Fear and Loathing in the LAPD
Award-winning author Joe Domanick’s critically acclaimed new book, Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing, chronicles how the reforms begun by Chief Bill Bratton, and continued by his successor Charlie Beck, have changed the behavior of rank-and-file cops—and raises the question of whether LA’s experience offers lessons for other law enforcement agencies in today’s troubled law enforcement landscape.
In a special podcast produced by The Crime Report, an online publication of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Domanick, The Crime Report’s West Coast Bureau Chief, discusses how the 1992 LA riots and pressure from the feds generated the momentum the LAPD needed to reexamine its practices, why it still remains an uphill battle to change the “paramilitary culture” of American policing, and why the skills of an effective police chief include “being a master of seduction” when dealing with the press.
Listen to the podcast here.