Inside the Strange World of the Police

Photographs by Joseph Rodríguez

“Police work is doing what people in the city want done,” Willie Williams, the Los Angeles Police Department chief, told me in 1994. Williams, the agency’s first Black chief, had been brought in from Philadelphia to make changes after LAPD officers beat Rodney King in 1991, the incident that ultimately led to the Los Angeles riots. A commission that year concluded that the LAPD was too quick to use excessive force and dangerously hostile to the community. The New York Times Magazine asked me and the photographer Joseph Rodríguez to embed with the police to see if Williams could actually reform the department.

For several months, Rodríguez and I went on, though, I was struck by how little has changed. The country as a whole is still dealing with the question of what, exactly, the role of the police should be in our society.