The Media Did It

If it is any comfort to him, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates is the most talked about cop in Southern California.

Not since Beverly Hills Patrolman Paul Kramer was slapped by Zsa Zsa Gabor has anyone found an individual policeman worthy of such intense discussion.

Even people who normally only talk about themselves are talking about Gates.

You remember the Zsa Zsa Incident. Kramer was attacked when he stopped her for a traffic violation. Though under assault, he bravely subdued the enraged Hungarian and brought her to justice.

Kramer was something of a hero in the incident because he didn’t respond to Zsa Zsa’s openhanded assault by clubbing her into bloody submission.

Chief Gates is definitely not the hero in the beating of Rodney King.

Though not personally involved, he’s considered morally responsible for the conduct of those officers accused of beating King while he was lying on the ground being a racial minority.

The cops claimed King had been speeding, may have been on dope and was resisting arrest. Subsequent investigation indicates otherwise.

The cops did note in their initial report, however, that he was black, and that’s true. Though not specifically mentioned in the Penal Code, it probably isn’t wise to be black in L.A.

Thanks to the amateur videotape, the beating is not being dismissed as simply another case of police overreaction, which is a euphemism often employed to explain undocumented cop violence.

The matter is being investigated by the department’s internal affairs division, the L.A. County district attorney, the state attorney general and the U.S. Department of Justice.

As a friend puts it, “Only the Boy Scouts of America and the Bishop of Rome aren’t involved in sorting through the thing.”

That too is a result of the widely telecast videotape, which has turned the beating into a subject of conversation wherever social critics gather.

They talk about the tape as though it’s a new television show, discussing not only the atrocity of police violence, but its potential as a series. Videocop! We’re thinking about it.

Most of the comment I’ve heard has been concerned not with how the policemen involved in the beating should be punished, but with how L.A. should deal with Daryl Gates.

People like Jesse Jackson, who always seems to be around during high-profile controversies, and Kim Basinger, who sat in her car during one anti-Gates demonstration pouting her protest, feel the chief ought to be fired.

So do all of my Maoist friends on the Westside and many of my Tory friends in the Valley.

One telephone caller suggested that Gates ought to be made up in blackface and forced to live in neighborhoods patrolled by white policemen.

A letter writer said she had achieved “psychic contact” with the chief and he was an agent of the devil. Newspaper editorials have suggested pretty much the same thing.

I’ve talked about Gates with everyone I’ve come in contact with for the past several days.

This has included proper suburban grandmothers in Walnut, cholos in East L.A., creek rats in Topanga and unfrocked Marines in Burbank.

Only two people thought the chief was getting a bum rap, and one of them was a white supremacist. He thought I was one too, due to a column in which I cautioned temperance in condemning all cops.

He asked quite seriously, “How did a Mexican ever get into the Ku Klux Klan?”

“On a waiver,” I replied. He accepted that.

The other person who spoke on behalf of Gates was bail bondsman-philosopher Joey Barnum.

Joey has been a bondsman in L.A. for 27 years. He is also an ex-boxer.

“The beating’s nothing new,” he said to me the other day. “I used to get guys outta jail by the ton with their heads bashed in.”

It is a sign of improvement to Joey that his clients are not as bloodied as they used to be.

Gates himself wrote me. He too thanked me for that column celebrating one good cop as a metaphor for many.

But then he said, “It seems like the media has attacked the LAPD like a pack of wild dogs.”

I see it coming. Gates will not be held responsible for the action of his men. It’ll be blamed on us, the wild dogs.

It won’t be the first time. But in this case at least, it’s the cops, not the dogs, who are in dire need of leashes.