The Badge

by Jack Webb

  In one instance, a patrol car from University Division brought in an over-sized sixteen-year-old, six feet, two hundred pounds, and roaring drunk. He had crashed a private party, started a brawl and then had brutally beaten up a smaller, younger boy. Obviously, even for his own protection, he needed detention.

  But the city maintains no regular juvenile detention unit, and because he was under eighteen, he could not be booked into City Jail. The arresting officers tried Juvenile Hall, a detention facility operated by Los Angeles County. Sorry, they were told; the Hall was already seventy per cent overloaded.

  The watch commander at University had the boy’s mother brought to the station, but even she had no place for him. “He beats me up,” she said tearfully. “I’m afraid of him.” Next the division called in the watch commander of the Juvenile Division. There was, he said, only one thing that could be done. Like it or not, the boy had to be released into the mother’s custody, and she went home with the child she feared.

  Sometimes, the overwork, the pressures, the tight restrictions on everything they do, on or off duty, become oppressive, and policemen just quit the job. In one case, a uniformed man became involved in petty difficulties with a neighbor, and though Patrol thought he was in the right, Chief Walton advised him that it would be more discretionary to move away.

  “The policeman usually loses,” he says philosophically.

  But as a man who must daily guard against the specific charge of “civil rights violation” against any one of his 2,200 men during performance of duty, there is a dry note in his voice as he adds:

  “A policeman gives up his civil liberties to a great degree —too much of a degree. People who shout about safeguarding civil rights don’t appreciate the extent to which a policeman gives up his.”

  Specifics.

  III

  “When did you go to the apartment?”

  “Who, me?”

  “When did you get there?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “We found the scarf there. It’s yours, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. That’s my scarf. I don’t know how it got there.”

  “It didn’t walk there, did it?”

  “No, guess not. But I don’t know how it got there. I didn’t leave it there. I wasn’t near the place.”

  “Well, you must have been there. Now, try to remember. You did know Helen, didn’t you?”

  “Helen? Sure. I seen her a couple of times. Down at the drugstore. Nice kid. That’s all. I hardly knew her.”

  “The landlady said you visited her once, in the apartment.”

  “Oh, no. Who, me? Naw!”

  “Where were you last Monday night? About eleven?”

  “Could have been anywhere. I’m usually out and around. Say, you got me wrong. This isn’t my beef. Not at all.”

  “Nobody said it’s your beef.”

  “No? Well…”

  In the soundproof interrogation room just off the squad-room of the Homicide Division, the detective and the suspect with the familiar faraway stare of the guilty are momentarily quiet. Then it starts again.

  “What do you say, Bill?”

  “What?”

  “Can you remember a little better now?”

  “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

  “Let’s have some right answers and we will.”

  “Well, what do you want?”

  “We found your scarf in Helen’s place. You know where we found it, Bill?”

  “Aw… Yeah, sure. I know where you found it. I know, I know, I know…”

  “Why did you strangle her with the scarf?”

  “She was a good kid… Helen. Too good. I had this crazy idea. I never had that idea before. You believe me? So I went…”

  And there it is. He is talking. Another murder is being solved.

  To Thad Brown, this is the specific he has known almost all his life now. The scarf, the clue; its owner, the suspect. Out of the specific, any damning little thing, come apprehension, interrogation, confession.

  Thad has never forgotten the days when he was breaking in under Detective W. A. (Pappy) Neely, an Oklahoman with a sixth-grade education who could never quite master the sergeant’s examination. But Pappy was a master of the specific.

  Once Thad rolled with him on the investigation into the stabbing murder of a woman in her apartment. They found a few cigarette butts, some drinking glasses (without fingerprints) and a partially used book of matches that could have been picked up anywhere. Pappy studied it a moment and tucked it casually into his pocket.

  Then they questioned all the murdered woman’s boy friends, and all seemed to have good alibis. Especially one. During his interrogation, Pappy offered him a cigarette and a book of matches. The man struck the match with his left hand, and Pappy arrested him. The suspect then admitted the woman had been his mistress, and he had killed her in a jealous rage. The book of matches he had left behind in the apartment had been used from the left side, rather than from the right as a right-handed person normally depletes a book of matches.

  In turn, Thad mastered the specific as he checked out on thousands of “dead body” reports and saw murder close up in all its obscene and grisly forms. Something in the room, perhaps a wisp of hair because no two heads of hair are exactly alike, would give him his lead.

