Connie tried to get our sources. Her technique was simple. She would volunteer to stay in the office and answer the phone while the three or four editors went out to lunch. I kept all my files in those pre-computer days in a metal recipe box on index cards. Fortunately I kept my best sources hidden by using false names and carefully rearranged phone numbers, so my inside sources in the LAPD and the Sheriff's Department were never uncovered by Millazzo. But it wasn't for lack of her trying, I'm sure.
The lawsuit brought against Gates and the PDID, settled out of court because the PDID didn't want to have to disclose any more of its nefarious activities, which it turns out included selling much of the collected data on local activists to a right-wing organization called Western Goals that had links to the John Birch Society, ultimately cost the City of Los Angeles $1.8 million, of which I received $2000.
So I guess I owe Chief Gates a small word of thanks. The money came at a point when my wife and I, by then living and working as freelancers in New York (and expecting a baby), were low on cash. But that check hardly compensates for his role in helping to undermine and destroy an award-winning but financially fragile investigative newspaper that was for the first time exposing the LAPD's role in killing unarmed citizens through excessive use of force and an official, but secret, department policy of shoot-to-kill.
Gates' obsession with violence and his policy of using the police in Los Angeles as an occupying army in poor minority communities ultimately led to his undoing. His defense of the officers filmed beating the unarmed and defenseless Rodney King, and his inept handling of the days of wide-spread rioting that followed the aquittal of those officers by an all-white jury, led to his being forced to resign as chief in 1992.
Chief Gates represented all that is wrong with police and law-enforcement in America. Thanks to him, my little town of Upper Dublin, a mostly upper-middle-class exuburb just north of Philadelphia where crime mostly consists of breaking and entering, or an occasional case of drunkenness or disorderly conduct, boasts a big gray SWAT panel truck, equipped with assault weapons and god knows what else that never gets used, but that gets shown off every year at an annual police and fire department show-and-tell day. And surely, his PDID, and the spying it engaged in, was a harbinger of and even pioneer for the almost universal surveillance state that we now live in, with cameras popping up everywhere, our electronic communications constantly monitored, and police acting like the gestapo, instead of the civil servants they are supposed to be.
Indeed, Gates profited handily off the trend towards increased surveillance that he helped encourage, moving from his disgraced resignation from the LAPD to a lucrative post as chief executive of Global ePoint, a maker of digital video surveillance systems.
I for one will not miss him.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martins' Press, 2006). He was a founder and editor of the Los Angeles Vanguard (1976-78), and later was Los Angeles County bureau chief for the L.A. Daily News. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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