Sheriff Lee Baca: A Visionary of Police Reform in Complex Times

By Karen Richardson

Nonconformist former Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca exemplifies how one can overcome adversity through grit, faith, and education and offers hope for improved relations between law enforcement and disenfranchised communities.

Sheriff Lee Baca explores the complicated history of law enforcement and race relations in Los Angeles—the Zoot Suit, Watts, and Rodney King riots—juxtaposed against the life and career of the four-time-elected sheriff.

Abandoned by his undocumented mother and raised by his grandparents in an East Los Angeles barrio, where he cared for his disabled uncle, it seemed inconceivable that Baca would one day command the largest sheriff's department in the country and earn the respect of national and world leaders.

With his honorable service to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department from 1965 to 2014 too often overshadowed by sensational headlines and soundbites, few know of the far-reaching and enduring innovations Baca brought to law enforcement, including unprecedented transparency; education-based incarceration; public-trust policing; global outreach; the recruitment of women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of color; and more.

At a time when communities are considering defunding police departments and district attorneys fail to prosecute, Sheriff Lee Baca is a timely must-read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mentoris Project
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215242025

Book preview

1

EAST L.A.

Kindness is actually the greatest strength on Earth.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, August 2, 1942, twenty-two-year-old farmworker José Díaz lay dying on a dirt road near a popular swimming hole known as Sleepy Lagoon. Surrounded by cornfields, the reservoir on the Williams Ranch in what is now Commerce, California, was popular with young Mexican American Angelenos. By day, the idyllic spot offered teens denied access to Whites Only public swimming pools relief from the blistering desert sun. By night, it provided lovestruck couples an escape from the overcrowded apartments they shared with their large families in the barrios.

On August 1, Hank Leyvas had brought his girlfriend to Sleepy Lagoon for such an interlude. Strains of live music from a nearby birthday party for a woman named Amelia Delgadillo carried through the still air to their car. But any romantic intentions Leyvas might have had abruptly ended when members of a local gang from Downey chanced upon the couple. Adrenalized after crashing and creating trouble at the birthday party, the boys were primed for more action. Taunting Leyvas and his girlfriend, their verbal insults quickly led to blows, and the young lovers were both badly beaten.

Humiliated and enraged—and a gang member himself—Leyvas returned to his neighborhood in South Los Angeles to corral his pals from the 38th Street gang. Hell-bent on revenge, the fourteen- to twenty-two-year-old zoot suit–clad pachucos caravanned to Sleepy Lagoon to look for the boys who had attacked Leyvas. For the second time that night, hot-tempered punks upended Amelia Delgadillo’s birthday party. The band had packed up around one a.m., so the remaining guests were dancing in the backyard to music from a radio. Inebriated and armed with knives, clubs, and chains, the boys from 38th Street arrived looking for revenge, and though the Downey gang was long gone, they tangled with both male and female partygoers in a short but violent brawl.

A few boys from 38th Street missed the start of the melee at the Delgadillo ranch house. While on their way, they veered off the road and got stuck in a ditch near Sleepy Lagoon. Their girlfriends got out to help push the car free. On the dirt road, bathed in the light of the not-quite-full moon, was a young man bleeding from his head and mouth, his fists and face swollen and cut, his skull fractured. His breath was shallow. He was unconscious. The pockets of his baggy pants were turned inside out. The girls tried to assess his condition and offer assistance, but their boyfriends pulled them away, eager to join the action at the Delgadillo home. The young man was José Díaz, who lived in a bunkhouse on the Williams Ranch and had been a guest at the birthday party. After being discovered by a Good Samaritan, Díaz died a few hours later at Los Angeles County General Hospital from a subdural hemorrhage. It was supposed to have been his first day serving in the US Army.

A decade before José Díaz’s murder, the country was in the throes of the Great Depression. Three of every four working Americans were unemployed. Charities struggled to feed the poverty-stricken in breadlines that stretched for city blocks. Despair had become the nation’s ethos.

President Herbert Hoover wanted to put a chicken in every pot and get Americans back to work. When he stated that Mexicans took jobs away from American citizens, he hit a nerve with the public. In 1931, the government began forcibly repatriating Mexican aliens. It is estimated that up to a million were deported, 60 percent of whom were actually US citizens. In one raid at a Los Angeles park, immigration agents rounded up around four hundred unsuspecting men and women onto dozens of flatbed trucks consigned for the train station. Over the next five years, approximately one-third of Los Angeles’s Mexican population was deported. When the Los Angeles City Council complained to the County Board of Supervisors, they got this response: This isn’t about constitutional validity. It’s about the color of their skin.

