by Jack Webb
IV
Per capita, police protection costs you less than four cents a day in Los Angeles. Even for a year, the police bill of the average family is less than the gas bill for one month.
Is it worth it?
In sixteen months, LAPD managed to catch Donald Keith Bashor, who had killed Karil Graham and Laura Lindsay and terrorized the women of Westlake. In more than a decade, LAPD has, at enormous expense, made no progress in the Black Dahlia murder.
You’ve got to have policemen but are they worth $35 millions a year, twenty per cent of the whole Los Angeles budget?
Of course, if the gun is in your back, four cents, even $35 millions, is tragically insufficient. You don’t count your life in those terms.
And if you’re a cop, with better than any civilian’s chance of catching a slug, you don’t count your life in those terms, either. Something more than take-home pay is involved, and you don’t like it when you’re a hero today, a bum tomorrow.
With fewer policemen than it had only a few years ago, LAPD is making more arrests these days. A quarter of a million yearly, but just let the department blow a spectacular one and listen to the howls. “Dumb cop,” “flatfoot,” “stupid.”
THE BADGE… how do you judge the men who wear it—LAPD, any department, your police force in your town?
Headlines don’t tell the story and neither do statistics though they are part of the yardstick. The system and the way it operates is part of the yardstick, too. So are the scientific facilities and the physical equipment, right down to good, grooved rubber on the wheels of speeding patrol units.
It helps to have a bright, honest chief; and it’s no drawback if the commissioners who backstop him and the whole department are dedicated men. In the complicated modern business of criminology, there are a dozen complicated reasons for the success or failure of a police department.
But, mostly, these reasons boil down to two: the man in uniform and the civilian in mufti. If the peace officer is good, if the public supports him and he knows it, you have an honest department with polish and morale.
Unfortunately, too many of us dismiss crime and cops as an exotic something we read about in the newspapers. Maybe the kid’s bike was stolen once, or there was a sneak theft of the milk money; but real crime, forgeries, sex offenses, beatings, poison pen letters, and especially murder, is what happens to somebody else. It is part of the price of modern living, four cents a day, and nothing to concern ourselves about seriously.
“The grave danger in such an attitude is in its possible spread to the police,” says Chief William H. Parker of LAPD. “If the police philosophy of this country ever becomes permeated with a laissez faire attitude, we are in serious trouble.”
As a citizen, you owe it to yourself to know something about the police, their limitations as well as their triumphs. The easiest way to do it is to study LAPD in action, for LAPD, scaled down to size, might be your department.
After all, it is your life, your property that they protect.
THE POLICEMAN
You’re a cop. You knew that when you signed on. Be a damned good one.
EVERYBODY IN THE CITY KNOWS him. He’s the harness bull who shoulders through the street crowd watching a fight and growls paternally, “All right! Break it up! Break it up!” He’s the fellow leaning on the siren as he pushes his black and white radio cruiser through red lights. He’s the motor-bike man in white crash helmet intent on making life miserable for some taxpayer speeding down the freeway.
He’s the cop.
Los Angeles is the place where that comic libel on all police everywhere, the Keystone Kop, was invented. And like most cities, Los Angeles still feels a curious ambivalence toward the policeman. He gives protection, which is vaguely appreciated, but he also exercises authority which is resented if you receive the traffic ticket or court summons.
So every tour the LAPD Policeman—aged thirty-four, married, two children, paying for the house and car on time—has to prove himself anew. “Policemen are soldiers who act alone,” somebody once said, and each day the LAPD man in his lonely way must demonstrate his brains, his heart, his guts.
Suddenly, on fancy Wilshire Boulevard, there are shouts and screams, and pedestrians scatter. “What’s the trouble?” Policeman George Audet growls. They tell him. A mad dog is loose, and already five persons have felt its bite.
