As the LAPD evolved, so did he : The incoming chief, who lived its ‘dark days,’ hopes to change how every cop thinks.

In 1974, Charlie Beck -- the man poised to become the next chief of the Los Angeles Police Department -- was 21 years old, unemployed, unfulfilled and adrift.

He had spent his teenage years training as a professional dirt motorbike racer but reluctantly walked away after failing to compete at the sport’s elite levels. For the first time in his life, he gave serious consideration to the profession his father, a high-ranking officer in the LAPD, had chosen.

Beck took a job assisting detectives with their office work and, intrigued by what he saw, joined the force as a part-time reserve officer. His first days with a badge on the streets of the department’s Rampart area were something approaching an epiphany.

“I knew it was what I wanted to do. I was sure of it,” he said. “I wasn’t going to be the richest guy in the neighborhood with this job, but I knew I would be the guy that had a job that was important, that made a difference. And you add with that the fact that it was challenging. I loved the thrill of it, I loved the adrenaline. I loved the hunt, I loved the capture. I loved the whole thing.”

The raw enthusiasm of a young cop would grow into something far more complicated in the years that followed. As the city devolved into a period of chaos and violence amid a drug epidemic and soaring crime, the LAPD descended along with it. Trained to follow orders and think of themselves as an occupying force, cops fell back on an aggressive style of policing that sometimes slipped into the realm of abuse.

It was a strategy, Beck would come to realize, that held no hope.

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Ups and downs

After a few years as a reserve officer, Beck returned to the LAPD’s training academy and emerged as a full-fledged cop in 1977. It was a time of flux, as Chief Ed Davis stepped down and Daryl F. Gates, a hard-line LAPD veteran, took over. Davis had flirted with the idea that police should build close ties with the communities they serve, but under Gates the department shifted back to an entrenched, paramilitary mentality.

As a still-green patrol officer, Beck took assignments in Rampart, South L.A., Hollywood and the Westside.

By the mid-1980s, with the crack cocaine epidemic in full swing and the city suffering a homicide rate three times what it is today, Beck had been promoted and was supervising cops in narcotics and anti-gang units in the thick of the chaos in South L.A.

With far too small a force to adequately police the city, heavy-handed, one-dimensional strategies prevailed, leading often to claims of excessive force and racism.

It was a time filled with troubling scenes. Beck recalled responding to a house his gang officers had raided to find children handcuffed and splayed on the street.

“They weren’t evil people . . . they were doing what they were taught,” he said of the officers. “There was no room for independent thought.”

And there were deployments such as “Operation Hammer,” when “we brought in all the gang units in the city and all the extra patrol units and just tried to get as many arrests as possible. It was untargeted, it didn’t matter what it was. It was a declaration of war. It was supposed to be a declaration of war on gangs, but people saw it as a declaration of war on the community.”

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The ‘dark days’

In recent interviews and speeches, Beck has shied away from talking in detail about specific incidents he witnessed or took part in, but he has not tried to shun responsibility for being a part of the force during what he refers to as the “dark days.”

“I saw it not working, but I didn’t have the maturity yet as a person or professionally to recognize it and to understand why,” he said in a recent interview.

The 1992 riots following the verdict in the Rodney King beating were a turning point for Beck, solidifying his feeling that the LAPD’s harsh policing methods were not only failing to make streets safer, but also helping set the stage for the eruption.

“I started trying to look at the job differently. I figured there had to be a way to be an effective police officer without alienating the people you were policing.”

It would be a decade, however, before Beck found himself in a position to try out some of the ideas that had been taking shape in his head.

Soon after being hired as chief in 2002, William J. Bratton identified Beck, by then a captain in the department’s rough Central Division, as someone who he believed had potential.

He sent Beck to run the Rampart Division, which was still recovering from a corruption scandal, and tasked him with one of the high-profile assignments aimed at winning back some of the public’s confidence.

MacArthur Park, which over the years had become an open-air bazaar of drug dealing, prostitution and violence, had come to symbolize the LAPD’s continued inability to maintain order, and Bratton wanted to take it back.

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Initiating change

Beck seized the chance. He reached out to a nascent core of local business owners and leaned on other city agencies to return the park’s lighting, sports facilities and landscaping to working order.

Specialized crime suppression units that had been aimlessly making hundreds of arrests in the park each month were ordered to stand down, and Beck instead placed the fate of the park at the feet of his own officers.

With the responsibility, though, he gave them greater discretion to think of ideas on their own -- a risky and nearly unheard-of proposition in a department that didn’t encourage officers to innovate. His officers pursued federal grants and partnered with business owners to install surveillance cameras. Beck’s cops reintroduced a sense of order to the park, making arrests and issuing citations for small infractions that had previously gone ignored.

