Surveying the Aftermath of the L.A. Riots

Joel Anderson: “This obituary for Tom Bradley covers his time as mayor and his approach to governing. For most of his tenure, he was popular, in charge as the city grew into a cultural powerhouse and the second-largest city in the country. By the time of the riots, Bradley had been in office for almost two decades and was weighing whether to run for a sixth term. Months later, he decided against it.”

JA: “The 1984 Summer Olympics were one of Bradley’s biggest triumphs as mayor. L.A. privately financed the Games and finished with a surplus of more than $200 million: It was unprecedented. Bradley’s partner in the effort—and the president of the organizing committee for the ‘84 Olympics—was Peter Ueberroth, a businessman who later became commissioner of Major League Baseball. Their success with the Olympics would influence Bradley’s plans after the riots.”

JA: “Ueberroth had wooed the corporate sponsors who made the ‘84 Olympics profitable. In this excerpt from a book published two years later, he gives his first-person account of putting the event together. One of the people I spoke with for this episode told me that Ueberroth became a ‘phenomenon in L.A.’ as a result of his success with the Games.”

JA: “Bradley asked Ueberroth to lead the rebuilding effort and do for Los Angeles’s blighted neighborhoods what he’d done with the Olympics: Harness the money and clout of the private sector to achieve what seemed impossible. And at first, the money seemed to be pouring in. Major companies promised investments in the community. Ueberroth said he expected to raise a billion dollars in the effort.”

JA: “When the L.A. Times called the companies listed by Rebuild L.A. as supporters, reporters found that some had no plans to invest and were unsure why they were on the group’s list. Bernard Kinsey, a former Xerox executive who had become chief operating officer of Rebuild L.A., told us that the media scrutiny ‘hurt us all in terms of our credibility.’ Ueberroth stepped down after just a year, and Kinsey followed soon after.”

JA: “The best hope for police reform came from Charter Amendment F, and it was on the ballot in June 1992. If the amendment passed, then the city might have a chance to exert some control over the LAPD. If it failed, the department would essentially continue to run itself. Supporters of police chief Daryl Gates and the LAPD sought to use the chaos of the riots to their advantage. But in the end, Charter Amendment F passed by a 2-to-1 margin. This story helped us to understand what would change under the package of reforms.”

JA: “A few days after Charter Amendment F’s passage, Gates cleared out his office and Bradley named Willie Williams as his replacement. Williams, the first Black police chief of the city, came from Philadelphia and shared many of Bradley’s ideas about reform. But his tenure was rocky, and he clashed with Bradley’s successor as mayor. This obituary from the L.A. Times gives a good summary of Williams’ time in L.A.”

JA: “Richard Riordan was the wild card in the 1993 mayoral election. The Republican businessman was the founder of a private equity firm, and one of the most well-connected people in Los Angeles. He’d also given more than $400,000 to Tom Bradley’s political campaigns, but he ran firmly as a conservative. He poured millions into his own campaign and promised to hire 3,000 new LAPD officers (winning him the police union’s endorsement). His victory meant that, in little more than a year, Los Angeles voters went from supporting a package of police reforms to electing the candidate endorsed by the LAPD rank and file.”

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