Part One: Daryl Gates: The Man Who Invented SWAT Teams and DARE

Coolzo Media.

Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast formed or filmed, recorded, all of those things in the burning hellscape that is Portland, Oregon, the most vicious and collapsed war zone on planet Earth.

Here from the rubble, Robert Evans, to talk to you about a really bad piece of shit with someone who isn't really bad.

My wonderful guest today, Bridget Todd.

Bridget, welcome to the program.

Thank you.

I am also calling in from a bombed-out Hellscape city that is Washington, D.C.

Yeah, Hellscape to Hellscape.

It was so funny when we both got on.

J-Dams detonated simultaneously right above both of our houses on opposite coasts.

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Bridget, what's your least favorite U.S.

aerial munition?

Ooh, do most most people have a least favorite?

Most people who've been targeted by them do.

I'll say that much.

What's your least favorite?

I will say the scariest thing I've ever seen to hit anywhere is a J-Dam.

Although, like, hellfires are pretty fucking scary too.

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empty

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None of them are really that fun when you're anywhere close to seeing them.

It's more just like, oh, fuck.

Fireworks really ain't got the juice.

Yeah.

No part of you is like, oh, that looks cool.

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Bridget, what do you do on the internet?

A place where there are no girls, according to one of your podcasts.

That is true.

There are no girls on the internet yet.

Here we are showing up there every day, making...

That's right.

flapping our gums and making opinions and all of that.

That's right.

And yeah, you got anything else you want to plug right up at the top here before we get into it?

Oh, yeah.

You can listen to me on there, No Girls on the Internet.

I am occasionally on It Could Happen Here.

Yeah.

Hate fascism.

Hate everything that's going on.

Excited to be super bummed out by whatever you're about to tell me, I'm sure.

Fascism.

What is that?

Is that good or is that bad?

It sounds like bad, I'm guessing.

Who can say anymore?

Who's to say?

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

That's right.

That's right.

You know who wasn't in the middle of the fascism good or bad debate?

Who?

I mean, a lot of people.

Bridget, have you ever heard of a guy named Daryl Gates?

I have not.

That's interesting.

Daryl Gates

was.

the police chief in Los Angeles for a period of time, right?

Mostly through like the 80s, the late 70s and the 80s up until 1992.

And if you kind of know what happened in 1992, you might be able to guess what made him have to stop being the chief of police in Los Angeles, right?

And the reason why I want to talk about Darrell Gates is that if you live in a U.S.

city and have been to a protest recently, or if you've just like watched the news and spent portions of the last decade or so in muted horror as you see, you know, police officers and federal agents dressed like soldiers, tear people from their loved ones or beat kids in the street, then you have a bone to pick with Daryl Gates because he is maybe the single most important figure in the militarization of U.S.

law enforcement, right?

That's kind of what Daryl is known for.

Among other things, he co-created and named the first SWAT team.

He invented the DARE program, and he played a major role in the birth of Hollywood propaganda and the militarization of normal city police departments, right?

This is Daryl Gates, right?

That's the fellow we are talking about this week.

Wow, I will never forgive him for making me spend what could have been a free period for most of my K through 12 education.

I don't know, watching a police officer sing a song about why you shouldn't do drugs and play acoustic guitar.

Right.

Tell you lies about the crack houses he'd busted up and no one like, no, no one who was busting up drug rings or whatever got made a dare cop.

I have a very clear memory of the dare cop in our school saying, oh, if you ever go into your parents' drawers and you see some of this green stuff, be sure to come tell your buddies here at the dare program.

Tell the fucking cops on your parents.

Rat out your mom and dad, kids.

What the fuck?

Yeah, we'll be talking all about that.

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Daryl was a famous cop in his own life.

So famous that after his career ended, he got to write an autobiography.

He's kind of like the first celebrity influencer, police chief, which is like a thing that we have to deal with now on the right.

I really hate that.

Yeah, you can tell a lot.

His autobiography was biography was just called Chief, and you could tell a lot about his life by just skimming the first few chapters of the table of contents.

Chapter one is Street Fighter.

Chapter two is Rookie.

Chapter three is Parker, which was the name of the guy he

worked for when he was chief the first time.

And chapter four is Gamblers, Drunks, Prostitutes, and Scumbags.

So, really, just exactly what you'd expect from an LAPD cop's autobiography, you know?

Those are some of my favorite kinds of people.

He does.

Those are some of them, yeah.

My core social groups.

Yeah, everyone I hang out with: gamblers, drunks, prostitutes, and scumbags.

Yeah.

Which one are you?

I'm at least three of the four.

Oh, I think I can make a claim for at least all of them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

most or all, depending on the day of the week.

So, Daryl Francis Gates was born on August 30th, 1926, in Glendale, California.

His father was a plumber and Catholic.

His mother was initially a homemaker and came from a Mormon background.

And as a little kid, he remembers that his family was comfortable and had a large house in a decent part of Glendale.

And as an interesting aside, Darryl Daryl D-A-R-Y-L is how his name would come to be spelled, but he was born D-A-R-R-E-L.

And I have found no reason why.

I don't know why he changed it to add a Y.

I don't, I don't, something, something must have happened.

There's a story there.

It's not in his autobiography.

Dude, is that like when girls will add, they'll change the spelling of their name to look unique?

Like, oh, I added a Y.

Right.

There has to have been a reason.

Like, why would you take the E out and add a Y?

I mean, I have seen more D-A-R-Y-L Daryls than D-A-R-R-E-L Daryls, but I just don't understand it.

Yeah, that's really, I would love to know what the story is there.

Yeah, that would be fun.

So Daryl and his four-year-older brother Lowell had separate rooms, you know, which means, again, you're doing pretty good in the 20s and 30s if each kid has their own room.

And up until Daryl was four or so, his family was doing all right.

But as he notes in his autobiography, in 1930, my world changed.

