The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (5 page)

Careful not to make tracks in the blood, Riske tiptoed through the bushes to the left of the pathway, past Nicole’s body, and up to the landing. From the landing, he shined his flashlight on a walkway that stretched the entire northern length of the property. Along this 120-foot-long corridor, Riske saw a single set of bloody shoe prints. It appeared that the killer had gone out the back way, to the alley that Nicole shared with Pablo Fenjves and other neighbors. On closer inspection, Riske noticed something else: fresh drops of blood to the left of those shoe prints. While leaving the scene, the killer might well have been bleeding from the left hand.

The front door to 875 South Bundy was open. Riske walked in to a scene of domestic calm. Nothing was out of place: no signs of ransacking or theft. Candles flickered in the living room. The officer walked up the stairs. There were lighted candles in the master bedroom and master bath, too, and the tub there was full of water. There were two other bedrooms, with a young girl asleep in one and a younger boy in the other.

Robert Riske knew his place in the chain of command. Once he had identified the dead and closed off access to the scene, his only responsibility was to summon the investigators, who would begin looking for clues. This was a major crime in an unlikely locale. (Eventually, there would be 1,811 murder victims in Los Angeles County in 1994, but these two were only the ninth and tenth of the year in the West Los Angeles division of the LAPD and the first two of the year in Brentwood.) As Riske prepared to summon assistance on his “rover,” a portable walkie-talkie, he noticed a letter on the front hall table. The return address indicated that it was from O.J. Simpson. The former football star was also depicted in a poster on the north wall of the home. On closer inspection, Riske found photographs of Simpson among the family pictures scattered on tables.

These discoveries prompted a change in Riske’s plans. He decided to call for help on the telephone because, as he testified later, “I didn’t want to broadcast over my rover that there was a possible double homicide involving a celebrity.” Reporters monitored the police bands, and if he had used his rover, he said, “the media would beat my backup there.”

Robert Riske was only a four-year veteran of the LAPD when he made his grisly discoveries. His name had never even appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
, but as his actions demonstrated, he had already developed an interest in, and some sophistication about, the ways of the press. In this he was typical. More than any other police force in the nation, the LAPD was locked in a strange and complex symbiosis, of several decades’ duration, with the media.

The modern Los Angeles Police Department was largely the creation of one man, William H. Parker. Born in 1902 and raised in the hard fields of South Dakota, Parker came to resemble in character the austere setting of his youth. He moved west to Los Angeles in 1923 and drove a cab to support himself while he studied at one of the many fledgling law schools that were springing up around the city. He joined the LAPD in 1927, worked a night shift on patrol, and became a member of the bar in 1930. Some years later, he made the acquaintance of another young LAPD officer, Gene Roddenberry, who eventually turned to writing science fiction and created
Star Trek
. The character of Spock is said to be based on Bill Parker.

Parker joined the force at a propitious time for an ambitious and incorruptible young officer. For years the LAPD, along with the rest of Los Angeles city government, had floated on a sea of graft and payoffs. The situation became so intolerable in the 1930s that the city’s business leaders decided changes had to be made. They hired from out of town a series of reform-minded police chiefs, who brought with them the gospel of “professionalization” of the force. The new leadership improved training, cracked down on corruption, and worked to insulate the police from what was then seen as the sinister influence of elected officials. This last goal became the special mission of Bill Parker. Working in tandem with
the police union, Parker drafted changes in Section 202 of the city charter, which put a cast-iron shield of civil-service law around all police officers. After voters approved these measures in 1937, it became virtually impossible to fire cops; they could only be dismissed by a panel of their invariably sympathetic brethren. The law even decreed that the police chief would be selected according to civil-service guidelines, which meant that the LAPD would determine for itself who would serve as its leader. Once selected, the chief would also enjoy the protection of the civil-service law, which amounted to lifetime tenure in the top spot of the LAPD. As Joe Domanick, a historian of the LAPD, has written of the changes in Section 202, “A quasi-military organization had declared itself independent of the rest of city government and placed itself outside the control of the police commission, City Hall, or any other elected public officials, outside the democratic system of checks and balances.”

