LAPD Chief discusses recent violence involving cops, Clinton's historic night, plus the best camping in the West

Chief Charlie Beck: All of us feel deep deep sorrow in the pit of our stomach over this. You go to work to try to do the right thing, and through no fault of your own, you become the target for what you have chosen to do for a living, by the way a noble thing to do for a living.  As as some people feel that they targeted for race, gender and orientation, to be targeted straight for wearing this uniform, for the vast, 99 percent honorable reasons. It’s gut-wrenching. And people take this very personally. This could be your brother, sister. This could be your friend. This could be you.  So it’s very difficult. 

Well, we did initially. We have put more helicopters up to provide additional vantage points, not only that, but direction and a layer of safety for officers. We assigned additional metropolitan units and patrol divisions to back up calls. We didn't really know the scope of the incident, particularly in Baton Rouge. We did all of that. We are screening our calls better. Things that we typically do. But most of that has returned to a normal level now. Our officers are trained to work safe. We put two people to a car for a reason. We have sufficient units at the most dangerous parts of the city  to make sure there's always backup. Those things are important.  We’ve actually added some overtime for the summer to make sure we have adequate staffing. Those things will keep cops safe and we'll continue to do that. 

I think everybody got to make some good points. We addressed what’s missing now that is dialogue. Instead of people pontificating, only presenting their point of view and not listen to other people. We had a good opportunity on people on spectrum -- elected officials, activists, law enforcement, clergies, all to comment and put forth their point of view and hopefully everybody understood each other a little better. I think that's what's missing in the national conversation.  Nobody strive for empathy, nobody tries to understand the view of others.  Everybody just go to their polarized opposites. We’ll never get closer to a solution if people try to do that.  One of the things we have to do is all of us needs to talk about it, all of us needs to work through, particularly minority community issues and talk about them in real terms. 

One is that you cannot expect the police department to work in communities that are under-served by the economy,  housing, employment and education and have disparate impact through all those aspects of community and then think that law enforcement will stand alone and not have an disparate impact there. In communities where police make the most arrest, make the most stops, and there’s the most crime, they are also the place with highest rate of unemployment, lowest rate of high school graduation rate, worst rate of pre-school entry, worst housing market. There are layers and layers and layers of failure in delivery of services and disparate impact. And yet, somehow, policing is expected to be completely different. First you have to recognize that. More crime means more resources, that's how the police office work.  And for high level of violent crime, there needs to be 2 to 3 times more resources than areas that enjoy a safer situation. We talked about the need for discussion, which I think is very important. Then there’s leadership, right now we are seeing that folks that don’t want to lead through this. And the President echoed those sentiments. He talked about the multiple societal delivery. That is also the cause of conflict with police. The second part of the message, and this hits me the hardest, is that America has a violent problem. We are the most violent first world society on the planet. The level of homicide in places like Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and France, they are infinitesimal compared to what we deal with in the United States. You can't expect a society that rely on violence so heavily to be policed without using some level of force and conflict. We see folks with guns, knives, and bad intentions. And that's an unfortunate reality of policing in America. When we look at ourselves, we look through the mirror of policing, and we don't like what we see. Well, it's not the police you are seeing, it's ourselves. 

When you police communities that are violent, you are going to be exposed to more violence. And you are more likely to have to respond with violence. That is the unfortunate reality. In our communities where we have very little violence levels, we have very little police use of force levels. Conversely, in areas with higher level of violence we have higher use of force levels. That doesn't seem to be disparate treatment, that's just to respond to the different areas that we serve. Nobody should take this as saying we are perfect and the police use of force is optimal and we can't do better and all of that. I want us to do better and I want us to come up with other avenues to address folks with mental illness and with blunt weapons. But the reality is that until we can control violence at all levels, we'll never be able to use the level of force we would like. 

I cannot speak for all of policing, I can only speak for Los Angeles. And of course we are a big police department, second largest city in the America. We take biased policing very seriously.  We have implicit-bias training for all our employees. We strive to treat everyone equally and I think we do a good job of it. Are we perfect at it? No. But we are working on it. I think everyone recognizes that's the goal and there are consequences to not working towards that goal. I see things across the nation the same things you see.   We make every effort to make sure we treat people fairly and regardless of skin color . I think  if you see our use of force, I think that bears that out. Last year, we had 48 officer involved shootings. That's a lot, but remember, we make over a million contacts a year and arrest over 10,000 folks over a year. A vast majority of them have absolutely no use of force involved what so ever. If I recall, the African American percentage of that is 20 percent, which, if you look at our contact ratio and policing ratio and the demographic of the city, it's actually a little bit less than you might expect. 



Do you ever take into account the race and ethnicity  of officers in terms their assigned communities?

We almost exactly reflect the community we serve. Even at the management levels, we are majority of minorities at LAPD. In regard to assigning people based on their race, that in itself is discrimination against our employees. We generally assign folks to based on their preference. We try to make everybody be able to work closer to home. But I think the real test is to look at the police cars when they drive by you, look at the two officers in the police cars. It's largely female, largely Hispanics, we have many African Americans. We have a good cross-section. 