Now it’s up to Audet, and a thousand pairs of eyes are on him. It takes guts, but he has to do it. He unlimbers his gun and follows the frothing, ninety-pound beast into a yard, cornering him so there can be no escape for either of them. The mad animal snarls, tenses; and then, as he leaps, Audet fires. He puts his slug coolly into the vital spot, and the animal drops dead.
Now the five victims must be rushed to a hospital, and traffic unsnarled. “All right, everybody. Move along. It’s all over.”
On a Wednesday early in June, Policemen William Morgan, driver, and Nelson L. Brownson, guard, are moving nineteen prisoners in the patrol wagon to the city jail. Suddenly, just as unexpectedly as a mad dog goes amok, a bus carrying seventy-five children to a parochial school near New Chinatown cuts off the wagon.
Then the bus runs a red light, jumps the curbing, almost hits a building and crazily weaves back into the street again.
Morgan and Brownson give chase, skillfully drawing close alongside the swerving vehicle. It takes guts; a man could fall or get crushed; but Brownson leaps into the bus, sprawling over the collapsed driver. He manages to push him aside and get the runaway under control.
An ambulance is called for the diabetic driver, who has gone into shock from an overdose of insulin.
“I don’t think the youngsters knew what was going on until it was all over,” Brownson says. “And they got to school on time, too.”
But always, you come back to crime.
For some reason, August and December are hot months for burglary. It’s August now, and Policemen Gerald L. Bryan and Alvin L. Porterfield are pushing Unit 3A91 through the University Division on routine patrol.
As they cruise past a market, its alarm is ringing. A “459,” radio code for burglary, is in progress. Guns in hand, they investigate.
Porterfield covers the front of the store. Bryan makes a quiet flanking approach to the back. Just as he is about to slip in the rear door, he hears someone trying to open it from inside. He backs across the darkened alley into the shadows along a concrete wall.
A perfect ambush. And then he freezes.
From alongside, on the other side of a wooden gate in the wall, he hears eleven low, cold words spat at him.
“Drop the gun, cop—or die with it in your hand.”
Bryan takes a chance and steals a fast look. Not ten feet away, a lookout is staring at him over the top of the gate, and the gun he holds is steady. The smart thing to do is to drop his own revolver.
Instead, Bryan suddenly wheels and pours three shots into the gate. The gunfire brings Porterfield to his aid; and the next moment they hear the crash of glass from the front of the store. Porterfield races back to the street, but the suspect has fled.
“Code 9,” he snaps into his radio mike in the cruiser car. That’s a call for assistance.
Then he rejoins Bryan, and they find the lookout crumpled in a heap a few feet on the other side of the bullet-riddled gate. A loaded Walther P38 automatic is still in his hand, but he is too far gone to use it.
But before he dies, Bryan’s quick questioning wins an admission of complicity and the identification of the accomplice who got away. When assistance arrives, there’s not much to be done. See to it that a body is taken away and run down a name.
For the job, Bryan holds LAPD’s Class A Commendation. That and twenty-five or thirty cents will buy a quart of milk at any store in town. He could have laid down his gun, avoided the awful risk, and his money would buy just as much milk today.
That isn’t the point. In the squadrooms, they say, “You’re a cop. You knew that when you signed on. Be a damned good one.”
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Always the unexpected, and you play it hard and fast. Then the awkward thing, the change of pace, just as unexpected, but now you play it gently, compassionately.
The young mother is driving happily in the San Fernando Valley, her seven-months-old son alongside her. He is sucking on a slice of orange.
She glances down tenderly, screams and brakes to a halt. A nearby radio car pulls over to investigate.
“No!” she screams hysterically. “You can’t have my baby!”
All in a moment, he had strangled to death on the orange. The cops quickly make sure the infant is dead. She grabs the lifeless form, hugs it, then drives off wildly with her dead baby.
Obediently, the radio car follows, mothering her along the highway till she gets home. They give her a few minutes to compose herself, and at last she realizes what has happened. Silently, she hands over the limp form. They quietly see to it that family and neighbors are summoned to comfort her and then go on their way.
