How an Innovative LAPD Program Could Bring Real Reform to Policing

A
bove all, he remembers the boots the cops wore when they kicked down the door of his mom’s apartment. They yanked him out of bed and a deep sleep, 12 gang cops in riot gear searching the room of a tall-for-his-age 10-year-old named Tionne Tisdale. “Where is it?” they yelled, manhandling Tionne until they realized he was only a child. In his terror and confusion, Tionne stared at their jackboots, thinking, “How’d I not hear those on the stairs?” Sixteen years later, that question still haunts him when he wakes, in a soft panic, at 5 a.m.

The cop who led that raid in 2008 is also haunted. “No one wins when you execute a no-knock warrant — but that night, all of us lost,” says Los Angeles Police Department Senior Lead Officer John Coughlin, a cop so feared that in much of Watts they called him the Boogeyman. He busted three generations of Bounty Hunter Bloods in as many decades. For years, any cop-connected shooting in Watts was ascribed to Coughlin by the streets of the Southeast sector — in particular, by the residents of Nickerson Gardens, a 55-acre stand of low-slung slabs known as the Nick, where there’s no getting in or out without running a gauntlet of gangbangers. 

No matter that Tionne was a stardust child whose early brilliance on the basketball court earned him safe harbor from the Bloods; that he grew to become such a playground god that his travel-ball coach, Andre Miller — an NBA assist champ — called him the greatest prospect to come from Watts. Tionne’s soul was forever kinked by that Coughlin-led raid at 5 a.m. “When he came down and saw his mom handcuffed in the yard, I watched all the innocence go out of the kid,” says Coughlin, who, at 55 and balding, has softened a bit from those clenched-fist days in the aughts. “It’s stuck with me forever, though I hope I’ve made it up to him. God knows I’ve spent, like, 20 years trying.” 

It was clear at the scene that Tionne’s mom, Tylin, knew nothing of the crack found in her flat. (It belonged to a family friend who stopped by sometimes.) Coughlin knew he had a mess on his hands: Tylin was a certified nursing attendant to the elderly and disabled. But because it was her name on the apartment lease, he felt he had no choice. His team booked her on possession with intent; she spent two nights in county lockup before her brother bailed her out. But as they hauled her off, she looked Coughlin in the eye: “Please don’t put my little boy through the system.” 

Coughlin took Tionne to a doughnut shop, bought him breakfast and some chocolate milk, then dropped him at his uncle’s house. By week’s end, Tionne was back with his mom, obsessed with never setting one foot wrong, lest Coughlin and his riot cops come banging back up his steps. “Coughlin locked up my uncles and my aunts,” says Tionne. “When he came around, everyone scattered like he was the devil with a pitchfork.” 

Three years passed; Tionne grew and grew, a kid of 13 destroying high school juniors in AAU tourneys around town. Then one day, in the summer of 2011, a cop stopped by the Tisdale apartment to make Tylin an offer: “I’ll pay Tionne’s way to Catholic school — and fund him straight through high school. All I ask is he keep a 3.0 average, and be a leader for other kids in my program.” Tylin heard him out, then told her son he was going, period. They warily thanked the cop, who showed himself out to begin making arrangements for Tionne’s transfer. 

“When he saw his mom handcuffed in the yard, I watched all the innocence go out of that kid.”

That cop was John Coughlin, and his program, Operation Progress, would change almost everyone it touched, including Tionne. It plucked kids by the hundreds from the projects in Watts, granted them tuition-paid, private educations, then sent them to top-tier colleges around the country on full-ride scholarships. It would surround those kids with tutors and mentors, lavish them with shopping sprees and paid internships. It would partner with billionaires and nonprofits to lift tweens and their younger siblings out of squalor, and slowly but surely begin to empty the pond of future Bloods and Crips. 

But the most salient thing Coughlin did in 2011 was say yes to Emada Tingirides. Tingirides, a Black sergeant and unstoppable rock star in the LAPD, had been tasked with setting up four new squads to undertake the impossible in Watts: to make peace with its residents, build faith with its leaders, and break the gangs’ stranglehold on its corners. Those new units, to be known as the Community Safety Partnership (CSP), were the brainchild of a pair of ex-combatants: the newly named police chief, Charlie Beck, and a firebrand opponent of gang cops and chiefs, the social-justice titan Connie Rice. After years of warfare in open court — Rice, an attorney and civil rights activist, had spent decades suing men like Beck for their “blue grip” suppression of the poor — they’d come to a hard-won truth: Shock-and-awe policing didn’t work. Far from making Los Angeles safe, it wreaked war without end between cops and gangs, and turned Watts and Compton into domestic kill zones, forever blighting the lives of the kids raised there. 

As the administrative officer of the CSP, Tingirides was recruiting 40 cops from hundreds of applicants on the force. Chosen for their street sense and hunger for change — and enticed with a pay hike and a promotion to come on board — they’d be something possibly never seen before in an American police force: part social worker, part peacekeeper, and part apologist for the department, taking responsibility for some of the indefensible wrongs inflicted by gang cops over the years. 

Coughlin sat with Tingirides, listened to her sales pitch, then asked her why she wanted Watts’ most hated gang cop to become her first big hire. “I told him, ‘Because you’re a badass, and because the gangs fear you, they’ll know we’re not going away,’ ” says Tingirides, who’s since risen from sergeant to deputy chief. “But the bigger reason was Operation Progress. I wanted his program to be the model for my cops.” 