Absurdly, the government flip-flopped on its policy a few years later. Now at war, the country faced a labor shortage caused when men of working age joined the military to fight the Germans and Japanese. Days after Díaz was murdered, the federal government signed a bilateral labor agreement with Mexico to offset the loss of farmworkers. The Bracero Program offered incentives for Mexican laborers to come work in America. In the decade that followed, the Mexican population in Los Angeles soared to approximately 250,000.

The year 1942 was a time of exceptional racial tension in the City of Angels. Distrust of the other was rampant. The US government had begun incarcerating Japanese Americans at the Manzanar War Relocation Center two hundred miles north of Sleepy Lagoon. Of those detainees, 90 percent came from Los Angeles. Posters and pamphlets spread messages such as How to Spot a Jap, Stay on the Job Until Every Murdering Jap is Wiped Out!, and Don’t Speak the Enemy’s Language, Speak American.

While Mexican men and women toiled in the fields, their children grew up largely unsupervised in barrios cut off from other Angelenos. Segregated by their neighborhoods and poverty, as well as direct ordinances (and some by their language), disaffected young men found camaraderie in a growing gang culture. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was trying to get the upper hand on Mexican gangs. Its best and most experienced officers had joined the military and left to fight for their country. Those who remained were less experienced and qualified and fell short of their duty to protect and to serve. Additionally, the situation with the Mexican gangs had created a public relations ordeal, partly of the LAPD’s own making. The Los Angeles Examiner, a branch of William Randolph Hearst’s syndicate, was thriving by publishing lurid and sensational headlines to sell more newspapers, and the LAPD had been feeding the beast exaggerated accounts of the crimes committed by Mexican gangs. Further hyperbole from tabloid reporters instilled a fear of violence in the public that far outweighed the gangs’ actual threat. On a different day, the death of José Díaz—to too many, just another Mexican—might have gone unnoticed or been written off as inconsequential. But the LAPD had decided it needed to show they had the Mexican problem under control. They needed to make a statement.

Instead of investigating the murder and interviewing witnesses however, the LAPD rounded up between three to six hundred boys and young men in an unprecedented citywide dragnet. All the detainees were of Mexican descent. When they discovered Hank Leyvas had been at Sleepy Lagoon the night of the murder, they arrested him and twenty-one members of the 38th Street gang. The police already knew Leyvas and they didn’t like him; the cocky nineteen-year-old had been in trouble before. The first time was when he’d been arrested for car theft and spent three days in jail until his father found the title slip showing that the car was actually his, as he’d been saying all along. Leyvas had also been arrested for loitering, fighting, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault and battery. In Leyvas the LAPD had found its scapegoat. And in the trial that followed—whether or not it was a spoken agreement—the district attorney’s office and judge who heard the case decided they too would make an example out of Hank Leyvas. The Mexican problem needed a face and Leyvas fit the bill.

The judge wouldn’t let the seventeen accused gang members sit with their attorneys or change their clothes for the trial. The once immaculately groomed pack sat in the courtroom in the glad rags they’d been wearing for weeks, now bloody, dirty, and torn from their scuffle in Sleepy Lagoon, as well as from the beatings they’d received from the police while in custody. The judge said he wanted the jury to see them for who they really were. Despite no police investigation, an overwhelming lack of evidence, and conflicting testimony from witnesses, on January 12, 1943, all but five of the accused gang members, including Leyvas, were found guilty of the murder of José Díaz. They were sent to San Quentin prison, four hundred miles away from their working-class families. Their leader, Hank Leyvas, got a life sentence. Five girls who had refused to cooperate were declared wards of the state, and though they had no trial, they were sent to the dreaded Ventura School for Girls facility.

Angelenos of Mexican heritage were crushed by the verdict, which intensified their distrust of the police after years of harassment at their hands. Other Angelenos believed the pachucos had it coming. On a more positive note, a group of activists and concerned citizens, including Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, and Anthony Quinn, helped the boys from 38th Street overturn the verdict, and all were released after serving close to two years in prison. Their pachuca girlfriends, however, were held in reform school until they turned twenty-one.

Before the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and claimed the land to build a baseball stadium, Chavez Ravine was a barrio. Thousands of Mexican Americans lived there and in the surrounding enclaves. During the war, servicemen from around the country rotated through the area’s newly built Navy and Marine Corps Reserve Armory. Terrified of their fate yet fired up to annihilate the enemy on the other side of the Pacific, boys barely out of high school understood that whether they survived or perished, their time in Los Angeles would be the end of life as they knew it. Downtown jazz bars beckoned, offering booze, dancing, and a chance to meet a girl or two.

