Daryl Gates Remembered: Closed-Casket Viewing

Los Angeles - Friends, former colleagues and residents paid silent tribute Monday to former Los Angeles police Chief Daryl Gates during a solemn visitation at the downtown Police Administration Building.

"He was a good chief of police," said Wilmington resident Joann Wysocki, who spent an hour on the Blue Line to attend the visitation at the police headquarters auditorium.

Wysocki, a retired Los Angeles Unified School District librarian, said she met Gates on several occasions and used to attend Police Commission meetings and speak on various topics.

"He tried to enforce the law and I believe he enforced it fairly," she said.

Gates, who was chief from 1978 to 1992, died April 16 at his Dana Point home at age 83 from complications of cancer.

Gates' oak casket was placed at the front of the Police Administration Building auditorium, with three officers in dress blues standing guard. Gates' hat, badge and gloves were on a pedestal near the casket, along with a red rose. Flower arrangements sent by members of the public were placed around the auditorium.

One floral arrangement formed the word DARE, in honor of the anti-drug education program founded by Gates.

Two pictures of Gates -- including a black-and-white photo from 1956 -- were on display. On the auditorium screen, a slide presentation showed highlights from Gates' career with the LAPD.

While Gates was popular among rank-and-file officers for most of his 14-year tenure as chief, some people saw him as a symbol of repression in parts of the city that erupted into rioting in 1992 when four white police officers were acquitted in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King.

Gates, personable and outspoken, was credited with taking the reins of a corrupt department and professionalizing it. He started the first police SWAT team and the widely adopted anti-drug program DARE.

And though he worked under one of the nation's first big-city black mayors -- Tom Bradley was also a colleague in the police department as both men moved up the ranks -- Gates became a lightning rod for racial politics in his latter years as chief.

He was infamous for over-the-top remarks, once saying that casual drug users should be shot. He also was pilloried for suggesting that black people were somehow physiologically more prone to dying in police chokeholds.

"Daryl Gates failed to react to a changing Los Angeles and a changing culture in policing," Ramona Ripston, the head of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in the wake of his death. "At a time of great unrest in our city, he was a lightning rod for criticism and controversy, and deservedly so, in part because of his penchant for making disturbing, overly broad statements."

A private funeral will be held Tuesday at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, with a procession from the auditorium to the cathedral beginning about 8:30 a.m.

Following the funeral, an honors ceremony will be held in the cathedral plaza that will be open to the public.

Gates' career intersected some of the most headline-grabbing events in city history, including the Marilyn Monroe death investigation in 1962, the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 and the riots of 1965 and 1992.

Under pressure from the mayor and City Council, Gates resigned June 28, 1992.

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck called Gates "one in a million."

"He inspired others to succeed and, in doing so, changed the landscape of law enforcement around the world," Beck said.

Gates was born Aug. 30, 1926. He grew up in Glendale and Highland Park in Los Angeles. After graduating from high school, he joined the U.S. Navy for a two-year tour and later earned degrees from USC.

He joined the police department on Sept. 16, 1949 and eventually became a driver for then-Chief William Parker -- a relationship that helped him move up through the ranks and eventually land the department's top job in 1978.

Gates had been battling prostate cancer that spread to his bladder, and he spent much of the last few months in and out of a hospital.

"It was a courageous fight on his part and it was a courageous fight by all the family members that stood by him," said his brother, Steven Gates. "Also for those that knew him, knew him to be a very decent and kind man, a caring man."