Coughlin thought it over, weighed the raise and title upgrade, and then accepted her offer, with one provision. “I don’t apologize for anyone,” he said flatly. “And another thing: This shit’ll never work.” 

John Coughlin is a man of many powers, but prophecy isn’t among them. The CSP has blown past its founders’ dreams, evolving from a tactical hand grenade to a transformational power in Los Angeles. It has more than doubled in size, become a stand-alone bureau of the LAPD, and helped repair the department’s pitch-black reputation in Watts, South Central, and East L.A. In just its first six years, it saved the taxpayers of Los Angeles an estimated $100 million in major crimes prevented, as reported by a team of researchers at UCLA. It helped radically reduce the death toll in Watts; raised the solved-murder rate in that area to 100 percent between 2023 and 2024; and took back parks and playgrounds from gangs, giving families green space to picnic and play Little League games. 

It was no one’s intent to invent the future of policing when CSP was launched in 2011. But that is precisely what its founders have done: built a new breed of cop and retooled the social contract between a community and the officers who protect it. It’s premised in the notion that safety is a covenant between two parties: the cops who patrol the riskiest streets, and residents who trust and respect those cops enough to help them keep the peace. That is where CSP comes in. It deploys its cops less as foot patrolmen than as problem-­solvers. They get streetlights fixed, abandoned cars towed, and gang graffiti scrubbed. They find jobs for strapped parents, treatment for first offenders, and vocational education for at-risk teens. They sit gang leaders down and strike a pact: They’ll ignore petty drug deals and public drinking on weekends in exchange for those men leaving their weapons at home. Above all, they recruit every kid they can find for CSP rec teams and youth clubs. Volunteer-based outfits like the Police Athletic League have been around for decades, offering after-school programs, tutoring, and camps in major cities across the country, but L.A. is actually paying CSP cops to run cheer squads and reading groups. 

The reward for all their labors: a powerful rapport with the residents of Watts, and countless kids rerouted from the gangs and the carceral system. But for all its successes, CSP has had to fight for its life from the day its boots hit the ground. It faced years of fuck-you’s from the residents of Watts, who told those cops where to stick their fine intentions. It built faith with gang leaders only to be backstabbed by gang cops from its own precincts. It survived a backstage plot to gut its methods and mission by a newly named police chief in 2018. Only the last-gasp heroics of its co-founder, Rice, saved CSP from the chopping block — and saved South Los Angeles from becoming Sinaloa, a place governed by its homegrown cartels.

A Call to Action

Connie Rice is that rarest American treasure: a public intellectual who serves the public by bending power systems to her will. Years before she dreamt up CSP, she sued Los Angeles on behalf of poor schoolkids and low-wage riders of city buses. She and her partners proved beyond all doubt that L.A.’s spending was grossly biased, and won billions of dollars to build schools in South L.A. and expand surface transit throughout the city. Over the first three decades of a dreadnought career, 10 of those years spent as a litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, she sued anyone and everyone in charge of institutions that trampled the rights of the underserved. After $10 billion won in such cases, Rice narrowed her focus to that first of all freedoms: the right not to be murdered by your neighbors. “If you’re trapped in a project run by Grape Street Crips, then none of your other rights count for squat,” she says.

And so Rice, who’s still regal at 70 and still working as a nonprofit lawyer, set her sights on the LAPD. For 30 years, the department had waged a blood-soaked war against the Black and Hispanic gangs of L.A. It tried building a blue wall around the city’s south side, hoping, by siege, to surround the gangsters and scoop up any daft enough to try to leave. But gangs are a virus: a pathogen that overwhelms its host, then poisons those trying to contain it. Over that 30-year span beginning in the Seventies, the city of Los Angeles spent $25 billion to reduce the gangs’ power. Its yield? A sixfold increase in the number of gangs, with membership rising past 100,000, and roughly 8,000 unsolved murders in the city’s Southeast Division alone. It is impossible to overstate the strength of those gangs and the terror they inflicted on working families. They raped the sisters of boys who refused to join their set. They sent “welcome wagon” crews to rob and beat families moving into the hood. They volleyed gunshots and garbage cans at police cruisers responding to 911 calls. 

“They were stuck on stupid, doing plantation policing and expecting a different outcome.”

Inevitably, the bug then bit the department, turning gang squads into gangs with badges. The most infamous was the CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit in the Rampart Division, assigned to the neighborhoods west of downtown L.A. Its cops tortured and ripped off countless gang members when it wasn’t jacking kilos of coke from the evidence room. Years before the CRASH scandal broke in 1997, Rice was suing the force for goon-squad tactics. To take but one of those suits and its reach: Rice learned, in the early Nineties, that the department’s K-9 teams were maiming 80 percent of the people they busted and sending almost half to the hospital. Rice’s team bundled together 40 such cases, got hold of a videotape cops filmed for their amusement — a reel of bloody victims they called “dog biscuits” — and won not only cash restitution but also a revamp of that unit. The LAPD transferred the handlers who’d taught those dogs to maul, put new trainers in charge of the squad, and created an outfit that, 30 years later, is still a benchmark for other squads.