And without explanation, his parents moved the family to the other side of Glendale.

So far out, they were almost in Burbank, which residents of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area will recognize as the very pit of hell itself.

You know, if you've ever had to be out on that side of Glendale, you know, I wouldn't wish it on the devil.

And this is, you know,

today when we're talking about Glendale, nobody's like, oh, that's the rough part of Los Angeles, but this is legitimately like a more impoverished area, especially as like we're coming into the early years of the Great Depression.

And it's also semi-rural, right?

Gates describes the move as like, you know, the family going past cornfields and grape orchards into this tired ramshackle house that was very small.

He and his brother have to share a room and a single bed.

And quote, even more disconcerting, my mother wasn't at home anymore.

That was the most shocking thing in my memory, my mother going to work.

And this is like the first great trauma of Daryl's life is that his mom has to get a job to keep the family afloat, which he doesn't describe as like a bad thing on his mom's behalf.

It's just like it changes his entire conception of the world because because his dad goes from, you know, this powerful figure holding up the family to someone who is on unemployment and unable to actually earn anything.

And he responds to it, Daryl's dad, by becoming a self-destructive alcoholic and abandoning his family for days at a time.

Not a unique story during the Great Depression, but obviously something that's going to fuck this kid up, you know?

And when Daryl's dad does show back up, he's no longer present or functional.

He stumbles around in what his son describes as a boozy haze.

And Daryl would later write, with my mother gone and my brother at school, I was in effect home alone.

So he's kind of raising himself in the earliest years that he has memories.

You know, that's a big deal for this kid.

So we're starting to see some of the trauma that this is making him the person he's going to be.

It's not surprising that this leaves a mark on a kid.

I don't think.

Sure.

I was also a latchkey kid with two overworked parents.

I didn't go on to remake remake to like militarize our police department.

Yeah, exactly.

I know a lot of latchkey kids.

None of them did this.

I mean, I was doing things I shouldn't have been doing, but not that.

Yeah, not that.

Get into drugs, kids.

Don't create SWAT teams.

That's our advice here on Behind the Bastards.

Just do drugs.

Don't become, you know.

Speak for yourself, my friend.

I am speaking for myself, Sophie.

That worked out great for me.

You could run an opposite dare program where you come into schools and tell kids to experiment with drugs.

Kids, I dropped out of school and started doing drugs, and I make, I have a comfortable living these days.

You know, all my friends who got a college debt, not nearly doing as well.

So just fuck off, you know?

Give up.

Jesus Christ.

It works for everyone.

It doesn't work for everyone.

But nothing works for everyone.

There's no good, there's no good advice I have for you.

My friends who got medical degrees and became lawyers, they're all fucked too.

I don't know what to tell you, kids.

Do your best.

It's messy out there.

Daryl has, you know, a rough time of it.

And he's not entirely consistent when he writes about his background.

So I expect there's aspects of this he's exaggerating because it makes a better story.

In one paragraph, he says that his dad was pretty much absent during his childhood.

And on the next page, he talks about how to avoid starvation, his family raised livestock, turkeys, chickens, and rabbits.

And his dad, per his recollection, was doing all of the raising of animals.

He talks a lot about his dad like butchering livestock in the house and preparing it for dinner.

And that doesn't sound as sound as like checked out and unavailable and not a part of life as he kind of describes him in other parts.

You know, so I don't, I'm not, I'm sure he's not completely making up that his dad was out of the picture, but his stories about how out of the picture he was are kind of inconsistent, if that makes sense, right?

Yeah.

Now, Daryl was particular, you know, the fact that they are raising their own food, this still doesn't provide enough for the growing family.

So the Gates has come to rely rely on what he calls government handouts.

Quote: Once a week, I would go with my father along San Fernando Road to an empty lot just outside Burbank.

We would join a long line of other recipients.

Inching forward, I would hold my gunnysack while people tossed in potatoes, cabbage, and lettuce.

I always felt a little embarrassed, thinking it wasn't right people giving us things.

I felt the same way at Christmas when the school would come by to deliver a Christmas basket to the Gates family.

Again, I had those ambivalent feelings.

I was delighted, but a little uncomfortable at being singled out.

And you see this sometimes with conservative people who grow up, but people who grow up to be conservative, like influential figures in politics and were poor as kids, where they react, and I have to think this is a failing on behalf of our society, with shame at the fact that they survived due to social programs that they later wind up thinking are the root of all evil.

Right.

Well, my family needed them, but I felt bad about it.

And so maybe no one else should have them.

I'm always interested when I encounter that in one of these stories, right?

Where you.

Such a pulling up of the ladder.

Like, I got this and it was helpful for me.

So nobody should get this.

It really reminds me of the way that J.D.

Vance writes about himself in his books.

My God, yes.

Yes.

Where it's like, and you're someone the system absolutely worked on, right?

Like to the extent that your family, your parents were unable to close the gaps, there were other things there for you.

And you just don't want those to exist anymore for anyone else because you think that like you felt bad about needing them and you don't think anyone else deserves them.

It's it's so fucked up.

Yeah.

I love when stuff like that makes me sad and depressed about the world.

Daryl would become a major Reagan era figure in the law and order movement.

And yeah, he's just one of these guys who learns the wrong thing from growing up poor.

And he never gets over the shame of the fact that his family has to be given help during this period of time.

In fact, the shame of having been poor as a kid is probably the strongest feeling that Daryl gets across in his memoir.

He writes at length about the god-awful sandwiches his mother had to make for him with their limited food supplies during the Depression and how embarrassed he was at seeing kids with shiny new lunchboxes while he kept his food in a sad, crinkled-up paper bag, which, boy, is that an experience I share with him, you know?

Like,

just remembering being a kid, poor kid, with a paper bag lunch at school instead of like a nice lunchbox and like, or just getting new stuff from the fucking school lunch line.

