Justice & Law Quote by Daryl Gates

Gates frames the problem as a management error - hiring too fast - but the phrasing is doing more than assigning blame. It’s a preemptive narrowing of the scandal’s scope. “Assimilate” is the tell: a bureaucratic euphemism that turns culture, training, and accountability into an HR intake issue, as if misconduct is a matter of onboarding pace rather than institutional incentives. By making the failure procedural, he steers attention away from what that rapid expansion was in service of: an LAPD era defined by aggressive policing, militarized posture, and a tolerance for “results” that routinely blurred into abuse.

The repetition of “I take responsibility” sounds like contrition, but it’s also a containment strategy. He accepts responsibility for the safest part of the story - staffing velocity - while leaving unspoken the deeper question of what kind of department was doing the assimilating. Assimilate into what norms? Into which informal rules about force, race, and deference? The quote invites the listener to imagine a basically sound institution temporarily destabilized by growth, not an institution whose core culture might be the destabilizer.

The context matters: Gates is remembered not as a neutral administrator but as the public face of the LAPD through flashpoints like the Rodney King beating and the unrest that followed. In that light, this isn’t just accountability; it’s reputation triage. He offers a manager’s confession to avoid a moral one, betting that “I wanted to do it” reads as ambition rather than the will to build a harder-edged department faster than democracy could digest it.