The Poor Example of Chief Gates
You may not believe this, but Police Chief Daryl F. Gates can be intelligent and sensitive when he’s talking about drug addiction.
I know it seems improbable in light of his telling a Senate committee earlier this month that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot.” Punishment-by-gunfire, he explained later, would be administered to those who “blast pot on a casual basis” and “the damned hypocrites who go out and party on the weekends and snort cocaine.”
That’s not the Gates with whom I discussed drugs a couple of years ago. I was interviewing him for a profile and, in the course of it, I brought up a subject he’d previously avoided, the drug addiction of his son, Lowell. This time, he wanted to talk, and he did so with considerable insight.
“It has a tremendous impact on my life,” he told me. “And I think, if nothing else, what it just told me was that we are dealing with something very, very powerful because my son had everything in the world going for him. I used to look at my son and say ‘God has been so good to you.’ Tremendous athlete. The girls used to hang around him. Smart. Nothing the kid did not have.
“Somehow, some way, somewhere along the way, he got caught up, and one of the things that I was never able to understand about him was that he has a very low self-esteem. Clearly, a very low self-esteem. And I never could understand how somebody, given all that he was given, could have a low self-esteem, but he did. He still does. Still does. He is kind of blustery. In some things, got a big ego. But overall, pretty low self-esteem.”
In light of this conversation, Gates’ comments in Washington made me angry.
Angry because Gates understands about drugs. Angry because, by indulging himself in flaming rhetoric, Gates made sure that everyone overlooked an important, and often ignored point about the drug trade: Middle-class recreational drug users help support big drug lords and their street-gang foot soldiers.
“Casual drug use” is a deceptively comfortable term. It evokes the image of coming home from work and puffing on marijuana raised by a friendly old hippie in Mendocino County. But the police make a strong argument that the purchases of cocaine and marijuana by recreational drug users puts money into the murderous drug trade that has become a business for gangs from Pomona to South Los Angeles.
Police officers tell me gang firepower--the guns that have been killing small children and other innocent bystanders--is paid for, in part, by the middle-class recreational coke snorters who drive from their work places or suburban homes to sidewalk drug marts in the San Fernando Valley, downtown Los Angeles or dozens of other locations.
Ask the working-class families living near Sepulveda Boulevard in the Valley what they think of recreational drug use. They welcomed the barricades that the police put up to keep out the visiting “casual” drug shoppers. In the MacArthur Park district near downtown, Councilwoman Gloria Molina had the police send in a special detail because of the heavy traffic of recreation-seeking sniffers and smokers from Central City offices and USC.
I was also angry with Chief Gates because, by popping off, he was failing to meet a principal obligation of leadership--setting a good example.
One good thing Gates and his department have done is to serve Los Angeles children through the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program--DARE. For one hour a week, over a 17-week period in several Los Angeles elementary and junior high schools, uniformed police officers teach subjects such as self-esteem, peer pressure, assertiveness, resistance to gang intimidation and knowing the consequences of your acts.
Some of it sounds pretty touchy-feely, which is surprising coming from a macho department known to batter South-Central L.A. crack houses with a motorized ram and sweep through neighborhoods with its massive Hammer arrest operations. But the kids relate to DARE. They listen to the teacher-cops with interest and respect. Hopefully, they leave feeling that drugs are bad and cops are good.
And that’s what makes me angriest of all about Gates’ remarks. He’s the top man in blue. He’s supposed to be an example, not only to his officers but to the city, including the kids in DARE.
The youngsters have heard police officers telling them to obey the law. Then on television and in the papers they learn that the chief is advocating indiscriminate shooting. And if anyone believed he was kidding, Gates cleared that up a few days after he popped off. “Yeah, I meant it,” he said.
That’s quite an example.