II
Give or take a few, there are some 3,590 men and 110 women who draw pay for the rank of policeman with LAPD. With their superior officers, they cover 6,000 miles of street in Los Angeles, operate 1,400 vehicles, and are outnumbered, five hundred to one, by the general populace. The odds don’t seem quite fair, and the LAPD Policeman tries to make up the difference with brain and body power.
He stands five feet ten inches and weighs 165 to 170 pounds. He keeps in shape playing basketball or working out on the horizontal bars.
He is a combat veteran of either World War II or Korea. He still practices up on his shooting. He serves in the military reserve on his own time.
His IQ is close to 120 (compared with the nation’s average of 100), and he is still going to college, on his own time. He is working toward a degree in Political Science or Public Administration.
On the average, this sedately married, thirty-four-year-old father of two has been plugging along like this for seven years on the force. Curiously, he originally came from out of state, and that is the only generalization you can make about his civilian background.
He may previously have been a truck driver, U.S. forester, clerk, lifeguard, plumber, salesman, or even have studied for the priesthood or ministry before going on the force. He may have been a math major at college (with a 140 IQ), who now rides a radio car in the Valley.
He might even be the brother of a Hollywood bookie; but he becomes an exemplary officer and lives as if there were no brother.
Whatever he was, LAPD has reshaped and hardened him in its $20,000 training mold, given him a metal badge and put him out on the street where the cop lives or dies.
“Be a damned good one,” the old-timers tell him in the squadroom.
Each tour, the unexpected.
Daytime, and Policeman Eugene R. Crammer Jr. is routinely directing afternoon rush-hour traffic at a downtown intersection. There is a cry for help, and Crammer, unlimbering his gun as he picks his way through the hurrying cars, makes for the scene.
In ten minutes, he has disarmed two gunmen and sent them off to Central booking for attempted robbery.
Nighttime, and Policemen C. J. Chapman and R. J. Brown are cruising on Hollywood Boulevard at 3:47 a.m. They are memorizing the latest addition to “the hot sheet,” the license number of an almost-new sports car stolen from a street in Hollywood.
At Hollywood Boulevard and Cherokee Avenue, just twenty-five minutes after the report was made, they spot the fast, shiny bug. They give chase, and for three miles through the heart of Hollywood, they slue round corners at frightening speed.
In a way, it’s ironic. There are 32,194 street intersections in LAPD’s territory, and Chapman and Brown know them all, or most all. But at DeLongpre Avenue and Cahuenga Boulevard, just a loud yell from the Hollywood Division, there’s a treacherous dip in the road.
Treacherous, anyhow, for a car thundering at their speed. They spin out of control, slam into two parked cars and escape, somehow, with just nasty cuts and bruises. They lose the bug, but their risk doesn’t go in vain.
Thirty minutes later, while they are being sewed up at the hospital, other policemen find the sports car parked back exactly where it had been taken. But Chapman and Brown had given the thief such a scare that he accidentally dropped an identification card inside.
He is arrested and confesses. Chapman and Brown go home. Their wives wince at the sight of the bandages, and all they can say is, “It was a little rough tonight, honey. But nothing serious. Nothing for you to worry about.”
Sometimes, in the smooth way of modern police, it’s a triple play. During a tricky heart operation in a veterans’ hospital, a crisis suddenly developed. The surgeon needed additional equipment, and he needed it fast, to keep the white-faced patient alive. The only place the equipment could be obtained was at Good Samaritan Hospital, and that involved a thirty-five mile trip.
In relays, Policemen L. S. Rasic, Charles Cunningham and Lawrence Berdlow got it and got it back to the veterans’ hospital, passing it on from one to the other—all in 35 minutes. Risking their lives at better than mile-a-minute speed, they saved another.
Too often, just because of the miserable nature of the job, it’s still the lonesome one-man operation it always was for an officer before the auto and radio were invented. They tell him where to go and get him there fast, and that’s all they can do. He’s alone with a dirty, dangerous one.
