When Antipathy to the LAPD’s Chief Was the Great Unifier

The following excerpt is from Danny Goldberg’s new memoir, “Liberals With Attitude: The Rodney King Beating and the Fight for the Soul of Los Angeles,” out Oct. 7 on Akashic. It offers a first-person account of the center-left coalition that succeeded in getting the powerful and much-loathed Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates to relinquish power in the months following the airing of the explosive video.

“Black people hated Daryl Gates,” Maxine Waters told me with characteristic intensity in the spring of 2022. She was the first person I wanted to speak with as I revisited the political culture of Los Angeles during the period between the Rodney King beating by four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers in March 1991 and the retirement of Gates as LAPD chief sixteen months later. 

The effort to pressure Daryl Gates into relinquishing power was led by Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley. Before his political career, Bradley had been an LAPD officer, rising to the rank of lieutenant, which was as high as a Black man could go in the department during the 1950s and ’60s. By the time of the Rodney King beating, Bradley and Gates had known and detested each other for more than forty years.

Although Bradley was a brilliant coalition builder, he was also a risk-averse politician. LAPD reform after the King beating could never have occurred without the efforts of Waters and her allies in the preceding years when mainstream politicians were fearful of alienating the powerful police chief. 

Maxine Waters was eighty-four years old, but she had driven to our meeting at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in West Hollywood by herself. “My staff wants me to get a driver, but I told them, I am not an invalid,” she said with a determined smile as she stepped out of her Honda Civic. Waters obliged admirers in the hotel lobby who wanted selfies, but she drew my attention to a woman in the corner who was glaring at her. “This is the way it always is,” she whispered, “some of them love me and some of them hate me.” She was a national figure, the chairperson of the Committee on Financial Services in the U.S. House of Representatives, yet the memories of her battles with Gates when he was LAPD chief from 1978–1992 were still fresh in her mind. 

Long after his death in 2010, Daryl Gates remains a polarizing figure. There are some who still revere him. Former LAPD sergeant Rod Bernsen, who was his driver in the 1980s, spoke to me of the chief’s support, both emotional and institutional, for many of those who worked for him. After Gates retired, he was typically greeted with standing ovations when he attended the funerals of LAPD officers. In 2023, the Los Angeles Police Protective League held their forty-first annual Daryl F. Gates golf tournament and the antidrug group D.A.R.E. presented their annual Daryl F. Gates Lifetime Achievement Award. The Los Angeles Police Revolver and Athletic Club features a Daryl F. Gates Lounge and there’s a Facebook group called “Daryl F. Gates (RIP): The Greatest Police Chief—Ever!” 

However, for many who remember his reign at the LAPD, Daryl Gates is an infamous figure. The Root, an online magazine started by Black historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. (no relation), published an article in 2023 headlined “White Extremists Then and Now.” It consisted of a slide show of “the men that have made the lives of Black people a constant struggle.” The first example was Bull Connor, the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, who in 1963 ordered police to attack nonviolent civil rights protesters, including dozens of children, with dogs and fire hoses. The second poster child for white extremism was Daryl Gates. 

Like disputes about Confederate monuments, the question of whether the former LAPD chief was a hero or a villain is a proxy for a deeper ongoing conversation about race and democracy in America, a debate in which Maxine Waters had long been a major voice. One of the few public officials whose time in office spanned the eras of both Gates and Donald Trump, she had been confronting racism in law enforcement for more than four decades.

I first met Waters in the late 1980s when my day job was in the music business as senior vice president of Atlantic Records. During that period, I was also chair of the board of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. 

I was initially attracted to the ACLU because of their history of support for free speech in the arts. In previous decades they had defended literary masterpieces such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl against government attempts at censorship. The ACLU’s national office was in New York City, and it had fifty semi-autonomous affiliates around the country. (California had three, with offices in Northern California and San Diego in addition to ours.) Except when otherwise specified, when I refer to the ACLU in this book, I am referring to the Southern California affiliate.

In 1985, Senator Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, cofounded an organization called the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), which tried to pressure record companies into adopting a rating system for lyrics that would have prevented kids under the age of eighteen from buying records by “controversial” artists. I persuaded the ACLU’s national office in New York to give their imprimatur to a group of music-business executives who opposed the PMRC demand, and I named the ad hoc coalition the Musical Majority. 

