Anna Deavere Smith - Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. (Where the Water Is - Sergeant Charles Duke) lyrics

Powell holds the baton like this and that is not a good... the proper way of holding the baton is like that. So one of the things they keep talking about why did it take fifty-six baton blows. Powell has no strength and no power in his baton strikes. The whole thing boils down to... Powell was ineffective with the baton. You're aware that that night he went to baton training and the sergeant held him afterward because he was weak and inefficient with the baton training. That night. That night. He should have been taken out of the field. He needed to be taken up to the academy and had a couple days of instruction get him back into focus. (He drinks water) Oh, I know what I was gonna do. Prior to this we lost upper-body-control holds, in 1982. If we had upper-body control holds involved in this, this tape woulda never been on, this incident woulda lasted about fifteen seconds. The reason that we lost upper-body-control holds... because we had something like seventeen to twenty d**hs in a period of about 1975-76 to 1982, and they said it was a**ociated with its being used on Blacks and Blacks were dying. Now, the so-called community leaders came forward and complained (He drinks water) and they started a hysteria about the upper-body-control holds- that it was inhumane use of force- so it got elevated from intermediate use of force, which is the same category as a baton, to deadly force, and what I told you was that it was used in all but one of the incidents. High levels of PCP and c**aine were found in the systems of those people it was used on. If PCP and c**aine did not correlate into the equation of why people were dying, how come we used it since the fifties and we had maybe in a ten-year period one incident of a d**h? The use of force policy hasn't changed since this incident. And Gilbert Lindsay, who was a really neat man, when he saw a demonstration with the baton he made a statement that "you're not gonna beat my people with the baton, I want you to use the chokehold on 'em." And a couple of other people said, "I don't care you beat em into submission, you break their bones, you're not chokin' 'em anymore." So the political framework was laid for eliminating upper-body-control holds, and Daryl Gates- I believe, but I can't prove it- but his attitude supports it. He and his command staff and I started use-of-force reports come through my office, so I review 'em and I look for training things and I look for things that will impact how I can make training better. So I started seeing a lot of incidents similar to Rodney King and some of them identical to Rodney King and I said we gotta find some alternative uses of force. And their attitude was: "Don't worry about it, don't worry about it." And I said, "Wait a minute, you gonna get some policemen indicted, you gonna get some policemen sent to jail, and they're gonna hurt somebody and it's gonna be perceived to be other than a proper use of force, and then you guys in management are gonna scurry away from it, you're gonna run away from it, you're gonna get somebody... somebody is gonna go to the joint because of your lack of effort." And the last conversation I had was with one of my... He walked by my office, so I ran out of my office and I catch up with him right by the fountain, right by where the water is. I said, "Listen, We got another one of these... we gotta explore some techniques and we gotta explore some options," and his response to me: "Sergeant Duke, I'm tired of hearing this sh**. We're gonna beat people into submission and we're gonna break bones." And he said the Police Commission and the City Council took this away from us. "Do you understand that, Sergeant Duke?" And I said, "Yes, sir," and I never brought it up again. And that, to me, tells me this is an "in your face" to the City council and to the Police Commission. And like I said, I can't prove this, but I believe that Daryl Gates and the Command staff were gonna do an "in your face" to the City Council and the Police Commission, saying, "You took upper-body-control holds away from us. Now we're really gonna show you what you're gonna get, with lawsuits and all the other things that are a**ociated with it."