But for all her courthouse coups, Rice didn’t make a dent in the department’s mindset. “The motto for its gang squads was ‘search and destroy,’ the motto for its SWAT teams was ‘shock and awe,’ ” she says. “They were stuck on stupid, doing plantation policing and somehow expecting a different outcome.” 

By the end of the Nineties, the feds had seen enough. The Justice Depart­ment won a consent decree, forcing a radical rebuild of the LAPD. In response, city leaders hired former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton to run the force and gave him carte blanche to clean house. Bratton had left New York with a complex brand. He was a fierce apostle of “broken windows” policing, which put people in jail for petty infractions like public drinking and turnstile hopping. But he also introduced the CompStat system of tracking — and reducing — crime. In three years, murders fell by around half in New York, other violent crimes also declined, and Bratton became the face of the new police chief: a technocrat who brought quants to law enforcement. 

His first act in L.A. was to demand the resignation of every department leader from captain up. He hired back the ones who respected his vision of reform and pushed the old-boy cronies to retire. He tapped a famed defense lawyer as deputy chief and charged him with bringing his roughly 9,000 cops into compliance with the consent decree. But the best thing Bratton did in his seven-year stint was persuade Connie Rice to come inside the tent as consigliere. He tasked her to run his Rampart probe, after four prior attempts merely scratched the surface. 

It took years, but Rice finally cracked the code by coaxing Rampart cops to spill their guts. In roundtable talks, their full humanity emerged: their fatigue at fighting gangsters to a draw and their guilt for how that fight traduced them. “I didn’t come to this job with racial animosity,” Rice recalls one captain saying. “But I was too stupid to understand that search-and-destroy doesn’t just destroy a community. It destroys yourself.” 

That captain, Charlie Beck, became Rice’s thought partner as he climbed the ranks. In his opening act as the Rampart boss, he restored a tarnished asset, MacArthur Park, to its former luster. Once the emerald of the Westlake section, the park had become a shooting gallery for gangbangers, sex workers, and addicts. (When they dredged its lake in the Seventies, they found hundreds of handguns rotting in the murk.) Before he sent his cops in, Beck enlisted everyone in the area — business owners, residents, pastors, and, yes, gangsters — to help him reclaim the space. He recruited the Forestry Service to trim trees so he could install security cameras. He enlisted public works to deep-clean the park of syringes and used condoms, and persuaded the L.A. Philharmonic to stage free concerts. He promised parkgoers foot patrols and new streetlights. The community signed on, and the city followed suit, funding a concert pavilion and a Metro station, then restoring the spring-fed lake. 

When the renovation was done in 2005, Rice walked the park with a reporter. They saw couples on paddleboats, children playing soccer at 9 p.m., and picnic tables packed with families. Without firing a single gunshot, Beck had pulled the park back from the brink — and given Rice her template for Watts. Go into its gang-run projects, offer the shot callers something of value, and ask for their assistance making the streets safer for schoolkids and grandmas, their own included. 

Rice wrote her blue-ribbon report on Rampart — but used it to platform then-­commander Beck and his “heal and build” vision of policing. On the strength of that report, Beck was named the new chief when Bratton moved on, amicably, in 2009. But Beck had barely furnished his office when Rice burst in on him that summer. A Korean mom had been robbed and nearly gang-raped on her move-in day in the Jordan Downs projects in Watts. “This madness stops today,” Rice screamed, before Beck calmed her down. “You and I are going to fix this together,” he said. “What do you have in mind?” Rice ticked off her list: a detachment of 50 cops, five sergeants, and a captain to protect the terrorized tenants of Watts’ projects. 

“I didn’t see that search-and-destroy doesn’t just destroy a community. It destroys yourself.”

It took Beck two years to forge Rice’s model with his civic partners: the Housing Authority, which owned those projects and failed to protect its tenants from the gangs; the city-run Gang Reduction and Youth Devel­opment agency (GRYD), whose remit was to shrink L.A. gangs and their violence by weaning at-risk kids with a raft of programs; and the reluctant union for the city’s cops, whom Rice had spent a decade fighting in court. With those sign-offs, she and Beck chose the corps of CSP, picking officers who’d had a moral awakening after joining the force. Those officers got weeks of training from GRYD, learning to be protectors, not oppressors, in Watts, and to let the small stuff slide. The nickel-and-dime crack sales; the tickets for open containers — none of that mattered anymore. Their task now was forging rapport with people who loathed and feared them: going door to door and introducing themselves, even to the gangsters on the corner. 

But before his cops were deployed in Watts, Beck dispatched Rice to meet the folks who mattered most, to ask for their blessing. “In 2010, I met the matriarchs of the Grape Street Crips, knowing we had no shot without their say-so,” Rice says. Sitting with five women in their fifties and sixties, Rice led with a concession: “I’m nuts for even asking you to work with cops who’ve killed your sons and husbands. But there’s a new chief in town, he wants to try something different — and we all know the old rules don’t apply. The kids these days, they’re shooting everyone in sight. Your grandkids might be next.” 

Those women — most of whom are dead now — assailed her as “a near-white bitch” who had some nerve on her. Rice listened, then reminded them all that she’d spent decades crushing cops in court. In the end, they told her they’d think about it, then get back to her… whenever.

A couple of days passed. Rice got a call. “On behalf of our babies, we’ll meet with those cops. But for your sake, they’d best not be lying.”