The only elected Democrat who sided with us was Tom Bradley; he welcomed me and a group of artists into his City Hall office for a photo op, after which he issued a statement of support. (The issue was resolved shortly thereafter when the PMRC accepted a compromise of voluntary “parental advisory” stickers which notified parents when there were curse words on albums—but didn’t prevent teenagers from buying them.)

My free speech activism gave me entrée to the progressive Hollywood creative community, and I met Stanley Sheinbaum. Along with TV producer Norman Lear, Sheinbaum was one of the leaders of the so-called “Malibu Mafia” that supported progressive causes and politicians. Stanley’s wife, Betty, had inherited a large part of the Warner Bros. fortune from her father, Harry Warner. Betty and Stanley frequently hosted events at their home where politicians like Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Clinton mingled with journalists like I.F. Stone and Joan Didion and movie stars like Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier, Jane Fonda, and Warren Beatty. (In 1998, Beatty would cast Stanley as a grumpy Jewish political donor in his political satire Bulworth.) The Sheinbaums were close friends with Maxine Waters, and the first time I met her was at their house. 

Stanley was then in his late sixties. He had a rabbinical salt-and-pepper beard, wore steel-rimmed glasses, talked in a thick Bronx accent, and was prone to alternating corny jokes with long-winded intellectual monologues about the issues of the day. In a Los Angeles Times profile of Stanley written in 1987, Ronald Brownstein described him as a “high-level kibbitzer, mentor, and fundraiser for American liberals” with “a palpable restlessness and a ticking compulsion to be where the action is.” Yet Stanley also had a piercing intellect, and he funneled his socialist idealism through a fiercely pragmatic sense of the art of the possible. 

He was thirty years older than I was and cared nothing about the rock-and-roll world I inhabited. (His favorite record was Bing Crosby’s version of “Pennies from Heaven.”) But Stanley took me under his wing, and it was his idea that I assume his former role at the Southern California ACLU, chair of the foundation board. 

Stanley introduced me to Ramona Ripston, the executive director of that ACLU affiliate and another major character in the battle to get Daryl Gates to step down as LAPD chief. In an obituary of Ripston in 2018, the New York Times referred to her as “a tall, thin former model with cascading blonde hair, [who] cut a fashionable figure in the sometimes rumpled world of civil liberties litigation.” Her younger protégé, ACLU lawyer Carol Sobel, pointed out that Ripston “didn’t look like the rest of the people in the ACLU. It made it easier for some men to deal with her.” Former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was vice president of the ACLU board at the time of the Rodney King beating, refers to Ripston as his mentor. He told me, “She could be tough as nails and never compromised on principle, but she was always gracious.” 

When I met Ripston in 1987, she had been running the organization since the early 1970s and had created a network of coalition partners with labor unions and organizations that represented the local Black, Latino, and Asian communities.

Anthony Romero, who became executive director of the national ACLU in 2001, and who worked with Ripston during the last decade of her career, told me that she was unique among ACLU officials in the way she combined a commitment to civil liberties principles with a sophisticated understanding of the day-to-day realities of politics. She had close ties with local Democrats, even some of those who were on the other side of ACLU lawsuits. Elected officials such as Mayor Bradley, senators Barbara Boxer and Alan Cranston, and congressmen Howard Berman and Henry Waxman often attended the annual ACLU fundraising dinners. “Ramona was such an important leader in this community for so many years,” Maxine Waters wistfully recalled.

The one-liner that Ripston and other ACLU officials often used to describe the organization’s mission was: “Our client is the Bill of Rights.” The secular ACLU commandment was that civil liberties were for everyone, including those whose political beliefs were abhorrent to us. One frequently cited example of the ACLU’s nonpartisan nature was the organization’s defense of former Reagan administration official Oliver North, whose authoritarian bellicosity was loathed by liberals. In 1988, the ACLU affiliate in Washington, DC, successfully argued that North couldn’t be legally indicted for his role in the Iran-Contra affair because he had testified about the issue before Congress, and use of information he provided in a trial would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. 

The ACLU had committees that wrote policies circumscribing the legal and lobbying activities of the organization. Within the voluminous catalog of those aspirations, Ripston and the legal staff chose what the ACLU actually spent its time and resources on. Every year there were some cases that clashed with the sensibilities of some of the group’s supporters. As Ripston said, only half-jokingly, “If you agree with everything the ACLU does, there’s something wrong with you.” But I soon came to believe that the vast majority of their activities added an important moral force to the community. 