He describes his food as, often it would be bean or mashed potato sandwich.

Sometimes when things were really bad, my mom would mix sugar, cocoa, and canned milk into a thick paste and spread it on a piece of bread.

So like, legit poor kids' sandwiches, you know?

Yeah, that is legit poor kid food right there.

That is a poor kid sandwich.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Peanut butter smeared on a playing card.

Yeah, that sounds like shit.

Yeah, exactly.

He writes that his mom was a non-union laborer in a dress factory.

She put in nine or ten hour days, probably because she was non-union, and she often came home with her hands bleeding because her workplace had switched to electric cutters that were faster, but way worse for the workers.

He grows up revering his mom because she keeps his family together during this period of time through sheer perseverance and hard work.

His father is a very different figure, and Daryl describes him as having, quote, kept us in line out of sheer fear.

He goes on to describe how his father was abusive, and to be honest, it's one of the weirder descriptions of an abusive parent that I've ever met, just because of how he talks about it.

When he was sober, we were scared to death he would whip us.

He did that only a couple of times, but we were always terrified he might do it again.

Basically, Paul Gates was an easy-going man who liked to laugh.

With this self-deprecating humor and an ability to tell a funny story, he made everyone else laugh too.

But he also had a real temper, and woo-that kept us in line.

And it's like,

my dad was a nice guy who hit us.

And I get it.

I get your interpretation of that.

But again, it's just evidence of this you haven't examined stuff all that much you know yeah i i get what he i think i sort of get what he's putting down

here i do i would get glimpses you would get glimpses of a temper and that and the fear of that would be enough to kind of right have there be a a fear behind behind you at all times whether or not your dad was passively hitting you a lot My dad didn't, you know, it was my dad, but like, yeah, this parent was not constantly or even often violent, but it happened a couple of times.

And that was enough that you were like, I am not going to fuck with them, you know?

Yeah.

And yeah, that's that's not an uncommon parenting experience for kids to have.

Because Prohibition coincided with the collapse of the economy and his family fortunes, and because his dad was a drinker, his father took to brewing beer in the family home in order to stay supplied with alcohol and to supply his friends with alcohol.

And so some of Daryl's earliest memories were watching Paul and his, quote, Irish Catholic buddies make beer in the bathtub and bottle it.

When When the family moved houses, his dad's friends still came over to make beer, but he notes that his father was increasingly absent because he's just drinking too much to make beer.

You know, too much of an alcoholic to be a moonshiner.

And this is where Daryl makes his first reference to being aware of the police at the kid, which is really interesting to me for a guy who grows up to be one of the most famous cops in the country, is he doesn't like the cops as a kid.

Because when his dad gets more out of control as a drinker, there are increasing run-ins with the law.

And one of Daryl's worst memories as a kid was the day the Glendale PD finally came for his father.

Quote, there was a knock at the door, a loud knock, and out front stood these large uniformed people.

It was just devastating as a kid.

Drunk or not, my dad was still the authority figure in the family.

And there he was, scurrying out the back door into the blackness of night, while these massive uniformed people were beating on the door, rushing in.

In those days, they didn't stand on ceremony.

They just pushed in, past my mother.

Where is he?

And that's a searing memory, right?

It's a memory, unfortunately, even more kids are having today with what the ICE raids are doing, you know.

And it's not surprising that Daryl grows up hating the cops.

He repeats this story, variations of it, numerous times over his childhood, right?

The police are coming constantly to his house.

They're chasing his dad off or taking his dad away all the time.

And he comes to see the police as fundamentally cruel and destructive.

As an adolescent, Daryl saw law enforcement as, quote, just a plague on society.

Wow.

It's so interesting to me.

The same thing as what you were describing with him not wanting to use welfare or other kinds of social services, it turning him against those things.

It's interesting that his run-ins with the police, he was like, oh, I hate the police.

And so I will become one.

That's just very interesting to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How that's going to happen is going to be interesting, but it is, it is like such a sad part that like he grows up understanding

what's so problematic about the police, right?

Is that is this guy not doing good as a father?

Is he out of control to an extent?

Does there need to be some sort of intervention in his life?

Sure.

Is that intervention armed uniformed men taking him away from his family?

No, probably not, right?

And traumatizing his kids even though he's not going to be able to do that.

Yeah, that's probably not the way, you know?

Yeah.

One of his other traumatic incidents from his childhood comes when he wakes up sick with his face all this.

This just tells you a lot of growing up in the depression.

He like wakes up with his face swollen and like just clearly deathly ill and his brother tells him you should probably skip school and go to a doctor and daryl goes to his dad and is like hey dad i think i'm i'm not doing well and his dad who is drunk at seven in the morning uh probably from the night before is like fuck off

like sleep it off kid i'm about to do that and so daryl stays home and then when his by the time his brother gets home from school daryl's face is twice its normal size right it's just become clear that this kid needs to be in the hospital.

And instead of going to the hospital, Daryl tries to go out and play with the other kids when they get out of school, who mock him for looking fucked up because they're like, dude, your whole face is what the fuck's wrong with that, right?

And it's not until his mom gets home later that night that she's like, no one took him

to the doctor?

What's wrong with you people?

And she calls the family doctor who diagnoses Daryl with an acute kidney condition.

He blames this on the fact that there'd just been like a sports competition in school that he won and that he'd had to push himself so hard to win that he pulled a kidney loose.

I don't know if that's what happened.

I think it's just that it's the 30s.

People are getting sick all the time.

You know, they don't know medicine yet.

But he's treated in time and he manages getting over it.

But the fact that his dad ignored it in order to get drunk is like a searing moment to him, right?

This really burns itself into his brain.

as you'd expect it to, right?

He spends three months slowly recovering from his injuries.

And since his mom worked all day and his brother was at school, that means that for three months he was basically rotting alone in bed.

You know, there's not a TV.