  Once a woman’s body was found dumped in the desert. She had been shot through the head at close range. There were odd-type powder burns on her cheek. They had to come from the muzzle of a strange and rare gun. That was all Thad needed because he remembered that gun. Once before it had been used in an unsolved killing. He traced the weapon to the woman’s husband. The man had just fled, but Thad ascertained his direction, and when the fugitive stepped off the train at Chicago, the police there closed in.

  Today, the specific is stretched almost into the abstract for Thad Brown. As Chief of Detectives, he has almost all sleuthing as his province and supervises detective divisions, which pursue investigations of auto theft, burglary, pawnshop, forgery, fugitive—bunco, narcotics, robbery.

  And, of course, the Homicide Division whose sixty men are assigned to the almost fourteen square miles and some 160,000 residents of the turbulent Central Division. Outlying divisions have their own detective staffs, but often Homicide helps them on an important case. And the word “Homicide” is a bit of a misnomer because the Division is also charged with investigating assaults, bigamies, suicides and other “dead body” reports, rapes, abortions, kidnappings, and train wrecks.

  Thad Brown doesn’t concentrate on the specific as much as he used to do. That’s the job of his detectives. He coordinates the action in the field, accelerates the investigation through his enormous personal file of contacts and informants, and counsels on the preparation of the evidence for presentation in court.

  Sometimes, because of his close personal friendships with police in distant cities, he cuts red tape with a single long-distance call. Once during the tedious Black Dahlia murder investigation, there was a “confession” (one of the dozens that distinguished that peculiar case) in faraway Lansing, Michigan.

  Thad Brown doubted the suspect knew anything about the murder and didn’t want to tie up one of his detectives in the time-consuming formalities of taking over responsibility for the prisoner. So he phoned a friend in the Lansing police department. Without delay, the suspect was brought to Los Angeles, cleared after a few questions and returned to Lansing. The whole thing took a few hours, instead of several days, because Thad Brown had a personal contact.

  And sometimes it works in reverse. When a bad check artist fled Honolulu by plane, one of Thad’s friends, Chief of the Island police force, Dan Liu, telephoned ahead. A LAPD detail was waiting at the airport, grabbed the fugitive, fed him, and put him back on the next Honolulu-bound plane.

  In a way, Thad Brown’s career is a microcosm of LAPD itself. When he joined the force, Los Angeles was struggling under the Volstead Act. Before the shine had worn off his rookie badge,
Thad was cracking nine to ten whisky stills monthly and making thirty to fifty felony arrests in the same period.

  He spent a dozen of his first fourteen years on the force in Detective Bureau assignments; and, right after Pearl Harbor, he was named LAPD’s liaison officer with the armed forces in the defense of Los Angeles Harbor. His mission was primarily to help guard the area’s huge shipyards and refineries against sabotage. As a trained detective lieutenant, he spotted and plugged many holes in the security wall. In one instance, he discovered that the power unit which fed an entire shipyard was left exposed and unguarded. He changed that.

  When Japanese aliens, the Nisei, had to be rounded up and sent to relocation centers in the desert, it was Thad’s squad that accomplished the job with lists supplied by the FBI. By 1942 the Nisei had been cleared from the city, and LAPD grappled with a more dangerous wartime problem.

  As the aircraft, oil, and shipbuilding industries boomed, the war workers flooded the city by the tens of thousands, and so did the criminals looking for an easy buck. In that first year of war, the population skyrocketed by 70,000, and arrests increased by 11,000. There were more murders and rapes; and six hundred more persons were reported missing than the year before. It was getting far more dangerous just to walk across the street. Traffic citations doubled to half a million compared to about a quarter of a million in the last prewar year.

  Thad Brown was holding down an assignment in the Administrative Vice Squad, but now he was needed in a hotter spot. Reported crime surged upward another thirteen per cent during 1943; and, with the department weakened by men absent on military service, there were 17,000 fewer arrests. Los Angeles seemed to be moving toward wartime anarchy, when Thad Brown was made captain and put in command of the catch-all Homicide Division.

  That year there were seventy-eight murders in Los Angeles, and Thad particularly remembers two as symptomatic of the mixed-up adults who had jammed into Los Angeles from all over the country.

  One gray November morning, John Valentine,* a six-foot-five war worker, was up by six o’clock to go to his job. A friend, Raymond Boyd, spoke casually to him, but Valentine didn’t like his tone. So, instead of going to the plant that morning, he shot and killed his friend. Just like that.

  * These are fictitious names.

