Grudge Match

GRUDGE MATCH: Daryl Gates, Tom Bradley, And The 1993 Los Angeles Mayoral Race
(adapted from material previously posted by the author at Othertimelines.com)

April 29th, 1992...a day that would change Los Angeles forever. That afternoon, a jury in the suburb of Simi Valley convicted four LAPD officers of assault and battery and police brutality in the 1991 beating of motorist Rodney King; the LAPD itself was an unnamed fifth defendant in the trial, accused by liberal activists of cultivating-- or at least turning a blind eye to --a culture of cruelty and racism within its ranks when it came to dealing with black suspects; LAPD chief Daryl Gates in particular was viewed by the political left as a living embodiment of just about everything that was wrong with the metropolitan Los Angeles police force, and after the guilty verdicts in the King trial were handed down Gates’ critics became increasingly vocal in their demands that he replaced as head of the LAPD. One of those critics was Gates’ own mayor, Tom Bradley, whose relationship with Gates had been largely adversarial even before the King trial polarized Los Angeles. After the trial, those relations would get downright hostile, and the tensions between Bradley and his police chief would climax with Gates making a decision no one saw coming.....

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The chain of events that led to Gates’ surprise entry into the political arena began with a visit by the veteran police chief to a longtime friend’s home on May 4th, five days after the guilty verdicts in the Rodney King beating trial. The visit lasted well into the night, and the next morning Gates’ office issued a press release promising that the LAPD chief would be shortly making a “major announcement” regarding the department’s senior leadership. At first the public was slow to take notice of this statement because most of the local media’s attention was focused on truck driver Reginald Denny’s fight for life after being severely injured in a collision with another vehicle on May 2nd, but before long everybody and theirsecond cousin was clamoring to learn just what Gates’ “major announcement” was. Even Mayor Bradley himself had a certain morbid curiosity about the content of his police chief’s forthcoming statement.

On May 8th hundreds of print and broadcast media correspondents jammed into the LAPD headquarters building at Parker Center to listen to Gates outline his plans for the future. No matter how much chatter there’d been before Gates entered the room, you could have heard a pin drop when Gates read the opening remarks of his prepared statement: he announced he was retiring after one of the longest-- and most controversial --tenures of any police chief in the department’s history. Gates’ critics were ecstatic about this: in their eyes it represented a vindication of their long-running efforts to get him replaced as head of the LAPD. Gates’ defenders, on the other hand, were outraged by what they saw as the unfair removal of a good cop from the leadership of one of America’s most important urban law enforcement agencies for the sake of placating far leftist malcontents.

Both camps, however, would quickly change their tunes when they learned why Gates was leaving the force. The outgoing LAPD chief followed up the bombshell news of his retirement with a second shocker: at 9:00 AM Pacific time(12 noon Eastern) the next day he would be filing papers with the city electoral clerk’s office to run as a Republican candidate in the 1993 Los Angeles mayoral race. In short, Gates was trying to win his long-running feud with his soon-to-be-former boss Bradley by taking Bradley’s job.

Gates’ decision to campaign for the mayoralty had a domino effect on a number of other well-known Los Angelenos’ mayoral plans. Many people who might have made a run for the mayor’s office opted not to do so after Gates declared his candidacy; on the other side of the coin Bradley, who had been contemplating retirement when his existing mayoral term expired, changed his mind and launched a re-election bid within hours after Gates filed his official campaign declaration forms. One Los Angeles Times political columnist aptly remarked: “Not since the Sylmar earthquake has a single event so dramatically shaken things up in the City of Angels.” While the outcome of the ’93 mayoral election was uncertain at that point, one thing was clear beyond a shadow of a doubt-- Bradley and Gates would each fight tooth and nail to make sure that the other didn’t occupy the mayor’s office once the elections were over.
 
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Grudge Match Part 2

Gates didn’t waste much time getting his campaign headquarters up and running; with the same efficient, no-nonsense approach that had characterized his police career, the ex-LAPD chief had an office set up in Beverly Hills less than a week after he officially filed his papers to run as a mayoral candidate. Although initially the campaign HQ was a fairly modest affair, generous contributions from Gates supporters fueled a swift and steady expansion of that facility; by the Fourth of July weekend the Gates mayoral campaign headquarters took up at least two full floors of one of Beverly Hills’ larger office buildings. While few political analysts gave Gates any chance of even coming close to winning the race, many of those same experts also thought he could draw just enough votes away from Bradley to deny the incumbent mayor another term in office.

That prospect didn’t suit Bradley at all, and to avert it he directed his media consultants to prepare a series of TV attack ads emphasizing the negative aspects of Gates’ tenure as Los Angeles chief of police. Gates retaliated with his own attack ads pointing out Bradley’s flaws in judgment in dealing with the social and economic issues facing his constituents. It was the first act in a drama that would soon rival anything being filmed on the backlots of the city’s famous entertainment industry.
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Gates and Bradley spent months marshaling their respective forces for what promised to be the most bruising mayoral campaign Los Angeles had seen in a generation. Calling in every favor they could, lining up every polling expert worth his focus groups, the former LAPD chief and the incumbent mayor were determined to be loaded for bear when the campaign got started in earnest. While the antagonists were roughly equal in terms of funding, Bradley had a decided advantage in terms of VIP backing; in overwhelmingly liberal Hollywood voter sentiment leaned 6-1 in favor of the incumbent mayor. Wearing a “Gates For Mayor” button could, at the very least, earn the wearer some strange looks in the more left-leaning neighborhoods of L.A.; at least one prominent community activist opined that anyone who voted for Gates in the 1993 mayoral elections should be taken away in a straitjacket.

Supporters of Gates in the more conservative suburbs of the City of Angels expressed similar sentiments about those planning to vote for Bradley. One Orange County radio host who was well-known around SoCal for both his vocal advocacy of right-wing views and his expensive taste in cars told his listeners on the day after Mayor Bradley’s first official re-election campaign appearance that if Bradley won another term at City Hall he would pack his things immediately, put them in his Porsche 944, and drive until he hit the Arizona border. As it turned out, said 944 and its driver would remain firmly entrenched in Orange County....but that’s getting ahead of the story
 
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