They don't have a radio.

His dad doesn't go to the library often to check out books.

So he's mostly just laying there alone, stewing in his anger, you know?

And that's not going to help anything about this kid.

No, I can see that being a very formative experience for a child.

Just lots of time to sit there and stew about your drunk father and the horrible school lunches you're packed every day.

Right, exactly.

So the next year, 1935, his family moves again to Highland Park.

Decades later, Daryl would recall the racial makeup of their new neighborhood in what I'd call telling terms.

Quote, a lot of Italian and German families, a mixture of Catholics and Jews, many Hispanics, some Japanese and Chinese.

I don't recall any blacks.

He writes this book.

in the mid-90s, you know?

So was it still, was it cool to be describing the makeup of your where you live in that way?

And then, like, just completely obsessed with the races and ethnicities of people around you.

Yeah, just like really laying out, here's all the different races in my town when I'm 10, you know?

Like, yeah, I don't know, man.

I don't know that I believe that.

Do you ever meet somebody that tells a story, and whenever they tell a story, they have to tell you the ethnicity or the race of the person involved?

When you meet somebody like that, it really tells you a lot about how they see the world.

Yes, yes, yeah.

That, that, that, that, that really like gets across significant details.

It's like, what rate, also, just what races you remember, you know,

okay,

which ones were notable to you, yeah, yeah, what are the notable races in your childhood?

So, the same year, his dad notched a new public drinking arrest for which he finally serves jail time.

And Daryl calls this his dad's rock bottom point.

You know, he goes through the DTs after he sobers up in the drunk tank, and the experience fucks up Paul Gates so much that Paul commits to sobering up, and he did.

And Gates' family life gets better at this point.

Not only is the Great Depression starting to wind down by the later half of the 30s, but his dad gets to another job and starts working again.

He gets a family car so that the Gates' have a vehicle for the first time.

And his new dad, the sober dad, becomes a real gung-ho pro-FDR New Deal Democrat, which makes complete sense because

A lot of people, my grandparents were like that, where it's like, yeah, they were dedicated New Deal Democrats for a long time because they survived thanks to New Deal programs.

you know?

Of course, that makes you real positive towards government programs, you know, at least for a period of time.

Paul becomes more involved with his kids and makes the questionable decision to teach young Daryl how to box.

I say questionable because Daryl decides, I want to be a professional fighter, right?

So as an adolescent, he joins a boxing club.

He spends all his free time fighting.

By the time he's 15 years old, he is muscular and increasingly aggressive.

That Halloween, he dresses up in costume with what he called a bean shooter up his sleeve, and at parties, he would shoot beans randomly at other kids.

This predictably leads to a fist fight, which his brother broke up, but the other kid's dad came in and saw Lowell with hands on his son, and so he starts attacking Daryl's brother Lowell, and Daryl sucker punches the dad of the kid that he'd shot repeatedly with beans.

Quote, absolutely furious at me, Lowell grabbed the bean shooter and snapped it in half, but the lesson he intended to teach me fell on deaf ears.

I could not keep my fists to myself.

So just a bean shooting little prick.

I grew up in a house where my brother was a bot, is a boxer.

My dad and grandfather are boxers.

I took boxing lessons as a kid.

And it's the kind of thing that a well-meaning adult is thinking, maybe this will teach my kid some focus and discipline.

Yeah.

And yeah.

And then often, it can go that way.

It can.

It can be great for you.

Or be making a very violent child.

You have to teach.

Here's the thing.

If you're going to teach your kid to be good at beating people up, which boxing can teach you, boxing's a functional fighting sport art, right?

You also have to teach them how not to use fighting people as like a default go-to.

Yeah.

You know?

Exactly.

Yeah.

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And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze, so Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction, and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate.

Oh, and this year, they want to hear your stories.

Yep, they've got a new call-in segment where they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air.

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So, if you're ready for round two, just push play.

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We're back.

There you go.

So,

he starts high school, Daryl, and this offers him some, you know, outlets for his violence because he describes himself as getting regularly into fights with kids he calls bullies.

And I'm not sure if they were the bullies.

I'll say that much, right?

This leads him to his first real legal trouble because by age 16, these other, he's come to the conclusion, and the accurate one, in my opinion, that quote, there was no bigger bully than a cop.

And he saved up money to buy an old car of his own by this point.

And the police, he says, were quote, always pulling me over for something, citing him for everything under the sun, including having a loud muffler.

And again, like, yeah, a lot of people have this experience, mostly not white kids.

And the fact that you did, it's a bummer that this doesn't like make you a better person.

Yeah, I feel like he's taking all the wrong lessons from these very formative life experiences.

All of them.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

It's just every wrong lesson you could take.

Shocking stuff.

Here's a passage from his book talking about how, you know, one of his early meaningful interactions with the cops.

On a Sunday night in 1942, with my girlfriend beside me and my buddy in back, I stopped my car in front of the Franklin Theater.

Every Sunday night, they showed a hop along Cassidy, and my buddy Pete Siula went in to see what time the next show started.

We were sitting there, my car parked just a little bit up

from the curb, when suddenly a squad car slammed to a stop behind me.

Because of the war, the LAPD had been forced forced to hire emergency wartime officers.

Among them, it turned out, these two.

One strolled over and whipped out his pad.

I jumped out of my car.

What are you doing?

Writing you a citation?

Come on, what for?

You're double parked, but my friend will be right back.

And it deteriorated from there.

Now, eventually, his friend comes out and his brother, you know, tries to de-escalate things.

And when the cops shove Lowell away, Daryl loses it, and he punches the cop who'd shoved his brother, and one of his friends punches the other cop, and they all get arrested, he and his friend, and Lowell.

Now, punching a cop normally would get you jail time, but his brother is kind of like a good, goody two-shoes in town.

He started some like local sports program for kids that the LAPD are partnering with.

