Editor’s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we are featuring Los Angeles as our theme this month. This is our second post; you can see others from this month as they are published as well as past pieces on the city here. In addition, check here for information on the conference, including accommodations.
By Aaron Stagoff-Belfort
In 1992, Daryl F. Gates published Chief: My Life in the LAPD—a retrospective, and often unapologetic, defense of his controversial tenure as head of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Gates, who led the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, was the department’s second-longest tenured chief and his influence on policing in Los Angeles was profound. Chief was one of the first major autobiographies by a celebrity police chief—stylized, image-conscious, and deliberately curated—foreshadowing the rebrands of former police commissioners qua public intellectuals like Bill Bratton, who would find himself on the cover of Time only four years later.
As LAPD Chief, Gates initially embraced novel community-police partnerships (like founding the D.A.R.E. program in 1983) but soon pivoted away from community policing, instead reshaping the department’s image toward a more militarized and impersonal style of law enforcement. Never one to shy away from the spotlight or a chance to defend the department’s record, Gates became notorious for incendiary public remarks, once testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee that casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot.” When questioned by a reporter about the LAPD’s high rate of chokehold deaths compared to other departments, he famously responded that this might be the case because Black people’s “arteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people.”[1]
Gates was a key architect in the transformation of American policing, an innovator of policing technologies whose tactics were widely adopted by departments across the country during his tenure in Los Angeles. And there is perhaps no figure more responsible for embedding militarization into the DNA of the modern municipal police department. Gates’ most enduring legacy may lie in his role as co-creator and popularizer of Special Weapons and Tactics teams—SWAT—with LAPD officer John Nelson during his tenure as inspector overseeing the Watts neighborhood. In a revealing passage in Chief, he discusses the origins of SWAT, recalling with pride the genesis of its iconic name:
One day, with a big smile on my face, I popped in to tell my deputy chief, Ed Davis, that I thought up an acronym for my special new unit.
“It’s SWAT,” I said.
“Oh, that’s pretty good. What’s it stand for?”
“Special Weapons Attack Teams.”
Davis blinked. “No.”
There was no way, he said dismissively, he would ever use the word “attack.” I went out, crestfallen, but a moment later I was back. “Special Weapons and Tactics,” I said. “Okay?”
“No problem. That’s fine,” Davis said. And that was how SWAT was born.[2}
The birth of SWAT is a story of the LAPD’s response to the growing set of racialized social upheavals that marked Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. The Watts Uprising and the Delano Grape Strike, which both erupted in 1965, were foundational in shaping Gates’ worldview and to the department’s evolving posture toward protest and civil unrest. As scholar Donna Murch argues, the LAPD’s development of the first SWAT team helped catalyze a “martial turn” in policing nearly a decade before the dramatic rise in prison populations and the onset of mass incarceration. For Murch, SWAT exemplifies how militarization operates not merely as a set of weapons, technologies or strategies, but as a governing ethos that required various “crisis-driven” rationales to justify itself. The ethos of militarization views urban space and highly segregated Black neighborhoods as battlegrounds, treating moments of social crisis (real or manufactured) like crack, the Black Panthers, and labor militancy, as justification for occupation and escalation.[3]
At the time of the Watts uprising, Gates was a 39-year-old inspector rapidly ascending the LAPD’s ranks, and he was tasked with overseeing the department’s intervention. The experience was formative. The protests were sparked when California Highway Patrol officers pulled over a Black motorist and arrested his family in front of a crowd, an incident that lit a powder keg of resentment under Police Chief William Parker’s LAPD. The National Guard were deployed, and public officials framed the events not merely as civil unrest, but as a new form of urban governance crisis. Parker compared the rebellion to Viet Cong insurgency, insisting a “paramilitary” response was necessary, while Governor Pat Brown described the events as “guerrillas fighting with gangsters.”[4] For Gates, Watts crystallized the stakes of what he saw as America’s spiraling “urban crisis”: the specter of disorder, Black insurgency, and the perceived loss of police control over racialized cityscapes. He later recalled in Chief:
We had no idea how to deal with this…We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails…it was random chaos, in small disparate patches. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare. Rather than a single mob, we had people attacking from all directions… The streets of America’s cities had become foreign territory.[5]
The Delano Grape Strike began just weeks later. In the San Joaquin Valley, largely Mexican and Filipino farm workers launched a years-long campaign against exploitative labor conditions. With the arrival of César Chávez and the formation of the United Farm Workers, the movement rapidly expanded in size and national visibility. Back in Los Angeles, LAPD personnel watched with interest as television reports highlighted the Delano Police Department’s crowd control tactics and surveillance strategies. Intrigued, they reached out to Delano officials to observe the program firsthand.[6]
After Watts, Delano, and a series of high profile shootouts that drew negative media attention, Gates began searching for tactical models that could minimize police fatalities while more effectively managing what he perceived as increasingly ungovernable urban terrain and forms of unrest and resistance that exceeded traditional policing capabilities. He turned to the U.S. military, “reading everything we could get our hands on concerning guerrilla warfare,” and became familiar with counterinsurgency (COIN) strategies being developed in the early years of the Vietnam War.[7] He consulted with Marines at the Naval Armory in Chavez Ravine.[8] It was out of a belief in counterinsurgency’s ability to discipline the metropole—where domestic unrest could be neutralized like insurgencies abroad—that SWAT was born.