Stigmatized and distrusted by those who held all the power, younger Mexicans became protective of the precious little they could call their own. Outside their barrios they saw signs like We Serve Whites Only—No Spanish or Mexicans. Their hostility toward the outside world and the police who continually harassed them grew to include the cocksure uniformed boys who eyed their girlfriends and swaggered drunkenly through their streets.

Barrio gangs had cultivated a new look, adopting the comically oversized zoot suits worn by Cab Calloway and popularized by the dance-hall crowd. For jitterbuggers, the billowing pants provided freedom of movement and the tapered ankles kept them from tripping over their hems. For the pachucos, the voluminous knee-length jackets easily concealed chains, clubs, and other weapons and were an extravagance otherwise lacking in their lives. The fashion spread beyond the gangs throughout the Mexican community.

But outside that community, resentment over the zoot suit was building. War rations were in effect. The growing list of limited items included gasoline, coffee, sugar, silk stockings, and the wool needed for soldiers’ uniforms. The War Production Board issued regulations on clothing that essentially banned the manufacture of zoot suits because of their wasteful use of fabric. But like any outlawed product, the outfits were still available on the black market, with some sellers even offering installment plans.

To the new enlistees who were sacrificing everything they held dear to protect the freedom and liberty of others—including the pachucos who heckled them—the baggy zoot suits were seen as a blatant contempt for their service.

No defining historical incident is borne in a vacuum. With the benefit of hindsight, we can connect a sequence of events and see it was just a matter of time before all hell was going to break loose. Four months after the Sleepy Lagoon trial, the fuse was lit on the night of May 30, 1943, when a few sailors and pachucos passed each other in the Alpine barrio near Chavez Ravine. A fight broke out, leaving one of the sailors with a broken jaw.

Just as the 38th Street gang members had searched for the Downey gang to avenge Hank Leyvas’s beating, sixteen sailors from the armory—carrying belts and clubs—went looking for the drapes who had beaten one of their own. The Zoot Suit Riots had begun.

The next night, fifty sailors joined the fray. The following night, two hundred. And over the weekend, five thousand civilians and servicemen—some from the army and marine corps on shore leave, others who bused into the city from San Diego and Las Vegas—went on a search-and-destroy mission through downtown and the barrios of East Los Angeles. A couple of twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys were pulled from a movie theater and left on the street as the clothing deemed so offensive was ripped from their bodies and burned in a pile next to them. Night after night, the mayhem escalated. When the mob couldn’t find zoot-suiters, they began attacking any Mexican they could find, as well as Italians, Filipinos, and African Americans.

Newspapers continued to inflame the situation with headlines like Zoot Suiters Learn Lesson in Fights with Servicemen and Pachuco Gangs Tangle in New Street Brawls with Navy; Cry ‘Death to Cops.’ The LAPD was later chastised for sitting back while the city they were sworn to protect and serve imploded. Some had even joined the fight. When the police did show up to make arrests, it was after the servicemen had left the area. Thus, after five nights of unbridled violence, most of the five hundred people detained were Mexican. The military finally declared the city of Los Angeles off-limits to all personnel and put an end to the Zoot Suit Riots on June 8, 1943. Surprisingly, no lives were lost.

This was the Los Angeles of Leroy Lee Baca’s infancy.

Boyle Heights is a neighborhood east of downtown Los Angeles. Today it can be found where the 5, 10, 60, and 101 freeways meet. With over half a million vehicles passing through every day, the tangle of concrete and asphalt known as the Spaghetti Bowl is the busiest interchange in the world. But in 1943 in the days of trolleys and buses, twelve-lane freeways were as unimaginable as the outlandish notion that the miles of blacktop wouldn’t be enough to accommodate the number of automobiles Angelenos would accumulate. Some Boyle Heights streets were paved, some were not. The multicultural neighborhood was one of the only areas in Los Angeles without restricted housing covenants that discriminated against people of color. The diverse enclave was home to approximately five thousand Japanese Americans, thirty-five thousand Jews, and fifteen thousand Mexican Americans—including Thomas and Consuelo (née Hernandez) Baca and their two children: three-year-old Elaine and one-year-old Leroy David—known as Lee—born on May 27,1942.