I was dazzled when Ripston recounted the issues that the ACLU of Southern California took on. In addition to their First Amendment cases, they litigated and lobbied on behalf of immigrant rights and women’s rights. They monitored local prisons and, unlike ACLU affiliates in the rest of the country, they had an economic justice policy. Ripston explained, “If you don’t have food on the table or a bed to sleep in, the promises we make to people about equity and justice are just illusions.” A lawsuit filed by ACLU general counsel Mark Rosenbaum increased funding for public schools in poor California neighborhoods. 

Joan Howarth, who was hired as a staff attorney by the ACLU in 1984, told me, “I was expecting it to be a law office, but I soon realized that it was also a movement office.” One day when Howarth wanted to use the Xerox machine to copy a pleading, she had to wait while activist Michael Zinzun made hundreds of flyers announcing an upcoming protest against police brutality. 

Ripston also made the Southern California ACLU the organization’s leader in litigating for gay and lesbian rights, which was particularly significant when the AIDS epidemic was at its peak and President Ronald Reagan would not even utter the name of the disease. “We were even doing cases for San Francisco,” remembers Howarth with pride. The five-times-married Ripston got an award from a local activist group that named her an “honorary lesbian.” Howarth recalls appreciatively, “The fact that she accepted it so enthusiastically sent a strong message to the staff.”

Candidates for board membership or staff positions were always cautioned that some of our activities might offend friends and colleagues. Even within the organization there were tensions between staff members who had varying concepts of how to make America a better place. There were frequent debates about what was or was not a civil liberties issue. At a time when the approach prized by mainstream political actors was “pragmatism,” the word that exemplified the ACLU ethos was “principle,” usually uttered with self-righteous fervor by people on all sides of internal ideological arguments. There were conventional turf battles as well. A large part of Ripston’s job was mediating internal disputes—but within her cacophonous realm, antipathy to Daryl Gates was the great unifier.

Nothing occupied the energy of the ACLU more than their confrontations with the LAPD. I was living in the upscale Hancock Park neighborhood in Hollywood, and in my few encounters with police officers they had been friendly and helpful. Ripston patiently explained that I was living in a bubble and that the LAPD acted very differently in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. The ACLU office had a police-brutality hot line staffed by volunteers who fielded dozens of complaints a day. Staff attorneys and their allies won millions of dollars every year in payments to victims of LAPD abuse. Ripston was such a thorn in Daryl Gates’s side that the LAPD chief publicly referred to her as “Ramona Rip-off.”

By the early 1990s, there was increasing overlap between free speech issues in music and the tension between the LAPD and Black communities. The genre of “gangsta rap” originated in Los Angeles and often focused on LAPD excesses. Daryl Gates was pejoratively named-checked in more than a dozen songs.

The group N.W.A (the initials of which stood for N****z With Attitude) released the album Straight Outta Compton in 1988. (Compton, a largely Black neighborhood in LA, was part of Maxine Waters’s congressional district.) It included a song entitled “Fuck tha Police.” After the album sold more than two million copies, the FBI wrote a letter to N.W.A’s label, Priority Records, that complained, “Law enforcement officers dedicate their lives to the protection of our citizens and recordings such as the one from N.W.A are both discouraging and degrading to these brave dedicated officers.” 

It was understandable that many police officers would be offended by the song. From a free speech point of view, there was nothing wrong with criticizing N.W.A—but there was everything wrong with trying to kill their career. When the FBI expressed itself publicly, it implicitly gave permission to local police forces to harass the group. As Dave Marsh and Phyllis Pollack reported in the Village Voice, “Their shows have been jeopardized or aborted in Detroit (where the group was briefly detained by cops), Washington, DC, Chattanooga, Milwaukee, and Tyler, Texas.”

In my role as ACLU Foundation board chair, I told the Los Angeles Times, “It is completely inappropriate for any government agency to try to influence what artists do. It is completely against the American tradition of free speech and government non-interference for government agencies to criticize art, because such criticism carries with it an implied threat.” 

On March 4, 1991, I called Ripston to rant about a new hip-hop censorship issue and she interrupted, “I can’t talk about this right now. There’s a new video with the LAPD, and it could change everything.”