It’s near the end of his long, hot day’s tour, and though the July sun has slanted down in the west, the temperature still stands at 92. Patrolling all day in the western end of the San Fernando Valley, Policeman Paul Cleary has just about had it.
It’s been the kind of day when the clayish soil of the West Valley gets as hard as asphalt and the asphalt softens to the consistency of clay. Cleary wants to get under a needle-cold shower, get a good cold drink.
“Code 3.”
The alarm—Emergency; red light and siren—shakes him out of his lethargy. He listens, and his name is tied to it.
“Debris on the railroad tracks one hundred yards west of Lindley. Train due at 5:20 p.m.”
Cleary glances at his watch. It is 5:15.
The radio sends him and the cruiser gets him there and now he’s back on his own. It’s 5:18 p.m.
Quickly he glances up and down the tracks. He sees nothing, and the pleasant words, “Report unfounded,” come into his mind. He looks again and a good 400 yards off, west toward the hills that rim the Valley, he sees something.
He starts running in loose, easy strides, trying to pace himself. One hundred yards… two hundred yards. He’s halfway home now, and he ought to make it.
Then he hears the train whistle.
Sweat pouring down his back, he runs at full speed now. He finds the obstruction, two lengths of pipe, two inches by five feet, and an old truck tire. They have been jammed on and between the rails.
The San Francisco Limited, highballing into Los Angeles from the coast, thunders into view. Desperately, Cleary claws at the pipe and tire as the train bears down on him. He pulls them clear, almost falling backward, and the train sweeps safely by.
Be a damned good one.
III
In LAPD, as in most big cities, the radio car patrol man is the departmental torpedo which can be fired from Headquarters, instantly and in any direction, in response to trouble. The men drive more than six million miles yearly. Every twelve seconds there is a new transmission over their car radio.
But a torpedo, or a submarine, is wasted unless it hits the target. Every LAPD radio man has to settle the emergency or at least wage a holding operation till his Code 9 (Request for assistance) can be answered. And here, unlike many cities, the radio man operates alone, rather than in pairs, during the daytime patrol.
Actually, this calculated risk was forced on LAPD by a manpower shortage. By splitting up the two-man radio teams in all geographical divisions, the police doubled their daytime coverage. The move was made cautiously after field tests in tough
and soft neighborhoods and drastic training revisions to teach the policemen how to fight a one-man fight. Then LAPD’s bosses crossed their fingers and waited.
In the first year of solo operation, assaults against police officers dropped some 20% (from 124 to 99), felony arrests increased slightly, and misdemeanor arrests were up by more than one-third. LAPD had won.
Curiously, nobody can say for sure why it has worked out. Some give the credit to the men themselves. They know they are on their mettle; and they know the fellow on the next beat is alone and on his mettle, too. By radio, they follow his activities, and when the going gets rough, they move in fast to cover him.
Hearteningly, the civilian has come through to help one beleaguered officer where he might not help a team. Police reports now list scores of incidents in which citizen assistance has reduced disorder and averted injury to the officer at the scene of a crime.
LAPD appreciates the neighborliness.
Behind all the street activity, disjointed though it may seem as the radio cars siren off in various directions, there is a directing voice.
Without talk, modern police departments just couldn’t function, especially one like LAPD with such an enormous ground area to cover. Its voice, a massive electronic and wireless network of teletype and shortwave radio, covers not only Los Angeles but also can be projected throughout California.
In the Communications Division, the sixty-six sworn personnel are supplemented by eighty-five radio telephone operators, plus another fifteen in the teletype and message sections. A separate unit, the Radio Technical Division, keeps thirty-eight civilians busy, operating the main receivers and transmitters and maintaining the intricate equipment.
Through the combined efforts of dispatchers, operators, and technicians, LAPD’s mighty voice can be heard in more than 800 two-way mobile units, some forty three-way mobile units which can talk car-to-car, more than twenty walkie-talkies and about fifty stationary receivers.