The Los Angeles Police Department has “some real work to do to continue a process of reform that’s far from finished,” Joe Domanick, author of the new book “Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing,” tells NPR. Domanick believes that Charlie Beck, successor to William Bratton as chief, “has the potential but he’s hit a wall in terms of continuing that reform … the unique thing about Bratton was that [he changed the LAPD] from the inside, which is so hard to achieve in policing.”
Domanick, the West Coast bureau chief of The Crime Report, says, “What we’re seeing now is change from the outside, the demands of a whole new generation of millennials who really do see African Americans as fellow human beings, unlike people of my generation — many white people of my generation.” He added that, “People like Jelani Cobb and Ta-Nehisi Coates … are linking it to the entire black experience and saying, ‘Look: You’ve got to understand this, that it’s not just the police, that the police are reflective of a far deeper problem.’ “