When LAPD brass, including then-Chief William Parker, rejected the idea of developing a special tactical unit to respond to social disturbances like Watts, Gates continued the project off the books. A cadre of SWAT true believers in the LAPD worked on the unsanctioned experiment by quietly recruiting the department’s best sharpshooters and conducting secret training exercises on farmland in the San Fernando Valley and alongside Marine units at Camp Pendleton. Nelson himself was a former Marine and Vietnam veteran, and sought out returning veterans with combat experience overseas. On December 8, 1969, SWAT opened for business. Its first major operation targeted the headquarters of the Black Panther Party in South Central Los Angeles, where SWAT officers attempted to serve arrest warrants while armed with grenade launchers, dynamite, and tear gas. The resulting shootout—during which more than 5,000 rounds were fired—left four Panthers and four officers wounded. At one point, Gates even contacted the Department of Defense to request authorization to deploy a grenade launcher.[9] All six Panthers arrested were ultimately acquitted of the most serious charges brought against them. Reflecting on the incident, even Gates acknowledged, “we were roundly criticized for our brutal activity.”[10]
However, the law-and-order climate of the 1970s proved to be fertile ground for the expansion of SWAT. As historian Stuart Schrader details in Badges Without Borders, the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, signed into law by President Johnson, created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which under Nixon appointee Donald Santarelli became a key vehicle for promoting tactical and counterinsurgency-style policing.[11] Through the LEAA, federal funds and surplus military equipment were funneled to local police departments, facilitating the expansion of SWAT programs nationwide.[12] Public enthusiasm grew after the high-profile 1974 standoff between the LAPD’s SWAT team and the Symbionese Liberation Army during the Patty Hearst kidnapping case. As Gates wrote in Chief, the operation generated a wave of positive media attention and marked a turning point in public acceptance of SWAT, effectively sealing its place in the American policing landscape:
One thing was certain. That night, SWAT became a household word throughout the world. Soon, other law enforcement agencies began mounting their own SWAT teams. The whole nation had watched the shootout—live, on network TV. Clearly, SWAT had arrived.[13]
When Gates became Police Chief in 1978, he expanded and institutionalized the SWAT program within the department. Ever the policy entrepreneur, he helped popularize it beyond Los Angeles, selling the general public on SWAT through interviews, public speaking engagements, and a popular radio call-in program.[14] SWAT tactics and LAPD gang suppression strategies became national best practices that, through LEAA grants, spread to other cities via federally funded technical assistance programs and training sessions. The program even became a pop culture icon. S.W.A.T., a police procedural that premiered on ABC in 1975, offered an early example of a phenomenon critics now refer to as “copaganda”: a dramatized depiction of an heroic elite SWAT team operating in a fictional California city resembling Los Angeles. The show’s theme song reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1976. Richard Kelbaugh, a former LAPD SWAT officer, served as the show’s technical consultant. With its iconic navy blue uniforms and bold, all-caps “SWAT” lettering emblazoned across the chest, the series helped cement the team’s image in the cultural zeitgeist.[15} Gates later consulted on a series of video games titled Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT, where he appeared as an on-screen character.[16] Los Angeles was an ideal city for SWAT to be founded, with Hollywood providing the cultural fodder that fueled a new kind of mythology around the unit, myth-making that would soon spawn countless spinoffs and imitators.
