Daryl Gates - SIGNED Letter

Signed official letter from former LAPD Chief, Daryl Gates. Dated 12/20/1984. 8.5x11, Very nice condition. Mentions the Olympics and his lackluster day.

Daryl Gates (1926 – 2010) was the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) from 1978 to 1992. His length of tenure was second only to that of William H. Parker. As chief of police with the rank of general, he took a hardline, aggressive, paramilitary approach to law enforcement. Gates is co-credited with the creation of SWAT teams with LAPD's John Nelson. Gates also co-founded the D.A.R.E. program. Gates publicly questioned the effectiveness of community policing, usually electing not to work with community activists and prominent persons in communities in which the LAPD was conducting major anti-gang operations. He helped form the specialized CRASH units (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums), that were depicted in the 1988 film Colors.

During Gates’ time as Chief, the LAPD was in the middle of a War on Drugs and was known for excessive use of force by anti-gang units, aggressive neighborhood sweeps like Operation Hammer in 1987 (criticized as a harassment operation whose main goal was to intimidate young black and Hispanic men). The operation lasted several years, with multiple sweeps, and resulted in over 25,000 arrests. This was not unprecedented: during the run-up to the 1984 Olympic Games, Mayor Tom Bradley empowered Gates to take all of the city's gang members— known and suspected— into custody, where they remained until shortly after the Games' conclusion.

In the years after the Olympic games Gates, Mayor Bradley and city council officials found a way to continue the sweeping policies initially meant for the duration of the Olympic games by reviving old, anti-syndicalist laws, to jail predominantly black and Latino youth, even though the overwhelming numbers of people arrested were never charged.

Gates’ leadership was attributed with much of the blame for the Rodney King incident and the massive riots that followed. He was pushed into retirement shortly thereafter. Gates was mentioned in a large number of rap and metal songs in the aftermath of the LA riots. Some of the more notable include Ice Cube's "The Wrong Nigga to Fuck With", which dedicates a whole verse to a depiction of Gates's being decapitated and cooked like fried chicken, and Body Count's "Cop Killer," which caused widespread controversy.