Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 30, 1993 TAG: 9304300306
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Long
Exactly a year earlier, four of his white officers were acquitted in the beating of black motorist Rodney King and angry mobs began days of fires, shooting and rampaging that killed 54 people and wounded thousands more.
Gates said in a news conference at W&L before the debate that he does have regrets.
One was about the incident in which white truck driver Reginald Denny was beaten by a mostly black crowd at an LA intersection. "We should have been at Florida and Normandie when Denny was being pummeled by people there," he said.
"You move in, and you move in quickly," he said of his policy on crowd control. His officers "did not follow that."
He said that one reason for police hesitation was that politicians and the media had accused them of being "provocative."
Gates, 66, has done all right since public fury forced him from his $168,000-a-year job last summer.
His city's tragedy left him famous.
Since September, he's had a weekday afternoon talk show on an LA radio station.
His book, "Chief: My Life in the LAPD," recently was published in paperback. It landed on The New York Times' best-seller list when published in hardcover last year, said his publicist at Bantam Books. A magazine article last year said Bantam advanced him $300,000 for it.
Gates' booking agent, Keppler Associates in Arlington, says Gates has done about 20 talks since last year - sometimes alone, sometimes paired with an adversary like Nadine Strossen, national president of the American Civil Liberties Union, whom he debated at W&L Thursday night.
Asked Thursday how he felt about profiting from his notoriety, he said, "I love it."
He added, "I don't know that I'm profiting from that. I have a radio show. I'm not sure I wouldn't have had that anyway."
But, he said, "There's no question I have more notoriety because of" the Rodney King beating and the riots.
Gates had little to say about King, but he was critical of the police sergeant at the scene. Stacey Koon "failed miserably. He did not take control of the situation."
W&L students and staff said they weren't too bothered that they were paying $5,000 to the law officer who once said that more blacks than whites died in LA police choke holds because arteries in the necks of black people "do not open up as fast as they do on normal people."
"Unfortunately, it's a function of our market economy," said Laura Anderson, a leader of the Black Law Students Association, a debate sponsor.
He's worth his fee, she said, if students come out to hear him and give some thought to civil liberties.
However, Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, who was critical of Gates last year, suggested that Gates "take that honorarium and contribute it to a community-based organization in South Central LA working against the kind of police abuse that he fostered while chief of the LAPD."
Gates was well-known in police circles long before Rodney King. He was with the LAPD 43 years, the last 14 as chief.
He pioneered SWAT teams, the "Special Weapons and Tactics" crews of high-powered marksmen who now burst in on barricaded criminals around the country.
And Gates is said to be the man who thought up the DARE program, or Drug Abuse Resistance Education. It takes anti-drug education into schools in every state and several foreign countries.
But Andrew Schneider, the undergraduate president of another debate sponsor, W&L's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that without the violence in LA, Gates probably wouldn't be speaking at W&L.
"I don't think he would be getting $5,000 and flying out first class," said Schneider, who arranged the debate. He said Gates' contract calls for first-class flights only.
Schneider was disappointed last year that W&L had no racial awareness workshops during the riots.
On one of the riot days, he said, a W&L fraternity dressed up in Confederate uniforms and held its annual "Sons of the South" parade.
Schneider vowed to organize a consciousness-raising program for the riots' one-year anniversary - "to at least make up for the year that we did nothing.
Strossen, a professor at the New York Law School, debated Gates at three other universities last fall.
Her more frequent sparring partner on law-and-order issues, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, is a better debater than Gates, she said. But, she said, she and Meese are lawyers; Gates isn't.
Strossen likes doing battle with conservatives. They draw big crowds. She reaches people she wouldn't if she were at the podium alone.
Has she gotten to know Gates on their road trips?
"I bridle at that," she said of the phrase "road trips." "It sounds so intimate."
No, she said, she doesn't know him well. "Not that he is at all unfriendly."
She usually goes out for beers with local ACLU members after a debate. Gates, she said, never wants to come along.
Schneider said Strossen was paid $3,000 for the debate. She picked up another $1,000 for an afternoon panel on neighboring Virginia Military Institute's all-male status.
And, Schneider said, Strossen flies coach.
by CNB