Following the 1984 Olympics which were hosted in Los Angeles, the LAPD’s Olympics liaison who would later lead the department’s drug and gang policing unit used their Olympics security budget to acquire military-grade equipment, including machine guns, infrared-enhanced viewing devices, and V-100 armored vehicles. As historian Max Felker-Kantor recounts in Policing Los Angeles, some of this equipment was later transferred to LAPD SWAT teams. Felker-Kantor documents one instance where a V-100 tank (the type which were previously used in the Vietnam War) labeled “LAPD Rescue Vehicle” was: “equipped with a 14-foot battering ram to smash down a wall of a suspected ‘rock house’ in Pacoima. The officers found two women and three children eating ice cream, a small amount of marijuana, no guns, and no cocaine. Chief Gates, along with some residents and Councilman David Cunningham, praised the tactics, believing that such a show of force would cause ‘rock houses’ to shut down.”[17]
In 1987, anti-gang sweeps the department had pioneered during the Olympics turned into a heavily militarized counterinsurgency program called Operation Hammer. The LAPD indiscriminately arrested thousands of Black youth in just one weekend, often for petty offenses like curfew violations or delinquent traffic tickets, using long dormant anti-syndicalist and anti-trade union laws.[18] As Mike Davis observed at the time, Operation Hammer resembled a “Vietnam-era search-and-destroy mission,” while the Chief of the District Attorney’s Hardcore Drug Unit remarked in earnest, “this is Vietnam here.”[19] None of this did much to reverse urban crisis or improve public safety in Los Angeles: violent crime increased by more than double the national average in the 80s while civilian complaints of police brutality increased by 33 percent between 1984 and 1989.[20] Davis argues in City of Quartz that Los Angeles during this period should not be understood through the media spectacles of the day—from the Watts uprising to the Manson murders—events for which Gates was often a ready mouthpiece offering hard-nosed, “tell-it-like-it-is” soundbites to a fearful white public. Rather, Los Angeles was a city undergoing profound restructuring: a rapidly diversifying metropolis that became a global center for real estate speculation, foreign banking, and finance, even as economic inequality deepened in deindustrializing Black and Latino neighborhoods. Militarized and impersonal policing strategies were designed to manage the widening social fractures and defend emerging nodes of global capital from the crises unfolding in the city’s working-class and minority neighborhoods.[21]
The simmering anger over Gates’ LAPD culminated in the Rodney King beating and the 1992 uprising, events that ultimately forced the Chief to resign in disgrace. [22] Gates had built his career on Watts, and his failure to prevent the 1992 rebellion would mark his undoing.
SWAT is itself an important case for understanding the spatial transformations in the policing of U.S. cities from the era of “urban crisis” to the present day. It is also a story about cities like Los Angeles, where media spectacle and police power frequently intersect, and where figures like Daryl Gates not only reshaped policing strategies but also helped define the national ethos—often by invoking visceral tropes of Black criminality, looting, and disorder. In doing so, Gates helped cultivate a form of penal populism that gave narrative form to the public’s inchoate fears about the social transformations of the era.[23] As such, Los Angeles should be recognized as both a critical site in the innovation and export of militarized policing and surveillance technologies, and also for defining the national mood on crime and race during the 1960s and 1970s.