A New Way to Patrol

Training day with Coughlin starts out blue and brilliant, with a faint zest of gunplay on an April morning. We sip coffee in his cruiser when 10 cops run past, bolting out of Southeast station to give chase to a gang member who’s jacked a driver. “Ten to one, it’s a P Jay Crip,” says Coughlin, belting in. “They like to boost cars for their smash-and-grabs. Swarm a store on Rodeo, clean it out, then dump the car wherever.” 

Half an hour later, we’re circling Figueroa Street — or as the Hoover Criminals call it, Fig-a-hoe-a. At 9 a.m., it’s a symphony of sorrows. Girls in bras and string thongs totter on spikes, twerking for the schmoes just off work from the chicken-rending plants. From bodega doorways, teens in hoodies glare, one hand on the bulge behind their belt. “The pimps,” says Coughlin, hawking up the word like a horsefly is caught in his thorax. “Each of those pricks has a six-pack of girls. Makes three hundred large a year doing nothing.”

Coughlin shows me Figueroa because it’s not his circus; this three-mile strip of human trafficking is the only L.A. hot zone without a dedicated CSP unit. That makes Coughlin mad enough to spit. In other sectors ravaged by gang tyranny — Watts, South Central, Newton, East L.A. — CSP has established a beachhead and says it has slashed violent crime by roughly half. There’s magic in what it does, but no mystery whatsoever. First, its research partner — the national nonprofit Urban Peace Institute — dispatches a team to canvass the community about its wants, fears, and needs. Armed with that data, and funding sign-off from the city council, CSP embeds 10 cops and a sergeant in a hot-zone division for a minimum of five years. Before they hit the streets, though, they liaise with their local partners: the OGs called gang interventionists. 

You may have heard of G.I.s and what they do — but whatever you heard is likely wrong. These are men of a certain age who spent decades in gangs, then made a moral U-turn in the joint. Some have murders on their sheets, others armed assaults — but what all of them have in spades is gravitas. The best are legends in the hood, with street names like Twin and Taco. In 2007, they were recruited by GRYD, the city’s then-newly formed civilian gang unit. Over months of role-play instruction at GRYD’s school for aspiring G.I.s, they were taught to broker peace between hothead gangs who were shooting up the streets of Southeast sector. 

“Back when we got started, there were wars jumping off where one shooting turned to 12,” says Skipp Townsend, a former Rolling Twenty Blood since the 1980s and a charter member of GRYD’s G.I. program since its 2007 launch. “Then we came in, squashed the rumors and escalation, and brought the shooters in to talk.” Those sit-downs with the crews accomplished several goods at once: They ruled out the gangsters who didn’t do the shooting, thus sparing the blameless from getting got; they scuttled wild gossip at the funeral of the deceased, so their crew didn’t ride out seeking vengeance; and they “let us remind them boys that no one’s earning when bodies are falling left and right,” says Townsend.

On the ride over to Watts, Coughlin recounts his own transformation. It began in the late Nineties, when he and his partner came upon an execution in progress. Several Bounty Hunter Bloods were killing a fellow Blood on the first floor of a low-rise unit. Two other Bloods were posted outside. They spotted the two cops and opened fire. When the shooting stopped, two Bloods were dead, one by the hands of the gang and one by cops. 

Aside from nightmares and a partial loss of hearing, Coughlin won’t discuss the fallout of that shooting. The only person he cleaved to — his father back in Boston — suggested he use this incident as a catalyst to enact change in Watts. The two of them started Operation Progress as a tiny nonprofit, raising money to support exceptional kids who were struggling with college costs. Then, eight years later, Coughlin was the first cop on the scene when a 15-year-old was cut down in crossfire. Dovon Harris, mortally wounded, would die three days later, after life-support measures were withdrawn. “He was such a righteous kid, and so damn young,” says Coughlin, who mistook Harris for a tween at the time. “This one cut me deeper than all the rest.” 

We exit the 105 and suddenly we’re in Watts. A dank haze overspreads the day. To our right, Imperial Courts; to our left, the Nick. Half a mile north, Jordan Downs. Those three projects, officially housing around 5,000 souls but probably double or triple that number in actual head count, are each unofficially run by a gang. In the Nick, it’s Bounty Hunters; in Imperial, it’s P Jay Crips; Jordan Downs is run by Grape Street Crips. But a curious thing is happening on this Wednesday in the Nick: No one’s working the avenues or the storefronts. Grandmas come and go, walking obstinate dogs who stop to browse the bushes. Abuelas tend flower boxes, chatting with neighbors over fences. You’d never know this grid was a free-fire zone before CSP and the G.I.s came in: 16 murders a year pre-CSP down to six, on average, per the LAPD’s South Bureau Division.

Here and there, Bloods lean against cars, smoking something pungent and drinking beer. Both are grounds for a ticket and, years ago, dares to passing cops. Coughlin stops his car but doesn’t get out. He nods in greeting, asks the gangsters about their morning, and reminds one that he’s got a job for him, a good gig driving tractor trailers. “You’re too old for this shit, D, you got kids in school,” he says. “Give my guy a call. He’ll hook you up.” 

D, a squat brawler in his drowsy thirties, gives a side-eyed smirk. “C’mon, Coughlin: You know how this game go,” he drawls. “You gon’ chase me, your kid gon’ chase my kid.” 

