alternatehistory.com

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.....

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.
Top