The rise of SWAT reveals several key dynamics in the history of policing and punishment. As the sociologist Julian Go argues in Policing Empires, policing officials often dream up and imported colonial logics from imperial battlefields to racially segregated urban space. What Go terms the “imperial boomerang” refers to the way strategies once used to manage subjects in the colonial hinterlands of Ireland, India, and the Caribbean reappear in domestic contexts in Britain and the United States, fundamentally shaping the structure and function of the modern police institutions of empire. Tracing the genealogy of police militarization as Go does requires us to move beyond a view of SWAT as appearing in a vacuum or as a mere counterreaction to the urban crises of the 1960s. It reveals imperial governance as a central feature of American policing, where colonial administrators and military veterans, like John Nelson, take lessons they learn in the metropole and bring them to American cities, substituting the colonial subject for Black and working-class urban residents.[24]
SWAT also demonstrates how the professionalization and militarization of American police departments in the 20th century should be understood as symbiotic processes. What Felker-Kantor has called “liberal law and order” in this publication is exemplified by the LAPD under Chiefs William Parker and Daryl Gates, and during the tenure of Los Angeles’s first Black mayor, Tom Bradley—a supporter of police reform.[25] These figures rooted out corruption and graft by weakening the patronage system’s hold on the department through charter revisions, expanded officer training, and investment in community relations programs. Collectively, they helped transform the LAPD into a quintessential “modern” police department. Yet these reforms occurred alongside a deepening investment in militarized tactics like SWAT, and in fact it was the the LAPD’s newfound competence and institutional legitimacy that was often leveraged to sell the city on increasing the department’s authority. The very features that made the LAPD appear more professional—technical expertise, bureaucratic efficiency, and public relations savvy—also expanded its reach and capacity for violence.
Aaron Stagoff-Belfort is a sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. He is a Research Assistant for the UChicago Justice Project and an Urban Doctoral Fellow at the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. His research interests lie at the intersection of policing and the criminal legal system, urban sociology, and race-class inequality. Prior to coming to the University of Chicago, he worked as a Program Associate in the Redefining Public Safety Program at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City.
Featured image (at top): 150 N. Los Angeles Street, LAPD Headquarters, Jeff Costlow, 2004, courtesy of Wikimedia.
[1] Ronald J. Ostrow, “Casual Drug Users Should Be Shot, Gates Says,” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1990, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-09-06-mn-983-story.html; Elaine Woo and Eric Malnic, “Daryl F. Gates Dies at 83; Innovative but Controversial Chief of the LAPD,” Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-daryl-gates17-2010apr17-story.html.
[2] Daryl Gates with Diane K. Shah, Chief: My Life in the LAPD (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 131.
[3] Donna Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs,” Urban History (2015), https://diversity.williams.edu/davis-center/files/2015/05/Crack-in-Los-Angeles-Crisis-Militarization-and-Black-Response-to-the-Late-Twentieth-Century-War-on-Drugs.pdf.
[4] Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 68–72.
[5] Gates, Chief, 104.
[6] Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 59.
[7] Gates, Chief, 125.
[8] Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop, 60.
[9] Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop, 78.
[10] Woo and Malnic, “Daryl F. Gates Dies at 83.”
[11] Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).
[12] Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop, 73.
[13] Gates, Chief, 159.
[14] Schrader, Badges Without Borders, 216.
[15] Troy Brownfield, “You Don’t Know S.W.A.T.,” The Saturday Evening Post, February 18, 2025, https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2025/02/you-dont-know-s-w-a-t/.
[16] “Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT,” https://www.mobygames.com/game/150/daryl-f-gates-police-quest-swat/credits/windows/.
[17] Max Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 200.
[18] NOlympics LA, “Examining the LA 1984 Olympic Legacy: Capitalism, Police Violence, & Privatization,” June 29, 2020, https://nolympicsla.com/2020/06/29/examining-the-la-1984-olympic-legacy-capitalism-police-violence-and-privatization/.
[19] Mike Davis, “Los Angeles: Civil Liberties between the Hammer and the Rock,” New Left Review I/170 (July/August 1988), https://newleftreview.org/issues/i170/articles/mike-davis-los-angeles-civil-liberties-between-the-hammer-and-the-rock.
[20] Dave Zirin, “Want to Understand the 1992 LA Riots? Start With the 1984 Olympics, The Nation, April 30, 2012, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/want-understand-1992-la-riots-start-1984-la-olympics/.
[21] Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990).
[22] Joe Domanick, “Daryl Gates’ Downfall,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 2010, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-apr-18-la-oe-domanick18-2010apr18-story.html.
[23] John Pratt, Penal Populism (London: Routledge, 2007).
[24] Julian Go, Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
[25] Max Felker-Kantor, “The Metropole Bookshelf: Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD,” The Metropole , Urban History Association, October 11, 2018, https://themetropole.blog/2018/10/11/the-metropole-bookshelf-policing-los-angeles-race-resistance-and-the-rise-of-the-lapd-by-max-felker-kantor/.