“They had to own the problem,” Beck said, using a favorite catch phrase. “I told them, ‘This is our problem, we are going to fix this.’ Everyone had to be involved. And we started talking about how we were going to do it. I told them, ‘When we get done with this, we won’t make any arrests in the park.’ ”

Every month, Beck would bring undercover officers from elsewhere in the city and record how long it took them to buy dope in the park. Within six months, he said, there was a sense of improvement. By his second summer in charge, the Pasadena Pops came to play a concert in the park, city workers stocked the pond for a kids’ fishing tournament and the undercover cops were telling Beck they had to go outside the park to find drugs.

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The leader’s role

Beck left Rampart marked as a rising star in the department. That was when it first became apparent to him that he could move into the ranks of the LAPD’s high command. He said it was gratifying to be acknowledged for his work, but he recalled with some ambiguity the momentum that swept him up and catapulted him forward.

Bratton promoted him quickly, and Beck returned as a deputy chief to South Los Angeles, where he again had success balancing an aggressive stance on crime with the need to rebuild the trust of still-wary residents. Civil rights leaders, attorneys and clergy who had clashed with police leadership over the years saw in Beck someone who wanted to hear them out. From there, Bratton brought Beck downtown to oversee the department’s expansive detective bureau and increasingly depended on him to handle high-profile crises.

As he has risen through the ranks, Beck has carried with him the cautionary tale of his father. A year before Beck joined the department, George Beck, one of the highest ranking officers in the department, came under scrutiny for his role in the leak of investigative materials in a sensational murder case to an acquaintance who worked for a film production company and for accepting a personal loan from the company. He was cleared of the most serious charges but was disciplined and demoted for failing to do more to prevent the leak by others.

The embarrassment his father suffered left a mark on Beck and it is not lost on him that his father was at a similar point in his career to Beck’s now. “It underscored that there is a lot of risk in being the boss,” he said. “You are responsible for what your subordinates do and the relationships that you keep. And you always have to be aware of it.”

That is no small thing for a man on the verge of taking over the entire LAPD, who considers among his most important assets his willingness to collaborate with people outside of traditional policing circles. “I have to be more circumspect,” he said. “If I make a mistake, it will affect the whole city now.”

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Keeping perspective

Beck comes across as a humble, self-effacing man comfortable in his own skin. He calls elected officials “ma’am” and “sir.” At a series of town hall meetings after being nominated for chief, Beck went out of his way to deflect attention. “They don’t know me,” he said at a meeting in Van Nuys, where he had been showered in applause. “I am just a symbol for something much larger.”

In an interview, Beck recalled advice his father once gave him after he had received a promotion. “He told me, ‘Remember, you just got promoted, you didn’t get any smarter.’ ”

In the few weeks since Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tapped his nominee, Beck has made a carefully crafted case to prove he is the right person to lead the department into the post-Bratton era.

While Bratton introduced badly needed reforms and pushed to rebuild ties with minority communities, Beck focused his attention on reshaping the upper ranks of the department and getting them to buy into his progressive ideas on policing.

Beck has presented himself as the one who will take Bratton’s ideas and infuse them into the minds of the LAPD’s roughly 10,000 rank-and-file officers. He is, he argues, the one who understands what it is to be an LAPD cop, the one who has their trust and thus the one who can rewire the way they think.

“The future of this organization is in our hands at this moment,” Beck said in a speech following the mayor’s announcement. “We have come so far in the last seven years and it is so important that we drive those changes that we’ve made, that we take them and put them into the DNA of this organization, so that never again will it depend solely on the leader to make a difference.”

Far from an abstraction, the future of the LAPD is a personal matter for Beck. His stepdaughter, whom he raised from a young age, is a patrol officer and his son is scheduled to graduate from the LAPD academy next month.

The job, Beck said, “is the core of my existence. It’s who I am.”

To succeed, Beck knows he will have to persuade young cops today to make a transformation similar to the one he has made over 32 years in the LAPD. It is a daunting task and one that was weighing on his mind as he left the town hall meeting in Van Nuys.

Stepping out into the chill night air, he headed across a dark plaza to the familiar confines of a nearby police station. Inside, he found a group of young anti-gang officers preparing for their shift.

“I respect what you do. And I understand what you do,” he said, slipping into an impromptu pep talk. “Believe me, I get it. When I was sitting where you are, the only thing I believed in was suppression and arrests. It took me about 20 years to come to a different conclusion. I’m going to try to close that time period for you. The only thing I ask of you is that you keep an open mind.”

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joel.rubin@latimes.com