Cardiologist recalls role in getting LA police to stop using chokeholds, connects experience with current events

As groups continue to protest police brutality and call for reform throughout the United States, one Los Angeles cardiologist has shared a personal story that shows just how long the country has grappled with these issues.    

Richard Allen Williams, MD, is a clinical professor of medicine at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and the president and CEO of the Minority Health Institute. He also founded the Association of Black Cardiologists in 1974 and is a former president of the National Medical Association. Williams sat down and spoke with Los Angeles-based KCET about his experience, discussing the day in 1982 that he received a surprising phone call from LAPD Police Chief Darryl Gates.

Gates, already widely known for his “forceful” and “aggressive” tactics, asked Williams if he agreed that Blacks were more susceptible to chokeholds due to “an anatomical defect in their necks.” The implication, as Williams saw it, was that Gates thought “Blacks were not normal in their neck anatomy and … it was their fault that they were dying, not the fault of the police.”

Williams quickly told Gates that, no, he did not agree with that idea—the real reason so many Black people were dying from chokeholds, he emphasized, was that they were being used more often on Black suspects than white suspects. The LAPD kept using such chokeholds, leading to numerous deaths in the following months, but the city did later stop using them after repeated debates, press conferences and public discussions.