“We saw a change from hook and book to serve and protect. Together, we helped shut the killing down.”

“Suit yourself,” says Coughlin, and pulls off slowly. I ask him about the petty crimes we just witnessed and the restraint he displayed. What exactly is the job of CSP, and where does the policing come in?

“That’s the job,” he says. “Letting the small shit slide so we can come down hard on the big stuff — the murders, the break-ins, the domestics we’d never hear about if we didn’t build relationships with these people.” He walks me through the protocols CSP established before it sent its officers into Watts. Stop the stop-and-frisk — a tactic Bratton endorsed — replace it with stop-and-chat, and get to know everyone on your beat. Focus less on crime than the problems that create it, especially with respect to school-age kids. Become their Pee Wee coach or their reading tutor. Take them out to Popeyes for heart-to-hearts. And when violent crimes occur, go arrest the doer, then return and ask his folks what they need: cash or food assistance, a job-training slot, an after-school program. 

That training, says Coughlin, was the last mile of his change, though adopting it cost him many pains. His CSP overboss, Capt. Phil Tingirides (then-future spouse of Emada), dragged him to Watts Gang Task Force meetings in 2010, hosted by Councilwoman Janice Hahn. There, several dozen of Watts’ leaders — pastors, activists, parents, and OGs — dumped decades of grievances on those cops. “There was so much pain, and so much anger, that all I could do was take it,” says Tingirides, a legendary gang cop from the department’s South Bureau who’d undergone a midlife transformation. As the captain of a station that had seen five bosses in as many years, he did something never heard of before in Watts (or anywhere else): He stood up and apologized for his department. Not once, in a perfunctory “sorry for all that” way, but every time his officers crossed the line. 

“It was brutal,” says Donny Joubert, an OG Blood who helped broker L.A.’s famous gang truce of 1992, then founded the Watts Gang Task Force in 2005. “Practically everyone in that room had been put down in the dirt and either framed or robbed by undercovers. But Phil kept his promise — that he would stay for five years and get rid of all the cops who did us wrong.” 

Tingirides, who retired in 2019, did those things and a good deal more. With his sergeant Emada, he sent cops to failing grade schools in Watts to read to the second- and third-graders. In one school, 99th Street Elementary, test scores jumped from bottom quartiles to the top in 2010, according to Tingirides. But that wasn’t his intent. Rather, he hoped to recruit those children as change agents with their parents. “I thought if I could get the moms and grandmas to trust us, they’d call us with their problems,” says Tingirides. “And once we helped them out, they’d tell the other moms — and we’d start getting tips before crimes happened.”

That, in a nutshell, is CSP policing. “It’s called the Community Safety Partnership because both sides have to work it,” says Rice. “You can’t protect a community that won’t protect itself.” The mothers of those schoolkids did call CSP, telling them of pistols hidden in bushes and older sons prepping for first kills. “We first thought CSP couldn’t be trusted — they just want control over us through our kids,” says Kathy Wooten, a mom who rose to power as an interventionist after she’d lost two sons to murder. “But I said, if they can save our babies — with our help — it’ll be the best thing that ever happened to our community.” 

The clincher for Wooten was meeting Emada Tingirides, “who’s a mother besides a great cop.” Tips poured in on cops’ personal phones, some from G.I.s on the streets. Over the first three years of CSP’s lifespan, there were only two gangsters killed in the Nick, down from eight in the previous three. And as the murder rate plunged, solved murders spiked. The clearance rate in Watts in 2023 and 2024 hit 100 percent — an unimaginable statistic pre-CSP.

“We saw a beautiful change from hook and book to serve and protect,” says Joubert. “Together, we helped shut the killing down, and damn if these gangstas didn’t bring their nephews to [Operation Progress]. The majority in Watts now support the program — and their kids are excelling at school.”

‘Hug-a-Thugs’

But put a gun to Johnny Coughlin’s head and he’ll tell you straight out: Those three years were hell on him. “If drinking on the job had been legal then,” Coughlin says, “I’d have been in rehab every Friday.” 

He’d been such an active cop on the street, meeting force with force. So when word got out that he’d joined the department’s “Peace Corps,” gangsters tried him every way they could. They clowned him to his face and spat curses from the corner, threatening the grade-schoolers he mentored. “I couldn’t even nod at my [Operation Progress] kids without putting their lives at risk,” he says. 

That much he expected, though it took everything he had to stand down when he’d always busted heads. The wounds that cut closer were the ones he didn’t see coming. “Some of the cops in our sector called us ‘hug-a-thugs,’ ” he says. “They hated what we were doing — and went out of their way to show it.” At night, when Coughlin and his colleagues were home, LAPD gang squads descended on the Nick or Jordan Downs and cracked skulls for small infractions. “Every time we’d build a little trust with the [gang] leaders, Narcotics [division] would come and sweep up hoppers for a couple of rocks,” says Coughlin’s partner, Eric Ortiz. 