Parker became chief in 1950, when Los Angeles was in the midst of a period of spectacular postwar growth. At that point the city was no longer, in H. L. Mencken’s phrase, “a double Dubuque”—an insular, nearly all-white outpost of the Midwest on the Pacific Ocean. But if Los Angeles was changing, the LAPD was not. Parker’s model for his force was the Marine Corps, and so the police became tantamount to an army of occupation for those in the city who did not share Parker’s ethnic heritage. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, though, the LAPD under Bill Parker became known as a model of efficiency and skill. This did not happen by accident. Shortly after Parker took charge, he became acquainted with a young radio producer named Jack Webb. In 1949, Webb had started a radio series,
Dragnet
, based on the exploits of the LAPD. At first Parker was suspicious of the show, worried that it might place his beloved department in an unflattering light. Aware of his discomfort, Webb proposed a deal: In return for the LAPD’s cooperation, he would give the department the right to approve every script. Parker’s suspicions eased. When
Dragnet
moved to television, Parker understood just how advantageous an arrangement he had struck. Sergeant Joe Friday became the paradigm of what Parker wanted in an LAPD officer: an incorruptible white man who, with scientific detachment, descended on neighborhoods
where he had no personal or emotional ties to clean up the messes made by the vaguely distasteful residents of the city. Soon Parker was only too happy to have
Dragnet
conclude each week with the announcement “You have just seen
Dragnet
, a series of authentic cases from official files.… Technical advice for
Dragnet
comes from the offices of Chief of Police W. H. Parker, Los Angeles Police Department.” Jack Webb, who later wrote an admiring biography of Parker, had created one of the longest-lived genres in television programming, the L.A. police drama, which has included, at various times,
The Mod Squad
,
Adam 12
,
Felony Squad
,
Blue Thunder
,
S.W.A.T.
,
Strike Force
,
Chopper One
,
The Rookies
,
Hunter
, and
T. J. Hooker
. As Joe Domanick wrote, “For twenty-five consecutive seasons at least one LAPD police show was being aired on network television.” They portrayed the LAPD in a manner that made Bill Parker proud.

Parker and his wife never had children, and the chief remained aloof from most of his colleagues on the force. He did, however, take a special shine to the young officer who was assigned to be his personal chauffeur—Daryl Gates. Together the two men refined a theory of “proactive policing,” which featured relentless confrontations between heavily armed officers and the hostile populations they patrolled. Parker and Gates came of age in an era when white cops didn’t have to rein in their feelings about African-Americans. When Watts exploded in 1965—a rebellion set off by a confrontation between a black motorist and a uniformed officer of the California Highway Patrol—Parker compared the black rioters to “monkeys in a zoo.” A year later, a black man named Leonard Deadwyler was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital when he was stopped by police for speeding. In the ensuing confrontation, the unarmed Deadwyler was shot dead. “Police are not supposed to stand by and watch a car speeding down the street at eighty miles per hour,” Parker explained. “[The officer] did something he thought would successfully conclude a police action. All he is guilty of is trying to do his job.”

True to the intent of the civil-service law, Parker served until he died, and Gates took over as chief in 1978. The selection process that led to Gates’s appointment seemed designed as a direct affront to the city’s black community: To head the internal review of
candidates for the job, the LAPD brought in Curtis LeMay, the far-right-wing former air force general who had served as George Wallace’s running mate in 1968 and earlier had promised to bomb North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.”

After Gates took over, the list of black victims of the LAPD grew ever longer. In 1979 Eulia Love, a thirty-nine-year-old black widow who was late in paying her gas bill, hit a meter reader on the arm with a garden shovel. The utility man summoned police officers, who, rather than defuse the situation, shot Love dead at pointblank range. In 1982, after a number of African-American men died from police choke holds, Gates observed that the deaths might have been caused by the distinctive physiology of the black victims: “We may be finding that in some blacks when [the choke hold] is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.” It mattered little that Los Angeles had had a black mayor, Tom Bradley, since 1973. The LAPD answered to no one.

A raid on a suspected narcotics operation in August 1988 may have been the paradigmatic LAPD operation. About eighty police officers (and one helicopter) swooped in on four apartments in two small buildings at Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue, on the periphery of the South Central district. The officers, armed with shotguns and sledgehammers, barreled through the rooms. They tore plumbing out of the walls, ripped a stairway from its moorings, pulled carpet from the floor, destroyed furniture and appliances, and kicked and punched the stunned residents. For all the terror it unleashed, the raid netted only two minor drug arrests. Nevertheless, the officers on the scene did find reasons to take thirty-two residents of the complex back to the local precinct, where the captives were forced to whistle the theme song from the 1960s situation comedy
The Andy Griffith Show
. Before they left the Dalton homes, some officers had spray-painted the words
LAPD RULES
on the walls.

Less than three years later, a passerby videotaped LAPD officers beating unarmed motorist Rodney King. On April 30, 1992, the four officers who administered the beating were acquitted in a trial that had been moved from downtown Los Angeles to the rustic (and largely white) Simi Valley. As it had in 1965, the city once
again erupted in a riot of protest, rage, and frustration. A blue-ribbon commission, headed by future secretary of state Warren Christopher, after studying the King beating and its aftermath, delivered a deadpan verdict that was many years in coming. “The problem of excessive force is aggravated by racism and bias within the LAPD,” the Christopher commission concluded. “These attitudes of prejudice and intolerance are translated into unacceptable behavior in the field.”

At 12:30
A.M.
on June 13, Officer Robert Riske telephoned news of the two homicides to his supervisor, David Rossi, the sergeant in charge of the West Los Angeles station at the time. Rossi promptly made a half dozen phone calls around the LAPD chain of command, setting in motion the police response to the crimes. In an ordinary case, even a homicide, Rossi would probably have made only two calls—to the detective on duty, who would investigate the scene, and to his own commander. But Rossi’s supervisor immediately told him to reach higher in the command structure because of, as Rossi later put it, “the possible notoriety of this particular incident.”