And so they offer Daryl and Lowell a deal, which is that they'll drop the charges if he apologizes.

And Daryl refuses at first, right?

He's wanting to like, no, fucking charge me with assaulting a police officer.

I'm not going to say sorry to this dick.

And insisted that, like, well, the cop pushed my brother, so I had a right to sock the bastard.

And eventually, Lowell has to like intervene and be like, you stupid motherfucker.

They're offering to drop assault on an officer charges.

Shut your fucking mouth and say sorry, right?

Yeah.

Like, like, I appreciate standing on business and being like, no, it's the principal, but if they're gonna drop charges, yeah,

you hit a cop, bro.

Like, take the, take the dub, you know?

Um,

next, per an article in the LA Times, in 1943, after after graduating from Franklin High School in Highland Park, Gates joined the Navy and served two years as a plain old seaman on a destroyer in the Pacific.

After his discharge, he enrolled at Pasadena College and married a classmate, Wanda Hawkins.

He was taking pre-law courses at USC when he learned that she was pregnant.

Unsure how he was going to support a family, he did not greet the news happily.

Not a weird story, right?

You know, a lot of kids like this out there in the world.

And one of his friends, this is kind of him finally breaking bad is he's like desperate and has to figure out how to make money to pay for a kid now.

And one of his friends says, hey, the LAPD is hiring.

They don't have enough people and the pay is good.

They've got like signing bonuses and a decent starting salary.

And Daryl reacts with fury at first.

He remembers calling his, telling his friend, no way in the world will I ever be a dumb cop.

But then his friend's like, but they pay like $290 a month.

And that's real good money back then.

And while he's in police academy, he can continue to study at USC the whole time.

So he drives out to Hollywood High and he takes a civil service exam, and he's claimed scored number nine in a room with 5,000 applicants.

And this is where we get a strong hint that old Daryl might have some narcissistic tendencies, because rather than taking satisfaction in his high score, he recalled anger that eight other, quote, prospective dumb cops had scored higher than him.

He assumed that this must have been

the result of nepotism or these other kids gaming the system in some way.

But he continues on to the other stages of the application, right?

He's like, no, there's no way these other, only dumb people would want to be cops.

So I have to be the smartest person in this room full of people who are desperate for money, you know?

Every takeaway is the wrong takeaway.

Also, is it really that hard to believe that there are eight kids who would score better on this test than you?

Is that really so?

5,000?

No.

Yeah.

No.

And you're doing fine, brother.

Like, come on, man.

So he has to lie when his interviewer asks if he has any criminal history or has ever been arrested.

But since the charges had been dropped, the guys responsible for the hiring process have no evidence to the contrary.

At first, he joins the LAPD to pay his way through college and support a young family, and he starts the job holding his nose and kind of not really wanting to do it at all.

On September 16th, 1949, he has his first day at the police academy.

And it's not like the classic film Police Academy, unfortunately.

His first sight as he goes to the academy are the words inscribed on the entrance of the building, The more you sweat here, the less you will bleed in the street.

And Daryl writes about his time training in a typically self-aggrandizing fashion, noting that he was too heavy when he joined, but at the end of the training, he was 205 pounds of pure muscle, and that his colleagues nicknamed him the bear.

And no, they didn't.

Whatever.

I'm sorry, man.

No one's colleagues.

And like, no one gets nicknames that cool that other people give them.

No,

that is a self-made nickname if I've ever heard one.

Yeah.

You know, and if you get a nickname like the bear, it's not for a cool reason.

It's because you like scratch your back on a wall or something and you look like a bear.

And people are like, oh man, look at him.

He looks like he's a bear.

Always getting your head stuck in picanic baskets.

Right.

Yeah.

You get your head stuck in a picnic basket and people are like, fucking Yogi Bear over here.

Right.

That's someone who gets nicknamed the bear, you know?

It's like if anyone ever tells you, my nickname was the Reaper.

It's like, no, that's probably because you ate nothing but corn or something during basic training or some weird shit.

It's not because you were cool.

Nobody gets that nickname for being cool.

No.

People just don't give out nicknames for that reason.

You get a nickname like fucking Cumstain or whatever, right?

That's a military nickname.

Anyway, he claims, more than on my physique, I prided myself on my intellect, which, sure, bro, I don't know, man.

That's not going to be a real through line in your life, but okay.

Now, by the time he finishes training, he says his opinion on the police had changed.

He met so many great guys in police academy that he realizes, oh no, I've been wrong about the cops all along.

And he never seems to have squared this fact that whatever his experience with the instructors and with his peers, the experiences that he had as a child of the police busting down his door and fucking up his life also happened, right?

He never like deals with the intersection of these two things, which is interesting to me.

Yeah, I'm so curious what's going on there, other than seemingly just being someone who, again,

every lesson is the wrong lesson from a life experience.

Yeah, that is his most consistent characteristic is that he never learns the right thing from the things that happen to him with a consistency that's like impressive in its fucked-uppedness, if that makes sense.

It does.

So Daryl's first job on the street was as an accident investigator with the traffic division.

He spends a little time on patrol after that.

And at the end of his rookie year, he still thinks policing is like a temporary gig for him, you know, a stopover on the path to him becoming a lawyer.

He does not want to work for long at the LAPD.

His plan is to finish school, get his law degree, and then leave the force.

But shortly after his starting his rookie year, you know, he spends a little bit of time moving around different jobs as a rookie.

And then he's selected after, like, kind of right at the end of his first year for this special detail where they're going to make him the personal chauffeur and bodyguard for the new police chief, William H.

Parker.

And

I don't think this was meant as a compliment to him.

It's going to help his career immensely because he gets close to the boss.

But I don't think you make the best new cop the cop, the police chief chauffeur.

And as a spoiler, the police chief needs a chauffeur because he's a hardcore alcoholic who can never legally drive, right?

