History of the Los Angeles Police Department
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was formed in 1869, and has since become the third-largest law enforcement agency in the United States.
During the California Gold Rush, Los Angeles was known for its violence, gambling and "vice" and lack of effective civil law enforcement.
[3] The first paid police force was created in 1869, when six officers were hired to serve under City Marshal William C. Warren.
In 1910, the LAPD promoted the first sworn female police officer with full powers in the U.S., Alice Stebbins Wells.
[6] In his first term he fired almost a fifth of the force for bad conduct, and instituted extended firearms training and also the dragnet system of policing.
The modernizer Arthur C. Hohmann was made chief in 1939 and resigned in 1941 after a strike at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, in which he refused to use the LAPD as strikebreakers.
Among the department's more notorious cases of the Horrall years was the January 15, 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia.
Horrall and Assistant Chief Joe Reed resigned in 1949 under threat of a grand jury investigation related to the Brenda Allen scandal.
Several of Horrall and Reed's more enduring actions, among others, were to approve a radio show about the LAPD titled Dragnet in the same year, with Jack Webb starring in the program, and the 1946 founding of the LAPD's secret "Gangster Squad" aimed to stop the rising threat of the American Mafia and organized crime (led by the local Los Angeles crime family) in the city.
The Bloody Christmas scandal in 1951 led to calls for civilian accountability and an end to police brutality in the city itself.
[11] The most serious challenge in this period was the 1965 Watts riots following accusations of mistreatment and police brutality toward minority communities by the City and the LAPD.
For six days, buildings and businesses were looted and set on fire, and sniping also took place before the California Army National Guard were deployed to assist the overwhelmed LAPD in restoring order.
A uniformed team was set up and given the acronym of TRASH, or Total Resources Against Street Hoodlums, headed by Sergeant Beno Hernandez.
To address this phenomenon, and to give courts a better understanding of whom they were dealing with, a joint task force of police, probation, parole, schools, and others formed an entity with an acronym of DDCP, or Disposition Data Coordination Project.
DDCP was a pre-sentence gathering of reputation information in the community, allowed under California law to be considered by the Court.
At about the same time complaints began being made by activists outside the City and South Bureau area, that TRASH was demeaning to the group members.
Chief Sporrer renamed the units CRASH, or Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, and it remained operational as it had been before the name change.
Also during the term of Chief Davis, the LAPD pioneered tactics and procedures that would serve as the blueprints of modern community-policing.
Zealous officers, led by Detective Lloyd Martin, are purported to have dangled two youths over a cliff to try to make him reveal names of pedophile ring.
Dozens of men were detained on charges of violating an 1899 anti-slavery statute, but the expensive raid was criticized by the city council and no one was convicted.
[12][13] Davis' successor, Daryl F. Gates, came into office just as Proposition 13 reduced the department's budget, cutting police numbers to less than 7,000 in seven years, just as drug and gang crime reached unprecedented highs.
To combat the rising tide of gang-related violence, Gates introduced Operation Hammer in 1987, which resulted in an unprecedented number of arrests, mostly of black American and Hispanic youths.
Also in 2002, voters in the City passed the Proposition Q—Citywide Public Safety Bond to expand, renovate and replace existing police and fire facilities.
At the request of Airport Police, LAPD officers are assigned on an overtime basis to security checkpoints in the terminals at LAX.
In 2006, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa initiated gradual increases in trash collection fees paid by property owners to hire about 1,000 LAPD officers over the next five years.
[14] On November 17, 2009, Charles L. Beck was sworn in by Mayor Villaraigosa to succeed William J. Bratton as the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.