On June 6, 1943, the Zoot Suit Riots had spread into Boyle Heights and come within a mile and a half of 1020 Bonnie Beach Place, where the Bacas shared a one-bedroom apartment. Infant Lee was still in excruciating pain from a dreadful accident. Two months earlier, he’d been crawling under the ironing board and become tangled in the iron’s electrical cord. The hot iron fell onto Lee’s right knee, searing deep into his skin. The wound failed to heal and secreted a foul-smelling, purulent fluid for years. The constant pain limited the boy’s ability to crawl and, later, to walk and run.

When Lee was three years old, his father enlisted in the US Navy. World War II was over, and Tom only served a year. But instead of coming home after his assignment, Tom offered Consuelo $15 a month in child support and filed for divorce.

When he was five, Lee’s mother took him to Children’s Hospital for surgery, where doctors grafted skin from his left thigh to his right knee. When he woke up from anesthesia, both his legs were in casts and would remain so for two weeks. Unable to take time off work, Consuelo couldn’t visit her son and Lee worried she would never come back for him. For as long as he could remember, pain had been a daily part of Lee’s life. He thought he knew what pain was—but that was until they removed his casts. To this day, he describes the process as unbearable, saying, This encounter gave me the courage to endure physical pain and believe it would pass.

Born in Mexico, Consuelo’s parents had illegally brought her into the United States when she was an infant. A single mother, she would bring Lee and Elaine to school, then take the bus to a downtown clothing factory, where she worked as a seamstress. Already overwhelmed, when she gave birth to a third child, she couldn’t cope. Something had to give. And for reasons known only to her, she decided that something was her then seven-year-old son. Consuelo put Lee up for adoption.

When Clara Baca, Lee’s paternal grandmother, found out, she was outraged. She insisted Lee come live with her, his grandfather Tomas, and their disabled adult son. Consuelo dropped Lee off at her in-laws’ and told him she would come back for him the next day. She didn’t. Nor would she.

Clara’s family, the Bottoms, came from Perryville, Kentucky, where they had settled long before approximately thirty-eight thousand Union and Confederate soldiers had clashed on the family farm in the Battle of Perryville, one of the bloodiest of the Civil War. After the war, Clara’s father, Charles Bottom, had moved to the New Mexico Territory, where silver ore had recently been discovered. There he helped establish Silver City, met his Mexican-born wife, and likely frequented the same saloons as Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, and the Wild Bunch. Charles and his wife had three children. Their only daughter, Clara, married Tomas Baca, a hardworking boilermaker for the Pacific Railroad, and they had three sons: Charles, Thomas (Lee’s father), and William. Sometime during the 1930s, the family moved to East Los Angeles.

Born in the Wild West, Clara grew into a straight-talking, hardworking, no-nonsense woman. Yet she was kind, loving, and patient. In his grandparents’ two-bedroom Boyle Heights home, Lee shared a room with his twenty-four-year-old uncle, William, who was severely mentally disabled. A pound and a half at birth, Lee’s uncle would never be able to care for himself, but Clara wouldn’t hear any talk of placing him in an institution.

At seven years old, brown-eyed Lee had officially been abandoned by both his parents and now helped his grandmother care for his uncle, who couldn’t talk or communicate in any way. Lee helped feed, shave, and bathe William, and on Friday nights, helped his grandmother comb the streets looking for his drunken grandfather. Lee’s leg had scarred, but not completely healed. Every time he bent his knee, the skin became uncomfortably taut. But there was no room for self-pity in Clara Baca’s house, nor was there in Lee’s heart. His uncle was a daily reminder of how good Lee had it, instilling in him an appreciation for life and physical and mental health. Lee learned from Clara’s example and came to share her positive outlook, work ethic, and steadfast sense of responsibility. He didn’t quite understand what Put that in your pipe and smoke it meant, but he knew whatever words his grandmother spoke before the confusing phrase were important and something he should remember. Clara’s devotion to both him and his Uncle William deeply impacted Lee. He was grateful for his grandmother’s warmth and strength, and he never wanted to disappoint her. And despite his grandfather’s struggle with alcohol, he was dutiful in providing for his wife, William, and Lee.

Despite the hardships, those were fond years for Lee. Every Saturday night the family tuned in to Hometown Jamboree on KXLA—Nothing but Western Music 24 Hours a Day—and listened to Cliffie Stone’s broadcast from the El Monte Legion Stadium. The show introduced Lee to Tennessee Ernie Ford, Johnny Horton, and Ferlin Husky, and fostered a lifetime love