I was perfectly content to let the Los Angeles mayor’s race come and go without a word from me. My only real anxiety about the whole thing was the possibility of Spencer Pratt landing in the runoff. So when Nithya Raman came from behind and passed him in the late count, I was relieved. Great. Two adult women I could actually get behind. It was never that I thought Pratt had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. I just didn’t want the embarrassment of my hometown being the city that looked at its homelessness crisis, housing shortage, and crumbling infrastructure and decided what it really needed was the unemployed villain from The Hills.
Spencer Pratt has spent the better part of two decades confusing being famous with being important, and judging by his political ambitions, nobody in his immediate circle has had the decency to explain the difference. This is a guy whose greatest contribution to American culture was making himself so obnoxious on reality television that people tuned in specifically to watch him be obnoxious.
Los Angeles has enough problems without handing the keys to City Hall to a grown man whose political résumé reads like the deleted scenes from an MTV reality show. The last thing this city needs is somebody treating a $13 billion municipal government like season seven of The Hills.
The thing I hate about this race is that I can’t vote in it. I live a few blocks too deep into the San Gabriel Valley, off Huntington, quite literally a stone’s throw from the city line. Yes, I gave money to Karen Bass in the primary, and that check had one very specific job: making sure Spencer Pratt never got anywhere near the mayor’s office.
Consider it a modest financial contribution to keeping Los Angeles from becoming the first major American city governed by a man whose primary professional skill is irritating people into remembering he exists.
Once it came down to Bass and Raman, my attitude was simple. Cool. Let the best woman win. I didn’t have to endorse anybody, and I was perfectly happy to watch the race from the sidelines.
Then the debate happened.
During Tuesday’s hourlong NBC4 and Telemundo 52 debate, Raman told viewers that “this city used to be the gold standard in terms of non-cooperation with immigration enforcement,” and argued that under Bass, the city had lost the trust of its immigrant community. She invoked the era of Daryl Gates as her historical reference point for that gold standard. Daryl Gates. Gold standard. In the same breath.
I had to mentally rewind what I had just heard because there was no way this woman had voluntarily reached into the history of Los Angeles, rummaged through all the people she could have referenced, and pulled out Daryl Motherfucking Gates.
Of all the historical figures available to make your point about protecting vulnerable communities, you landed on the police chief whose name still makes an entire generation of Angelenos want to check whether the statute of limitations has expired. Is this woman for real?
I know what she was reaching for. Gates signed Special Order 40 in 1979, which prohibited LAPD officers from initiating police contact solely to determine someone’s immigration status. Fine. Congratulations. You found one policy worth defending in a career that otherwise reads like a civil rights attorney’s retirement plan.
There are names in this city you do not put anywhere near the words “gold standard,” and Daryl Gates is sitting comfortably at the top of that list, probably holding a baton. The only thing Daryl Gates was ever the gold standard of was being a piece of shit. If police brutality had an awards ceremony, the man would have needed a separate storage unit for his lifetime achievement trophies.
As a lot of my readers know, I am an L.A. native. I spent the first half of my childhood growing up at Slauson and 7th Avenue in South Central Los Angeles. Right after the city burned to a crisp in 1992, my family packed us up and moved us to Tennessee, pulling what I can only describe as a reverse Beverly Hillbillies. Instead of leaving the hills of Tennessee for the bright lights of California, we packed up our lives in Los Angeles and headed straight for Knoxville. All we needed was Granny riding in a rocking chair on top of the moving truck.
Don’t get me wrong, I ended up liking Knoxville, but come on. I was a kid growing up in Los Angeles, California, and suddenly I was living in East Tennessee because my hometown had become a goddamn war zone.
And in my opinion, Daryl Gates and his decades-long campaign to turn the LAPD into an occupying army deserve a substantial amount of the blame for why my family felt the need to get the hell out of Dodge. That son of a bitch helped create the conditions that made Los Angeles feel like a city at war with itself, and families like mine were left to deal with the consequences of his spectacularly destructive leadership. Gates got to spend his career playing authoritarian cowboy with an entire police department, and the rest of us got to live with the wreckage.
So forgive me if I don’t hear his name as some quaint little policy footnote from a bygone era. I hear the name of a man whose leadership helped turn my hometown into a national symbol of police brutality, racial hostility, and institutional arrogance.
Some people remember the Gates era through municipal policy documents. I remember it as part of the reason my family packed up our lives and left California.
And nearly 35 years later, I’m supposed to sit through a mayoral debate and listen to somebody casually associate that miserable bastard with the words “gold standard”? You’ve got to be shitting me.
