No one knew what Rodney King had done beforehand to be stopped. No one realized that he was a parolee and that he was violating his parole. No one knew any of those things. All they saw was this grainy film and police officers hitting him over the head.
From Daryl Gates
We were the finest. We were the best in the world. We were a department that people came from all over the world to study, to look at, to see how we accomplished so much with so little; and we did.
Our people went out every single night trying to stop crime before it happened, trying to take people off the street that they believed were involved in crime. That made us a very aggressive, proactive police department.
Casual drug users should be taken out and shot.
No police department should hire more quickly than they can assimilate the people that they bring in, and we did. I take responsibility for it. It was the first opportunity I had to hire, and I wanted to do it, and I take responsibility.
It was a department where you had honesty and integrity stamped right on you when you came into the Los Angeles Police Department. If you violated that, or if you were a dishonest cop, you were terrible. We got rid of you as quickly as possible.
They have the ability to take a person's freedom from them. On certain situations, they have the ability to take a person's reputation. And under certain circumstances, they have the authority to take a person's life.
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