Chief Daryl Gates hangs up his badge

June 28, 1992: After 14 often tumultuous years, Daryl Francis Gates retired from his job as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.

He left, The Times said, “as he always vowed he would: with his head defiantly held high.”

“The chief has shepherded his beloved department -- ‘the finest in the world,’ he likes to say -- through good times and bad,” the newspaper said.

“He has been at the helm through visits from presidents and a pope and the golden moments of the 1984 Olympics, through the police shooting of a black woman named Eulia Love and the beating of a black man named Rodney G. King and the darkest hours of the Los Angeles riots, when his officers watched, helpless and embarrassed, as city blocks went up in flame.”