Medrano: It was not only some delegates as the picture is being painted, it was actually a lot of delegates. Not only from California, but from a lot of states. It really was to the point of sending the message that we are not okay with this. We are not going to just move past this [and] look the other way and unite because it’s what the party wants us to do. We’re definitely not happy, and we’re going to do everything we can to raise awareness of our issues and bring awareness to the change that we’re trying to bring. 

Medrano: My responsibility is not only to Bernie, but it’s also to our district and the constituents that sent us here. We represent about 44,000 [people], and because of that it’s our job to make sure that we stay and push the platform and the issues that we’re not going to budge on. So, we’re definitely going to be there today and tomorrow and raise awareness around these issues.

Calleros: He’s already endorsed Clinton. I think we knew coming into this that we’re here to say to the Democratic Party that they have not yet convinced us that we can really trust them. I think my generation -- I’m twenty-nine -- [and people younger than me] really feel that in the age of the Internet, the veil has been pulled back. We see [that] this party which we were raised to believed was the party of the people, seems to be really in bed with lobbyists, with corporations, [and] with this kind of oligarchical system. We have things like the WikiLeaks revelations that just happened last weekend that seem to confirm these suspicions that we have -- that there are people in power pulling the strings, and that we’re not really running the show here.



Myself and many people we know really put our lives on hold and worked day in and day out to elect Bernie [and the perceived bias in the WikiLeaks email leaks] feel like a slap in the face. We brought in so many new voters, we registered millions of people across the country to be in the Democratic party, and then we feel like all that work was being worked against by the party leadership. 

Calleros: I think if they could install someone into that leadership chair — somebody like Tulsi Gabbard — somebody from the Bernie side of the party… to work with the more “establishment” Democrats and just show some good faith that “we want to incorporate your half of the party, we want to incorporate your ideas,” that would be a huge leap forward. 



I think if that doesn’t happen and it’s kind of the same crowd that we seen, it’s going to be really hard to trust them.

Prestel: The highlight was the roll call vote. Hearing each state give these adorable descriptions of their virtues — hearing Delaware mention Joe Biden as though they invented Joe Biden and everyone cheers. But more importantly, hearing each state mention the diversity in their delegations or what their states have done for women — our state had the first woman this, our state had the first woman that — was very inspiring. It was really emotional. I just feel really lucky to have that chance to celebrate what we were really doing in nominating the first woman to be president of the United States.

Prestel: A lot of different types of conversations. I feel like the Bernie Sanders delegates aren’t all alike. But most of them are upset and disappointed. I understand that. and I sympathize. I think a lot of them see this as a pretty good opportunity to have their voices heard. I think that was one of the things that was so great about the roll call vote. More than the boos of the last couple days, which I don’t really think represent every Bernie Sanders delegate, hearing those numbers tally up and seeing what Bernie Sanders really did in this past year is impressive, and it’s important. I think his supporters are just a little worried that some of the things he values are going to be forgotten, and I respect that. 

Prestel: These aren’t people that are maybe Trump supporters. Most of them I think understand how dangerous it would be to elect someone who’s said what he has said about women [and] about Mexican-Americans. So I’m pretty confident that most Sanders supporters will come around, but some won’t.

Curzan: We are often communicating fast — particularly when we’re texting. It’s fast and short and we’re missing all the context that you have in a spoken conversation. You can’t hear tone of voice, you can’t see facial expression, you can’t tell if the person is laughing or leaning in or leaning back — all the signals we rely on to figure out what the message is behind the words. When we’re texting, part of what emoticons can do is try to help signal some of that: I’m happy, I’m laughing, I’m kidding, it’s not a big deal, etcetera.



When you’re speaking to someone face-to-face you can often see if your message has gone awry. You can see that someone got confused or someone looks like they’re about to get annoying — and you can correct it. But when you’re texting, you don’t get to see if something has gone awry until you get the response and learn if you’ve somehow annoyed someone and didn’t mean to.



I think we’re also seeing a slipperiness between texting and emailing. People are often doing both at work and they may also be on something like Slack, where teams are working together online, so we're constantly trying to figure out, is it OK to put a smiley face in an email, if it’s OK in a text?

Aunnie in Los Feliz: We’re constantly having two different conversations, so the fact that we have the ability to add an emoji to be concise with how we feel is perfect. It’s too easy for people to misinterpret what we’re saying. 

Curzan: I think you're seeing people be incredibly smart and savvy about their audience. They're saying, "With the people I know well or with the people I work with closely, emoticons and punctuation can help show what we mean in a concise way. But when I’m sending out stuff to the public, when I’m in a more formal context, I’m careful, more formal, which means not using emoticons."



We do this all the time — it’s the difference between using “Dear” and “Hey.”

Michael in Laguna Hills: Being autistic, I can have communication issues. So sometimes I add parentheticals to clarify my meaning. I haven’t jumped on the emoji train just yet; I definitely use stickers, but it definitely depends on who I’m talking to and how I’m talking to them — is it professional or casual, is it in Instant Messenger or in an email.