Yikes.

Yeah.

He's not getting this because he's the best.

Yikes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Woo-woo.

We need you to drive the boss who has never been sober a day in his life because you're the best cop.

Yeah.

You don't give Robocop that gig, you know?

No, no.

No.

No.

Also, it does kind of put to rest the idea that people have the fiction that people become police because they really care about law and order.

I've known like the handful of people in my life who are law enforcement.

They're the most lawless psycho pieces of shit you've ever met in your life.

Never date a cop.

Oh my God.

Yeah, it's, I mean, that statistically, the evidence bears that one out.

And it's, yeah, it's just this.

Yeah, you did it because the money was good and you suddenly didn't care anymore about the fact that you knew they were bad in a lot of ways.

You had horrible experiences with the police.

But then they offered you 290 bucks a month.

So like, fuck it.

You know, I guess they're good guys.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can't help but think about hearing all the stuff like, oh, join ICE.

You get a signing bonus maybe.

50 grand.

Yeah.

So yeah, the way they sweeten these jobs that most people can see are odious.

The way they sweeten them and it makes, I think there's a certain kind of person that will just forget

how harmful these jobs are to people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, I mean, it's the they live kind of, John Carpenter called all this out decades ago

in his classic film, right?

You know, people will forget their morality as soon as you offer them some cash, which, you know, is none of us are immune to it.

I think some people's price is higher than 290 bucks a month, but whatever.

So I want to talk a little bit about the cop that he becomes the chauffeur for, right?

William Parker, Bill Parker, who is a really influential L.A.

police chief.

He takes the LAPD.

from like old-timey cops kind of into the early modern era in a lot of ways.

And he's got one of these like classic American turn of the century lives.

He was born in the town of Lead, South Dakota, and then he was raised in the even more, the only town with a more sinister name than Lead, Deadwood.

It's awesome.

I think that one's in North Dakota, but like, yeah, from Lead to Deadwood is his childhood.

He's an okay student as a kid and a promising athlete, but obviously he's in Deadwood.

So there's not a lot of a future there, right?

And after he graduates, he works a series of dead-end jobs.

At one point, he's selling underpants that his mom knitted to women in town.

So he's an underwear salesman for a little while in Deadwood.

I have never heard of a bleaker job than that.

Not just underwear, hand-knitted underwear.

Yeah, hand-knitted by your mom, underwear salesman, and fucking Deadwood, bro.

That's bleak.

Like, it doesn't get any worse than that.

Eventually, in 1922, his mom splits from his dad and decides to move to LA with his younger siblings.

And Bill's like, I guess I'll move to Los Angeles too.

It's got to be fucking Deadwood, you know?

Now, at this point in time, LA is advertised as being, like, if you look at like the advertisements the city is putting out, one of the names that Los Angeles gives itself is, quote, the white spot of America.

I don't need to tell you what the word white means in that context, right?

You can figure it out.

Yeah, I know what it means.

It's not talking about the color of clothes or whatever, right?

Per the book LA Noir by John Bunton, it was seen as, quote, a place where native-born white Protestants could enjoy the magic of outdoors inviting always, trees in blossom throughout the year, flowers in bloom all the time, as well as mystery, romance, charms, and splendor, all safe among others of their kind, right?

The weather's always nice for white people who are the only ones allowed in Los Angeles.

That's how L.A.

is presenting itself to the rest of the country at this period of time.

And not because that's a totally accurate description, because even LA is never not a diverse place, right?

Like it is always an incredibly mixed city.

This is how they're trying, they're trying to portray themselves to the rest of the country that way so that white people will move there, right?

This is

a conscious attempt by the people leading the city to gentrify it, right?

Now, LA is at this point a hub of vice and organized crime because there's a lot of money and the film industry is there and all of the gangsters who'd gotten cracked down on the East Coast had moved out west, right?

Like that's a big thing that has happened by this period of time.

It's why, I mean, I just quoted from a book called L.A.

Noir, but it's why L.A.

Noir becomes a genre, right?

It's because Los Angeles, a lot of crime there, a lot of real good opportunities for organized crime there.

It's a huge port.

A lot of money moves through it.

And as a young man, Parker joins the police and he spends his adulthood fighting crime in a city overwhelmed by it.

He takes a brief break to fight in World War II and he comes home a war hero and is the highest-ranked LAPD officer and war veteran.

This earns Parker a measure of fame.

The city council passes a resolution thanking him specifically for his service.

And to make a long story short, he rides that fame to the top.

Parker would go down as perhaps the most consequential chief in LAPD history, certainly before Darrell Gates.

In an LA Times article, Joe Dominique describes his reign this way.

World War II and the years that followed had brought a mass migration to Los Angeles of job-hungry African Americans, Jews, and later Latinos.

By the mid-60s, these new arrivals were transforming the complexity and politics of the city and coming into conflict with the LAPD.

Parker reinvented the LAPD, making it a less corrupt and more professional department, but also turning it into one that was aggressive, intimidating, and confrontational by design.

A small force of faceless paramilitary cops and patrol cars policing through fear.

Doesn't sound familiar?

It certainly does.

I'm so what was the what was the police?

So the only police that I know is the one they have described, you know hyper militarized what was it like before then i can't even conceptualize what policing would be like before that was the vibe yeah i mean number one there just weren't as many cops number two the idea that like they would have that kind of strength they would have access to heavy weaponry the idea that they would have access to high numbers that they would do sweeps in big numbers that was all fairly new at the time right some of that really starts becoming a thing because of the gangster era but you know and there's also this factor that like the LAPD isn't a thing for you to worry about if you can bribe them.

And so one of the things that happens when Parker is with the LAPD is that the ability of just like random normal local criminals to pay their way out of problems becomes less of a factor.

But also the LAPD are becoming increasingly violent and increasingly like a force of their own, right?

During the time that Parker is in charge.

