Capt. Shannon White Bridging Communities and Law Enforcement in Changing Times
Editor’s note: Capt. Shannon White’s rank is Captain I. She is second in command to Capt. Brent McGuyre, whose rank is Captain III.
Capt. Shannon White, first class, is cognizant of the importance of recognizing history and accepting it, knowing that it’s real, and then talking about what we want going forward because, as she says, “it’s easy to sit in the cheap seats and talk about how bad everything is.
Last month the Harbor Division police captain discussed her life and career in the Los Angeles Police Department. The San Pedro-born, second-generation police officer was assigned to her hometown in September 2023. She is the first African American woman to serve as captain at the Harbor Division.
White takes her cue from her LAPD police captain father, the late Paul Enox, who was born in the 1940s and joined the department in the 1970s ― a generation of African Americans who despite having negative experiences with Los Angeles police chose to fix the department from within and offer a different perspective of what it means to be Black in Los Angeles.
Referring to non-Black officers or officers not necessarily from Los Angeles, she said it can be hard for people who are asked to drive past 1,000 houses not in crisis, where everybody is doing the right thing, to the call of that one house that is in crisis.
“It alters your mindset a little bit because all you’re seeing is how everybody has problems,” White said. “Yeah, everybody needs the police. They wouldn’t be safe without me,” White explained about the mindset of officers on a beat. “I think it’s important for people to have touch points that show there’s a lot of normalcy in the Black community. It’s not all violence and crime. It’s people there that get up every day, and go to work, and live honorable lives, and try to make a living and want the best for their kids.”
Capt. White’s elevation is a big deal to any in the African American community who’ve long advocated for the hiring of more Black police officers in the Harbor Division.
Joe Gatlin is a long-time civic leader who served on the LAPD Harbor Division’s Community Police Advisory Board for the past year.
“That’s a big deal. Especially with the Port of LA wanting to do more work with the continent of Africa, and that means more imports coming in from the continent,” Gatlin said. “And with that happening, we’ll all be pushing to make sure that more Blacks work in the union as these arguments get bigger because of these imports.”
“I’ve been pushing for a long time to get more Blacks from LA and everywhere into jobs on the waterfront; and the things I run into all the time is that some of the Blacks who work long hours at the port wonder how they’re going to be perceived once they get here … driving in at 2 or 3 in the morning going back home, are they going to get profiled, and how are they going to get treated and that type of thing,” Gatlin explained. “That’s the reason I even joined the advisory board at the LAPD Harbor division.”
Gatlin said he was pleased with the progress the Harbor Division is making.
Pastor Adam Stevenson of Warren Chapel CME Church expressed similar sentiments, praising Capt. White’s elevation as being “essential for the transformation and growth of our communities.”
“Her presence brings a needed perspective to law enforcement and inspires future generations to pursue leadership roles,” Stevenson said. “True progress is achieved when our leadership reflects the diversity of our society.”
To be fair, the diversity reflected in the Los Angeles Harbor Area is directly reflected in LAPD’s Harbor Division in both rank and file ― a reality orchestrated by the concerted efforts of the department since the 1992 rebellion. Indeed, Capt. White is not even the first African American to serve in that position. That title belongs to Deputy Chief Gerald Woodyard, the current commanding officer of operations in the West Bureau. He served as captain of the Harbor Division from 2013 to 2017.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Passion
White calls her work a passion project with the department.
“I love the City of Los Angeles. I love the LAPD,” the 42-year-old captain said. “I jokingly tell people that if you are not part of the LAPD or the NYPD, then you must be working a security job.”
The captain values the lived experience of a community.
“No one side is completely right and no one side is completely wrong,” White said. “I don’t deny the lived experience of people. I never do when they’re telling me that they felt some sort of way about their interaction with the police. That is to be believed. But I also understand the complications.”
The captain posed a hypothetical: Imagine four officers receiving a crime alert, and they have to stop vehicles that relate to this crime alert because there’s violence going on in the area. How should she address that?
“Part of it is just building up trust over time,” she said. “I think what’s challenging for any personnel in the department today, is that we’re in that transitional period.”
White believes the LAPD is more transparent and more accountable than it has ever been before. But the officers have to remember that just because it feels like so much time has passed does not mean residents see those days as being in the distant past.
Changing the Narrative
“We talk about Operation Hammer in ’84,” referring to the large-scale attempt to crack down on gang violence by the LAPD’s CRASH unit in 1987.