Contempt for CSP went across the board. “You had a community that sees white cops the same: coming from Orange County and treating the residents like all of ’em are gangsters and drug dealers,” says Phil Tingirides. He had cops who’d spent decades in a shooting war with gangs and who viewed CSP partners as softies at best, sellouts and traitors at worst. He had commanders bashing him at Comp­Stat meetings for refusing to arrest for small infractions. “I told them, ‘I’m not taking food off someone’s table when I’m trying to build relationships,’ ” says Tingirides. For that, he “got drug outside” by a superior who screamed, “I know what you’re doing and it’s bullshit!” But Tingirides didn’t budge. Beck, the new chief, had his back. Moreover, “our violent crimes were dropping like crazy.”

The job was hell on cops’ families, too: They rarely had days off. “I led a running club for kids, drove them to horseback lessons, and coached their football team,” says Ortiz. But when you show up every Saturday to teach a kid to swim, you’re telling his folks you’re com­mitted to their child’s future. And when you fortify that message by tending to parents’ needs, too — getting dad a side gig at the Housing Authority, finding their colicky infant a pediatrician — you stop being a cop and become a guardian, their through line to a safer, stabler life. 

Keeblan Marks, a baker and father of four in Imperial Courts, sent all of his kids through Operation Progress — and then Coughlin brought him in as a mentor. “I’ve gone camping and deep-sea fishing [with OP], and spent so much time with my kids that it made me a better man and a father,” he says.

By the end of those three years, word began to filter out: CSP was a smash success in Watts. Someone told the Obamas about this brave new model; they invited both its leaders — Emada, the administrator of the four units, and Phil, her husband and boss — to the White House. The couple sat, on camera, in the First Lady’s box while the president extolled them in his 2015 State of the Union address. Los Angeles magazine put Emada on its list of Ten Most Influential Women; Governing magazine named the couple among its public officials of the year. On the Tingirides’ watch, gun violence had dropped by almost half, Phil says, and in year two of operation, there were exactly zero murders in Watts’ most lethal projects. 

Cities like Chicago and New York called, seeking their guidance creating units. They were lauded by Watts’ leaders, and by Beck; he bumped Emada to lieutenant and Phil to deputy chief in 2016. After years of derision from their fellow cops, they’d been anointed the faces of the new department, one built on the values they espoused. “Every day I put on the uniform now, I’ve got a chance to change the world for the better,” says the new CSP boss, Bill Brockway, a 30-year veteran of the department. “I begin and end each day here by telling my cops I love them. That’s how different this bureau is.” 

Persistence Meets Resistance

In the summer of 2018, Chief Beck retired, after an extraordinary nine-year run. Alas, his successor was exactly the sort of hire Connie Rice had been dreading: an “old-guard enforcer,” as she puts it, named Mike Moore, who hailed from the San Fernando Valley. The Valley, as it’s known, is to South L.A. what Staten Island is to Manhattan: a cheek-by-jowl enclave of white-flight grievance that tried to secede from L.A. in the early aughts. It is where, says Rice, white cops exchanged call signs like #NKNNHI (N—–s Killing N—–s, No Human Involved) on dashboard computers. Rice, who claims to have “ears all over the department,” says “Moore’s buddies were taking bets on how fast he’d end CSP.” 

Moore denies he had any intention of eliminating CSP, calling the assertion “entirely false,” and notes that in fact he expanded it during his tenure. “My vision was for CSP to strengthen its fidelity to its original mission,” Moore says, “and serve as a model for best practices across the department.” But others involved with the program dispute his version of events.

“He didn’t respect or understand Beck’s relationship-based policing,” says a civilian power broker who knew both chiefs. Moore “resented us for getting more resources and attention than [his cops from the] Valley did,” says Phil Tingirides. (Moore “categorically” rejects both claims.) As Rice puts it, more bluntly: “This chief who gaslights better than Trump had no time for our health-and-safety model. It threatens the authority of old-line cops, especially ones from the Valley.” 

When I reached out to Moore in Tennessee, where he now consults with the Nashville Police Department, he acknowledged being “dissatisfied with the leadership of [CSP],” but declined to say why or name names. Within weeks of taking the job, though, he confirms, he called Phil Tingirides. “He said, ‘I’m pulling you out of South Bureau’ — where I had oversight of CSP — ‘to run the traffic division,’ ” says Tingirides. Moore says CSP wasn’t technically under Tingirides’ command by that time, and the move was part of a larger departmental reorganization. But Tingirides maintains that Moore’s motive was to “kill off CSP.” 

With both Tingirides out of the way — Emada had by then taken a role with the LAPD’s Detectives Bureau, which came with a title bump to captain — Moore installed CSP bosses who, he says, “were best suited to the mission.” Rice claims their goals were very different. “Moore’s clown-car captains made it known to [our] cops that he was gonna roll up CSP within months,” says Rice. Worse, according to Joubert of the Watts Gang Task Force, the new chief gave no agency at all to the residents of Watts’ three projects. “If they thought we wouldn’t notice that Phil was gone, they must’ve been out their mind,” says Joubert. “This whole community loved the Tingirides. They gave us our voice — and we damn sure used it.” 

Members of the community made their displeasure known. (Moore calls that clamor “expected but short-lived.”) Rice, meanwhile, says she “laid a spike strip down” in front of the new police chief. She raised half a million dollars to fund an independent study, conducted by researchers at UCLA, on CSP’s impact in Watts; that study bought CSP a year’s reprieve. When its findings were officially released in May 2020, all doubt was erased about the power of CSP to reduce crime and promote healing in hot-zone sectors. “CSP saves dozens of violent crimes — including murders — and tens of millions of dollars every year — and that’s just in those three [Watts] developments,” says Jorja Leap, a gang anthropologist at UCLA who authored the study. “Its effects were so profound, we called on the city to expand it, and to mainstream its methods in the department.” 