So there's both this thing of like, well, the LAPD are less of a, whoever can pay for them owns them and more of a militant force of their own that is increasingly controlling the city during his reign.

This might sound fucked up.

I feel like it might be less harmful to have them be a force where anybody who can pay them kind of owns them than having them be their own paramilitary, their own like military force,

you know, wreaking havoc in the city.

I could see how you would view the change as progress, but also like, I don't know, maybe it didn't, maybe this, maybe it wasn't as much of an improvement as you might have thought, right?

Fair.

Yeah.

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Okay, if you thought season one of Sniffy's Cruising Confessions was spicy, buckle up.

Season two is here, and Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso are taking things deeper.

They're tackling trending topics, offering practical advice, and having hilarious and heartfelt conversations with a range of queer celebs and sexperts who know their stuff.

This season, they're also hitting the road, literally, from NYC to rural cruising scenes to overseas hookups.

No stone is left unturned.

And let's be real, 2025 hasn't exactly been a breeze.

So Gabe and Chris are doing the work, keeping the community informed with chats on prep, harm reduction, and how to cruise smart in a wild political climate.

Oh, and this year, they want to hear your stories.

Yep, they've got a new Col-In segment where they'll react to your wildest cruising confessions on air.

No pressure.

So, if you're ready for round two, just push play.

Sniffy's Cruising Confession, sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Thursday.

This is Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

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And we're back.

So we just set up, you know,

Bill Parker's time running the LAPD.

And right after Parker gets made chief, Daryl is made his driver.

And the fact that Darrell is the chief's driver during the busy

first 15 months of Parker's time running the department gives him a front seat to this revolutionary period in LAPD history.

And his position makes him a natural sounding board for Parker's ideas.

It gives him influence incommensurate to his low rank and his rookie status inside the department.

In the LAPD, Gates gains a reputation as being the chief's fair-haired boy.

Per journalists Elaine Wu and Eric Walnick, Gates would later write, quote, What I received during my 15 months with him turned out to be more than a primer on policing.

It became a tutorial on how to be chief, right?

And for the sake of completion, I should note that in his own autobiography, Gates paints a mixed picture of his mentor.

He admits that he became totally smitten with Parker and saw him as a kind of father figure, but also Parker was sadly a father figure in, quote, more ways than I would have liked.

By which I mean Bill was a raging alcoholic like Daryl's dad.

And Daryl writes, yeah, like, oh, yeah, I can see why this guy influences you.

Making a guy just like Daddy, I know all about it.

Yeah, but daddy got in trouble with the cops and this guy gets to run them for some reason.

Here's a quote.

After trying to absorb Parker's brilliance by day, I would too often by night drive him home drunk, and I mean loaded.

He drank until his words slurred and stares became a hazard.

He would repeat the same thought over and over until he became a terrible bore.

Some nights he would attend to function and not touch a drop.

Other nights he drank heavily and smelled embarrassing to me as he stumbled getting into the car and stumbled getting out.

From the street to his house required negotiating a steep hill that I often had to help him up.

And Daryl insists,

yeah.

And he's like, but his drinking never affected his thinking, right?

It never changed the way he worked.

And like, I don't know, man, you're just describing it as affecting him on the job.

But you described him as smelling embarrassing.

You think that didn't impact his work at all, really?

You think that didn't change how he worked as police chief?

I don't know, man.

Now, Daryl does note fairly, well, all the journalists in the media pool at press conferences were outrageous alcoholics too.

And yeah, man, it was the 50s, right?

Like, I'm not, I don't believe you're lying about all the journalists having, being self-destructive alcoholics in 1951, you know?

Yeah, that makes sense.

He did acknowledge one time in which Parker's drinking caused serious issues, New Year's Day, 1951.

He and the chief were scheduled to pick up the mayor and drive to the Elks Club for breakfast before the Rose Bowl.

But Parker had gotten completely shithouse hammered the night before, and Gates only got him home two hours before they had to wake up.

The result of this was that they are late to pick up the mayor the next day, and the mayor is furious.

Gates plays this off as the mayor being an arrogant prick, even though he admits he and his boss were giggling the whole time about how hammered he still was.

So I'm not sure it's the mayor who sounds bad in this story.

The mayor's like, my fucking police chief can't sober up to pick me up for the fucking Rose Bowl.

Like, can't do one night without getting so drunk that he's blacked out the next morning.

Yeah, hours late and laughing about it in front of the mayor is not a great thing.

In front of their job.

No, no, no, no, his drinking never impacted his drinking.

Never impacted his work, though.

Never impacted his job.

Absolutely not.

Now, one long-term impact of this year and change is that Gates rockets himself to the head of the line for promotions and choice appointments within the department.

When he gets back to normal duty, he works briefly on juvenile patrol, like the the cops who'd let him and his brother off easy for assaulting an officer when they were kids.

And his section of the book on his time in juvenile patrol is one of the most incoherent pieces of his autobiography.

He describes this adolescent kid named Jose who was a serial burglar and enough of like a habitual criminal that he and his partner could tell when they got a call about a burglary that like, oh, that's Jose.

right?

Like that must have been him.

It matches his MO perfectly.

Classic Jose.

Classic Jose.

And he's like, we liked this kid, but like, you know, know, we had to deal with him constantly.

And he describes having to call their, his, Jo Jose's parents all the time about their son.

And then he writes a very confusing passage that is absolutely not consistent.

Times were so different then.

The people were different and the laws were different.

Often you'd haul a kid in, chew him out, and call his folks.

Father would come down, ball the kid out.

You'd never encounter that kid again.

And he goes on to complain that like, that's not the way it is today because police don't have as much power.

There's all these children's rights advocates who've lobbied for laws that give kids more rights.

And now cops can't use their own in-house probation system to, quote, skip the courts and put kids on probation at their own recognizance without involving a judge or court.

