City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

In April 1988, “Operation Hammer” was what the LAPD called the arrest of “more Black youth than at any time since the Watts Rebellion” for drug-related gang violence (268). The LAPD likened the youths, who were all from impoverished inner-city backgrounds, to “the Viet Cong abroad in our society” (268) and thereby terrorist-like enemies of the state and the American people at large. Davis argues that “the contemporary Gang scare has become an imaginary class relationship, a terrain of pseudo-knowledge and fantasy projection” (270). While the violence remained in the ghetto, it attracted little media attention; however, when a Southside hitman accidentally killed a young woman in affluent Westwood in 1987, the gang members’ violence attracted widespread outrage.

In 1978, Daryl Gates was appointed as chief of the LAPD. Gates was racist against the black community and advocated increased police brutality toward them. Illegal police conduct included shooting black people who policemen thought merely looked suspicious and terrorizing communities within the ghettos. Black leaders, who were torn between the desire for safe streets and respect for their communities, “began to weigh police misconduct as a ‘lesser evil’ compared to drug-dealing gangs” (272). Chief Gates eventually came up with a policy of barricading gang-troubled neighborhoods as “narcotic enforcement areas” (277), so that those who entered and exited them had to pass through police checkpoints.