Justice & Law Quote by Daryl Gates

Gates is selling a myth of institutional purity in the language of manufacturing: honesty and integrity are "stamped right on you", as if the LAPD were an assembly line producing uniformly ethical officers. The metaphor does heavy work. It frames corruption not as a systemic risk but as a defect that can be detected and discarded. That’s convenient for a leader defending a department whose public image, by the late 20th century, was defined less by pristine standards than by recurring scandals, aggressive tactics, and a widening credibility gap with Black and Latino Angelenos.

The line "We got rid of you as quickly as possible" is meant to sound like swift accountability, but it also smuggles in a familiar bureaucratic alibi: bad conduct is the problem of a few "terrible" individuals, not incentives, training, or political cover. Gates’ phrasing turns oversight into housekeeping. It’s managerial, not moral; the institution stays clean by definition, because anyone who threatens that definition is rhetorically exiled.

Context matters. Gates rose as the face of a harder-edged, militarized policing style and presided over an era when community trust was already fraying. The quote reads like an attempt to reclaim legitimacy through certainty. There’s no room here for ambiguity, error, or contested narratives of what counts as "honest" policing. That absolutism is the tell: the statement isn’t designed to persuade skeptics so much as to reassure allies that the LAPD’s authority is self-correcting, and therefore deserves continued deference.