Operation Hammer can be traced back to the 1984 Olympic Games under Chief Daryl Gates when the LAPD expanded gang sweeps for the duration of the Olympics. The sweeps were implemented citywide, particularly in South Central and East Los Angeles. After the games concluded, city leaders revived old anti-syndicalism laws to maintain the security apparatus instigated by the Olympic games. Those involved in the mass arrests of Black and Hispanic youth made little distinction between gang members or teens seen in the same vicinity as gang members.
“Those people are still living in their multi-generational homes,” White said. “So they’re able to tell their kids and their grandkids about what they experienced.”
She said we have to get real distance from those events ― real distance means doing the right thing repeatedly.
“That’s the tough dynamic,” White said, “because I think our officers that come in and go, ‘I wasn’t even alive in ’84,’ right?”
“I come taking reports from people and go filling out their paperwork and going on like, ‘Oh! There’s a two in front of the year you were born.’ So they weren’t even alive, but they have to carry that departmental reputation of the things that [officers] before them did.”
White noted that ultimately, it’s the job of new generations of police officers to help shift the narrative a little bit at a time.
The police captain would know after serving with the LAPD during the Occupy Movement in 2010 and the Black Lives Matter movement a decade later. It is in moments such as these, in which public sentiment and political headwinds swirl with intense public scrutiny, that police departments have the most challenging struggles.
White believes the media play co-equal parts in those struggles.
“The media is paid to create a narrative that can go 24 hours a day and psychology shows that we have more of an emotional trigger to negative news than positive,” White said. “That’s the way your brain works. A lot of media outlets really traffic in division, making us feel like it’s you versus me.”
To combat this in her own mental space, she said over time she spent less time falling down certain media rabbit holes of television and radio news and began reading [as many books] as she could.
“I can’t encourage officers enough,” White said. “I tell them to turn off the TV and stop listening to the radio on the way to work. It’ll make you think everybody hates you.”
Citing Loyola Marymount University’s 2023 Police And Community Relations Survey, she noted that while officers think they are hated, nearly 70% of residents were neutral towards or very positive about the police.
“When you look at the Occupy Movement through Black Lives Matter, at its foundation, policing is about protecting people,” White said. “There are times when we have to recognize that people are being responsive to some things outside of the city. That’s what happens as we now have a global media.”
White noted that no longer does anyone ask if it happened in LA or not. It can happen in another country and it will come here.
“Our job is to recognize that and to be adaptable to the fact that people are being expressive of things that they don’t like and they’re trying to move the needle, and our job is to protect their constitutional rights and balance that with public safety,” White said. “I can’t stress enough for people that our role as an apolitical police force is that we leave it at the door when we put on the uniform.”
The 42-year-old mother of two noted that some would assume she agrees with Black Lives Matter, who have called for the abolishing of the police. The social justice movement believes that justice is impossible as long as American policing is based on the late 19th century Black Codes.
“I think some of the largest movements are things where people would go, ‘Oh, well, of course, you agree, it’s Black Lives Matter’, but I’ve been at protests where there’s fundamentally nothing that they’re talking about that I agree with,” White said. “It actually speaks counter to everything I hold dear in my personal life.”
For the captain, however, what’s important is, “Are they [protesting] in a way that it’s a protected act? If they are … perfect. It’s my job to make sure that that’s being facilitated.”
“That goes back to [my point about] critical thought of how, we as officers, can separate ourselves a little bit and go, ‘It’s your rights ahead of my feelings,’” White said.
White implicitly understands the limits of a police department’s commitment to constitutional policing. She noted that while the department values highly educated personnel who can think critically, the department is not filled with 10,000 independent thinkers. A police department is a paramilitary organization, and the actions of rank-and-file police officers are driven by who’s at the top and the political will of the city.
“When you look at the difference between the actions of police officers in different eras, a lot of that relates to who the chiefs are, their relationship with the mayor and city council, and the overall conversation that’s going on,” White said.
The City of Los Angeles is fortunate in that there is some commitment to constitutional policing. But at this moment, where radical factions of Congress and partisan Supreme Court justices are actively attacking the U.S. Constitution ― even to the extent they are willing to attack police officers and police institutions to facilitate the attacks, one has to wonder about the future of constitutional policing.
From Capt. White’s perspective, the job remains the same: remain apolitical and adapt as much as the law and the way that it’s applied changes.
“While there is an increasing amount of political noise that can make it seem as though the walls are coming in, our day-to-day direction ― as dictated by local, state, and federal laws have been relatively stable,” Capt. White explained. “Where others feel called to act out violently, even to the point of attacking officers, we stand ready to take appropriate action to ensure our partners and our community members go home safely.”
Changing the Narrative
