Daryl F. Gates, whose aggressive approach to law enforcement as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department was both admired for its innovation and criticized for the racial unrest it provoked, died Friday at his home in Dana Point, Calif. He was 83.

In a statement, the Police Department said he died after “a short battle with cancer.”

Mr. Gates began his police career in 1949 as a Los Angeles patrolman. It ended when he was forced to resign in June 1992, after 14 years as chief, in the wake of riots that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the highly publicized beating of Rodney King.

The years in between were a raucous era in which Los Angeles almost doubled its population while becoming overwhelmed by drugs, gangs, guns and a tide of violent crime.

Mr. Gates, who embraced the tough, principled and inflexible strategy of his mentor, William H. Parker, the former Los Angeles police chief, responded to that climate by stressing discipline in the ranks of his 8,000-strong department, enlarging the police presence in the streets and developing new policing tools.