Daryl Gates Quotes

United States, Public Servant
August 30, 1926 – April, 16, 2010.

Daryl Gates was the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) from 1978 to 1992. His length of tenure was second only to that of William H. Parker. As chief of police, he took a hardline, aggressive, paramilitary approach to law enforcement. Gates is co-credited with the creation of SWAT teams with LAPD's John Nelson, who others claim was the originator of SWAT in 1965. Gates also co-founded D.A.R.E along with the Los Angeles Unified School District.

It was a department where you had honesty and integrity stamped right on you when you came into the Los Angeles Police Department. If you violated that, or if you were a dishonest cop, you were terrible. We got rid of you as quickly as possible.

Daryl Gates
- Police
- Integrity
- Honesty
Casual drug users should be taken out and shot.

Daryl Gates
- Taken
- Drug

No police department should hire more quickly than they can assimilate the people that they bring in, and we did. I take responsibility for it. It was the first opportunity I had to hire, and I wanted to do it, and I take responsibility.

Daryl Gates
Our people went out every single night trying to stop crime before it happened, trying to take people off the street that they believed were involved in crime. That made us a very aggressive, proactive police department.

Daryl Gates
- People
- Trying
- Night
They have the ability to take a person's freedom from them. On certain situations, they have the ability to take a person's reputation. And under certain circumstances, they have the authority to take a person's life.

Daryl Gates
- Life
- Freedom
No one knew what Rodney King had done beforehand to be stopped. No one realized that he was a parolee and that he was violating his parole. No one knew any of those things. All they saw was this grainy film and police officers hitting him over the head.

Daryl Gates
- Done
- King
- Police
We were the finest. We were the best in the world. We were a department that people came from all over the world to study, to look at, to see how we accomplished so much with so little; and we did.

Daryl Gates
- People
- World
- Study