Though the local press bannered Leap’s conclusions, the praise fell on deaf ears in the department. Leap says she briefed Moore several times on her findings, yet he stashed copies of the study — in unopened cartons — in the office of an LAPD commander. (He disputes this, claiming, “The study was distributed to all command staff, and its findings were integrated into our strategic planning.”) Then, not long after the study dropped, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. L.A. simmered for a week before exploding. From Long Beach to Fairfax, stores burned and glass shattered; marchers shut down freeways and intersections. City cops turned a bad week into a bad month, beating down the peaceful and the lawless alike and volleying rubber bullets into crowds. “It’s not like I didn’t make mistakes in addressing the unrest,” says Moore. “But we did the best we could … and demonstrated resilience to the values we swore to uphold.”

But then the looters headed north, swarming the swank shops at the indoor-outdoor mall the Grove. That last week in May, Rice got a flurry of phone calls from the billionaires who really run L.A. Each of them asked the same question of her: Do we have to get rid of Moore to save the city? “I told them to hang on,” says Rice. “I’d go see him and have an answer for them quickly.” 

“I grew up hating cops. To this day, I get stopped for nothing, being a Black man driving a Benz.”

She booked a face-to-face with Moore that week. “I told him, point-blank: ‘Your head’s on the chopping block,’ ” says Rice, who’d ended her consultancy with the department but still had a ton of juice with city leaders. “ ‘When I leave this meeting, I’m going straight to the mayor if I don’t hear what I need to hear.’ ” Moore asked her what she wanted, and she laid it out: a stand-alone bureau for CSP, its expansion in the police department footprint, and — oh, yes — the immediate appointment of Emada Tingirides as its citywide leader. “What, promote a captain to deputy chief?” Rice remembers Moore scoffing. “Is that what I hear you saying?” 

Moore admits he initially questioned Emada’s promotion, but he eventually granted Rice her ask. Tingirides was anointed deputy chief; CSP became a separate bureau; and the suite of CSP sites jumped from eight to 11 (with more planned). But Rice, ever the skeptic, hedged her bets. “Did we prove that you can change policing from command-­and-control to full engagement? Yes, we did,” she says. “Did we prove you can treat pandemic violence by partnering with the gangs and the folks they harmed? Yes, we did.” But it took “a team of unicorns to pull this off,” she notes, “starting with Charlie Beck.” Where Bratton was a reformer, “Beck was a transformer, and you get one of those per lifetime. If you’re lucky.” 

Last year, Moore retired from his post, after six years. Karen Bass, the current mayor, took eight months to choose Moore’s successor, Jim McDonnell. A Bratton disciple who helped remake the force before taking the top job in Long Beach in 2010, McDonnell comes across as an admirer of CSP, if not an evangelist. In a phone call, he lauded its “astounding” impact on crime and said he hoped the model would catch on as chiefs “throughout the nation see the value that it brings.” But he hedged when asked about his plans to grow it, citing nationwide departures of uniformed cops following the George Floyd murder. Under Bratton, the department had more than 9,100 cops; it’s currently at around 8,700. “My biggest challenge,” he says, “is bringing the best and brightest recruits into the academy.” That’s “especially difficult in the face of 2020,” but he hopes he’ll start to “see more young people wanting to reengage by being part of the difference.” 

Fields of Dreams

On my last night in town, Coughlin drops me at a grade school, St. Albert the Great, in Compton. It’s as drab and charmless as the church it’s named for — until I step inside. The gym is a hive of organized bedlam: 50 or 60 children running basketball drills while laughing and talking mess in outdoor voices. Across campus, 15 girls hone a dance routine, a synchronized step from a Stomp Wars show, or something that looks a lot like it. Down a long hall is the Youth Leadership Council, a plenary of teens who brainstorm ideas for these Wednesday gatherings. The energy in the building is joyous and polyrhythmic. I float back to the gym to watch the drills. 

There, I’m greeted by a well-built man with a beard so precise, it could solve for pi. Marc Maye is the founder and director of this program, the iPlay, iLead Academy. He’s the former assistant principal of St. Lawrence of Brindisi, one of several Catholic schools Coughlin has partnered with through the years. “We call him the child whisperer,” Coughlin had told me while driving over. “There’s literally no kid Coach Maye can’t fix. He’s the surrogate dad to half of Watts.” 

Maye has the clenched severity of a monk, albeit a monk who can bury you with step-back threes. Raised without a father, he was secure from Compton gangsters, who saw the shine on Maye and let him be. A two-sport standout, he became the first man in his family to attend college, get a degree, and then a master’s. He now runs Project Blue, a sprawling nonprofit whose tentacles are entwined with CSP’s. Founded and funded by Steve Robinson and his wife, Janet Crown — the philanthropists who backed Operation Progress and turned it into a Watts-to-college colossus — it’s a rec-sports empire with a twist. “Sports are just the bait we use to sign kids up,” says Maye. “This is all about growing leaders through life-skills training.”

He points me to a group of kids trying to dribble left-handed. Their instructor, whom I’ve seen before but can’t quite place, stops the drill to talk. “It’s hard using your off hand, amirite? But what do you do when something’s hard?” 

