Shortly before dawn on Super Bowl Sunday, Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton's phone rang at his Los Feliz home.
He was told that one of his officers had shot and killed the driver of a stolen Toyota Camry after a brief car chase through South Los Angeles. The victim proved to be heartbreakingly young: 13-year-old Devin Brown.
Bratton showered and drove to the scene. He was already thinking: "This thing will get legs," he recalled during an interview with The Times.
So began a week that seemed to pile one test upon another for Bratton, a political crescendo that threatened his most cherished goals: reducing crime, reforming the Los Angeles Police Department and improving race relations.
Hours after the African American eighth-grader was killed, racial tensions were laid bare. Neighbors and some community leaders said the shooting was clear evidence that the LAPD did not value the lives of young black men.
"These are very tense times," Bratton said. "Anyone who dismisses it lightly is crazy. The community ... is extraordinarily angry."
The night before the boy was killed, Bratton went to bed thinking that his biggest challenge in the coming week would be persuading the City Council to put a city sales tax increase on the May ballot to pay for more police.
Since coming to Los Angeles a little more than two years ago, Bratton had believed that he could mend historically poor relations with the black community by reducing violent crime in the city's hardest-hit neighborhoods.
Expanding the LAPD was vital to attaining that goal, he had argued. But so far, he had failed to persuade political leaders or voters to provide money, most recently in November, when voters defeated a similar countywide sales tax increase.
The vote made it clear that old wounds still festered. Black voters in South L.A. were especially opposed. The response this week to Devin's shooting, Bratton said, shows "we are locked in a time warp."
At the scene of the boy's death early Sunday, Bratton began learning details.
LAPD Officer Steve Garcia and his partner had begun following a stolen car a few minutes before the shooting near the intersection of West 83rd Street and South Western Avenue.
Garcia, a nine-year veteran in the LAPD's Newton Division, saw the car run a red light near Grand and Gage avenues, and followed with lights and sirens for about four minutes, police said. Devin, who attended Audubon Middle School, was driving a car that had been reported stolen a couple of hours earlier, police said.