And like, but you just talked about this kid who was constantly a problem and who like the way the system worked didn't benefit him at all.

It didn't like help him stop.

Like he, he was a career criminal anyway.

And then you're like, but things were better.

That didn't happen back then.

You know, not like it was in the, not like it is today.

He's writing in the 90s where like, cause kids have rights, things are worse it's just interesting to me again he just can't it's it's completely inconsistent right like his recollection of things and how they worked then versus how they work now is just never accurate to the actual things he's saying i almost feel like this is an issue with the editing like i like i'm curious if an editor of this book would have would have called out that very clear inconsistency there to say hey your your point's getting a bit muddled They don't have those on right-wing sheriff books, you know?

Just write whatever you want, hit publish throw whatever you want on there kid we don't give a it's your name that's gonna sell this motherfucker people will know it's the swat guy yeah so daryl goes from this point where he talks about this this this kid and how things are different now than they were back then he goes from that to immediately telling an anecdote that makes me feel like none of his colleagues should have been allowed within 100 yards of a school and this is so fucking wild that he just tells this as like a gag

we had encountered a 16-year-old girl living on her own.

A typical arrival, she was hoping for the big break, but on the streets of Hollywood, anything could happen to her.

So when we'd spot her, we would stop and talk, or sometimes we'd go by her room to check up on her.

I tried to give her all kinds of fatherly advice, and I guess she kind of fell for me.

One day I was thumbing through a batch of crime reports when I noticed one for rape.

I picked it up and went, oh no, it was the girl.

Next I saw the suspect's name, me.

Oh my god, I thought.

Instinctively, I checked the date of the rape and the time, trying to remember what the hell was I doing then.

Suddenly, I looked up.

A bunch of detectives were standing there, laughing, thinking they'd played a pretty good joke on me.

So the joke that his colleagues play is filing a fake child rape report for him.

Isn't that funny?

What a great joke.

I mean, it's hard to know what to say.

These are like,

I mean, oh my god.

Got him.

Got him.

He thought he raped a kid.

You thought you raped a kid.

You were thinking back to remember if you'd raped that kid.

Ha ha ha.

Oh, Daryl.

We got you.

Because you have done it before, right?

Obviously, like it was a possibility in your head.

You had to think about it, right, man?

The fact that he was like, oh, let me think back.

Let me think back.

As opposed to, this is clearly some mistake.

Who was I raping that day?

Oh, no.

Like,

that's insane.

That's real weirdness.

That's insane.

As a bit.

As a bit.

That's nuts.

And that you'd say that about your colleagues who were like, I respected, I really had my mind changed.

I thought the LAPD were all bullies.

But then I learned they're real serious professionals who do joke about child rape reporting, obviously.

But that's fine.

You know?

It's a bit.

Jesus, right?

Holy shit.

Like.

That was really one of those like, oh, okay, so things haven't changed all that much, huh?

Like, cops haven't.

No, okay.

Cops really really have not changed.

Cool, bro.

After his time on the Juvie beat, Gates gets moved to the Vice Squad, and in 1955, he makes sergeant.

Four years later, he's promoted to lieutenant, and four years after that, he makes captain.

This is a pretty rapid pace of advancement, and he credits this.

He says he gets his promotions as rapidly as he does because he studies really hard for every exam, and he's just very rigorous in the way he approaches the work.

But brown nosing is at least so much a factor in his rise as anything else.

You know, the chief likes him.

He's the golden boy.

He drove him around.

They bonded.

And so for the remainder of the time that Parker is running the LEPD, Daryl can count on having the boss's ear whenever he needs it.

So he's never going to get turned down for a promotion when he goes up for it, right?

By the spring of 1965, Gates had risen to an impressive rank indeed.

Inspector.

Now, his particular role is oversight.

And Bridget, this is probably going to start the ominous music in your head.

In 65, he gets made the inspector overseeing all patrol officers in a certain neighborhood of Los Angeles called Watts.

Oh, God.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, we know what this is going to be.

We know where this is going.

We know where this is going, right?

Watts is a majority black neighborhood that is very impoverished, right?

And as the civil rights movement is picking up steam, people there are growing increasingly organized and increasingly angry about a system that rules their lives.

And the fact that Parker has turned the LAPD into this unaccountable paramilitary force and set them patrolling neighborhoods with an aggressive posture is about to bite everyone in the ass, right?

That is, that's what's coming up.

And as a spoiler, Parker is in charge of not the whole LAPD, but like the group of cops who are directly responding to Watts when the Watts riots breaks out.

And he's running the whole department during the 92 Rodney King riots.

That's Daryl Gates.

The same guy was on.

Probably not so when you think about it, There's like, oh, is the same guy on deck for both of those things?

Yeah.

Oh, hell yeah.

That's kind of scan, huh?

Unbelievable.

There's four guys in all of history, and two of them are Daryl Gates.

The other two are Hitler.

It's just Daryl Gates and Hitler all the way down, baby.

All the way down.

But speaking of neither of those guys, Bridget Todd, you want to plug anything as we head out here on part one?

Yeah.

Well, I am not Daryl Gates or Hitler, and I actually host a podcast that I think is pretty good called There Are No Girls on the Internet.

You should check it out.

You should check that out.

You should check out our new podcast or our new season of a pre-existing podcast, Jay Canrahan's Sad Oligarch just dropped its second season.

If you wanted to learn about all these powerful Russian businessmen and corporate leaders who keep dying, strangely, you know, check that out too.

Check out There Are No Girls on the Internet.

And if you want to learn more about Daryl Gates and why Los Angeles be the way that it is, there's a book we'll be quoting from in our next episode called City of Quartz by Mike Davis.

Check out that book too, because we'll be hearing from that in part two.

All right, that's been our episode, friends and enemies, frenemies.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.

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Casamigo Stequila, 40% alcohol by volume.

This is an iHeart podcast.