ali, who devoted much of his life to fighting LAPD abuse of minorities, said this: “The Black community battled Daryl Gates for years, but as a human being, I feel empathy for his family. Gates’ legacy will be permanently tainted by his racist actions and policies while he was LAPD’s chief, ranging from the police murder of Eula Love to the nationally televised beating of Rodney King.”

As a leader of the Los Angeles NAACP, Anthony Samad spent four years handling 300 police misconduct cases filed by community residents and numerous racial profiling complaints leveled by blacks against the LAPD. Samad said this about the late Gates: “He was an extremely polarizing figure in L.A. and he gave the LAPD its racist swagger that it had because the rank-and-file officers knew that no matter what they did, they would always get Gates’ support. So we had one bad shooting after another.

“Gates had a mentality of the old Jim Crow South that white supremacist control was the best way to control the Black community.”

Cynthia McClain-Hill was a young lawyer who fought tirelessly for justice for victims of police abuse perpetrated under Gates’ watch. She said: “The passing of Darryl Gates causes me to think about my friend Melanie Lomax, who preceded him in death, and her unwavering commitment to standing up for the people who fell victim to the disrespect, hostility and violence against the community that was far too prevalent during the years that Chief Gates led the department. While the Gates’ legacy will forever be tied to brutality displayed by his officers in the infamous Rodney King tape, it is the warrior Melanie Lomax that was fearless in her efforts to hold him accountable that I will never forget and whose memory occupied my thoughts when I learned of Chief Gates’ passing.”

Sweet Alice Harris, a community icon in Watts for decades, was a member of a community group Gates organized in the 1980s to deal with police abuse complaints in Watts. “We saw his police officers beat up people and we saw them dropping off young Black dope sellers in the neighborhoods early in the mornings. We used those monthly community group meetings to tell Gates about what we saw his officers doing in our neighborhood. Some of it stopped — at least it stopped happening right in front of our faces, but we knew it was happening behind our backs. The best thing Gates did was to form that committee so we could at least tell him once a month what we saw and what we didn’t like so some of the police abuse could be stopped,” Harris said.

Some African-Americans I talked to could — like White people — recall some “good things” Gates did. These included Ozie Gonzaque, longtime LAPD volunteer and former city commissioner; attorney Carl E. Douglas, who handled many police abuse cases; Adrian Dove, CORE chairman; and former councilman Nate Holden. They tempered their criticism of Gates’ racist policies and public pronouncements by citing his creation of the DARE Program and SWAT teams as the late chief’s good deeds — deeds that most Blacks regard as pale in comparison to his bad deeds.

Nevertheless, the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray, retired pastor of First AME Church and current USC religion professor who led his church in a constant, valiant fight to secure dignity for the community in the face of turbulent times, responded to my inquiry as to his reaction to Gates’ death with this:
“‘Transition’ is often the term used to mark the passage from life to death. The middle passage from African entrapment to American enslavement witnessed the transition of some 18 million lives in ships where captives were packed like sardines. The millions who survived that passage after four centuries on this continent know that transition means change, and change can be for better or for worse, to heaven or to hell. Change for the better is heralded by such as has happened in the White House. All who knew the legacy of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates need only a short debate to determine what change for us is effected in his transition.”