“Keep going till you get it,” shouts a kid.

“Stop and ask for help,” shouts another.

“There it is,” says the coach. “You ask for help, and I show you how to keep that dribble tight. Now, what do you do when you’re sitting in class and you don’t understand what’s being taught?”

“You ask the teacher for help,” chimes the group.

“Boom,” says the coach, who demos a left-hand dribble that no one in this gym will ever master. It’s then that I recognize who he is. Here is Tionne Tisdale, the kid whose apartment was raided by Coughlin and who now, at 27, is a mini Marc Maye: his ace youth instructor and heir-in-waiting. I jot myself a note to call him later and follow Maye across the court. He nods to CSP cops in gym apparel, overseeing other drills. “It took me a minute to trust them,” he says. “I grew up hating cops. To this day, I get stopped for nothing, being a Black man driving a Benz.” 

Maye tells me of a day, too recent for comfort, when cops drew their guns on him at a gas station. He had a car full of children headed to a game; the cops mistook the tweens for baby gangsters. “I yelled, ‘Hey, put those guns down — these are schoolkids here!’ ” says Maye. The cops muttered something about Maye’s racing tires, then peeled out when he asked for their IDs. Maye is royalty in South L.A.; it was in his power to have those bum cops punished. But for 19 years, he’s built a circle of power with the best cops in L.A. He coached and expanded the Watts Rams program, a sandlot squad of kids from Watts that’s grown to five teams, a couple of hundred boys and girls who dominate their Pop Warner leagues. Maye’s patrons, Robinson and Crown, brought the Los Angeles Rams on board. The Rams furnish their gear and travel expenses, bring NFL staffers to Watts Rams clinics, and recently built the kids a facility so they can finally host home games in Watts. “When we first got involved, you couldn’t get a parent to a game,” says Robinson. “Now, the stands are packed with parents.” He shows me a photo of a recent game: players from Watts’ three feuding projects playing on the same team. “We’re rebuilding the fabric of a community,” he says, as well as its “social contract with cops.” 

Those cops do more than blow whistles and bark signals. All of them mentor at least one child from third grade on to high school. They drop by that child’s school once or twice a day, seeing to it that they’ve got money for lunch and have turned in their homework. It’s wraparound care that starts at 8 a.m., when cops and parents and gang interventionists walk thousands of kids to school through gang zones, a CSP program called Safe Passage. It picks up in the afternoons, when those children leave for Strive, an after-school program that’s merged with Coughlin’s to turbo-boost kids’ academic prowess. In Watts, the high school graduation rate is 53 percent. Among Strive and Operation Progress students, it’s more than 90 percent — and many of the kids they mentor go to college for free, thanks to Strive and yet another of Coughlin’s nonprofits, a foundation called Watts2Boston. That Massachusetts-based fund covers all expenses not paid for by grants and tuition waivers, and, for students who’ll be attending school in the Boston area, matches them with local families to nurture and guide them through the experience. 

Says Julie Mulvey, W2B’s co-founder, “We advocate with schools to give kids a full ride, but the biggest thing we do is keep them in school when they’re struggling.” The workload, the loneliness, the distress calls from their parents: There’s so much weighing on Watts transplants. Mulvey and her staff are in constant touch with the 25 kids they support, exhorting them to just be “selfish for four years” and not respond to hometown drama. “They’re in 20 different schools across four states, and our hope, as we grow this, is to find them host families in each [of those towns],” says Mulvey. “Around 25 percent of all first-gen [college] students drop out in their freshman year.” The support of a host family “can make all the difference.” 

That is the magic of CSP: It’s created a virtuous circle that keeps rippling out. A top-line list of the billionaire patrons funding its partner nonprofits includes Steve Ballmer, the ex-Microsoft CEO who owns the Los Angeles Clippers; Rick Caruso, developer of luxury malls; and Stan Kroenke, whose vast holdings include the L.A. Rams. “We’re not just funding a path out of Watts for a bunch of gifted kids,” says Caruso. “We’re funding a path for all the kids in Watts,” and a blueprint for “every city that has a Watts.” Robinson of Project Blue goes further: “CSP is brilliant at what it does, but the enrichment stuff comes from the tutors, the rec teams, the scholarships — we’re the force multipliers of hope.” 

Rising Above

A couple of weeks later, I got Tionne Tisdale on the phone to ask about his long road out. He said he’d chafed, then starred at Maye’s Catholic school in Watts, earning his way to St. John Bosco, a powerhouse prep in the suburbs. But after 15 years of hooping on asphalt, his feet and ankles gave out in college; he left to take a job at LAX. He’s still pushing planes in and out of hangars but coaches Maye’s kids on weekends and evenings, “teaching them my losses, not just wins,” he says. There’s unfinished business in his story about himself, half-notes of rue and might’ve-been. But he’s got Maye in one ear and Coughlin in the other, speaking the mother tongue of speed-the-plow. “They both see my spark when I’m around those kids; they come from the struggle, same as me. I want to do like Marc, be their hope and proof that in Watts, we don’t fall — we fly.” 

PAUL SOLOTAROFF has been a contributing editor at Rolling Stone for more than 20 years. He wrote about Snapchat’s teenage opioid crisis last summer.