  And then, Thad remembers, there was the fumbling little hood with the impressive name of Farrington Graham who finally fumbled his way to Death Row at San Quentin. Beginning at the age of ten when he stole a bike, Farrington Graham built up a mediocre but uninterrupted police record for theft, robbery, burglary, possession of weapons, and jail-breaking.

  Then Farrington Graham went on a long holdup kick in Los Angeles. At first he was lucky, but he really had neither the brains nor the nerves for the job. When a hotel clerk seemed about to resist, Graham panicked, poured four shots into him and fled with his loot—$3. He went to Las Vegas and repeated his mistake. He tried to hold up the cashier at the Frontier Club, panicked again and killed him.

  Graham was returned to Thad who prepared the evidence, a confession buttressed by ballistics findings, which convicted him. Then Graham devised a novel appeal, claiming he resorted to crime only after taking drinks and hence was not guilty by reason of intoxication. But the California high court found that voluntary intoxication is neither an excuse for crime nor a defense. And thus belatedly Farrington Graham made a constructive contribution to society. To this day, he stands as a musty precedent in the law books barring that possible loophole of escape to any other killer… drunkenness.

  Specifics.

  All that Tuesday in mid-June, the mercury had bubbled above the one hundred mark through the San Fernando Valley, but tonight in the $200,000 hilltop mansion of Lauritz Melchior, the opera singer, there was the whisper of relief. Melchior and his wife, Klinchen, had entertained two couples at dinner, and, just before half past ten, they left.

  Melchior’s property was well-secured, and he had to press a button inside the house to open the electrically controlled gate for his departing friends. It opened and closed in a matter of seconds. With his wife, Melchior sat down to watch the 10:30 news on TV while Klinchen’s invalid mother, Mrs. Maria Hacker, seventy-five, sat in the patio beside the pool, seeking relief from the heat.

  Melchior’s two German hunting dogs barked suddenly, but the tenor quieted them. And then four strangers, their faces grotesquely masked in silk stockings, were confronting Melchior with guns. With them they had the housemaid and caretaker. “Don’t try anything,” the leader said, “and nobody will get hurt. We want the money and the jewelry.”

  Melchior tried to sidetrack them by opening a wall safe which contained mostly record albums. “Quit stalling,” the leader commanded, jabbing his gun into Melchior’s back. “We know there’s a big safe.”

  Fearing for her husband’s safety, Klinchen told them its location, and the tenor grudgingly opened it. The intruders scooped up more than a dozen pieces of jewelry, including a diamond ring and two bracelets which had once been among the crown jewels of Denmark. They seized five costly fur pieces: three sables, a leopard, and an otter; $518 cash and a hundred dollars’ worth of imported cigars. One couldn’t even resist stealing five packs of cigarettes.

  Except for Klinchen’s invalid mother whom they ignored, the quartet then bound their victims with Melchior’s expensive ties and his wife’s lingerie. They tore out the phone lines and pressed the gate button. They had been in the house thirty-five minutes. They now had fifteen seconds to get through the gate before it closed again, and they made it—with $100,000 worth of loot.

  Quickly Melchior broke his flimsy bonds, called the police from a hidden phone and ran into the yard with a high-powered .270 hunting rifle. The getaway car was racing down the hilltop road beyond gunshot range.

  Obviously the raid had been based on inside information. The stickup men had seemed to know how much jewelry was in the house and practically asked for one piece by name. They knew Melchior possessed a prized hunting pistol and took it. They realized Klinchen’s mother was confined to a wheelchair. They understood the mechanics of the gate.

  But, except for a few tire tracks, that was all Thad Brown had to go on. By morning he had twenty detectives checking all M.O. cards, questioning and requestioning the Melchiors, searching and researching the grounds. And that was it till Robbery Lieutenant Ed Jokisch picked up a lead from possibly the oldest police source of all—the informant. For a price, he would divulge the identities of the four holdup men.

  Once police would have rolled instantly on such “information received,” but police work is more complicated and intricate these days. It is LAPD’s policy not to deal with informants on their terms. Further, the courts had been getting increasingly severe with the police on their methods of obtaining evidence, and it had been made plain in more than one case that there must be no tampering with the civil rights of criminals.

  Lieutenant Jokisch had to wake Thad Brown in the middle of the night for authorization to deal with the informant. Go ahead, but only on a “clean hands” basis with no entanglements, Thad ordered. That meant that if Jokisch could wangle the information without committing LAPD to “a price,” fine.

  Somehow, Jokisch did it; and, just forty-eight hours after the robbery, two of the quartet were seized in separate downtown hotels. The other two (one of them a former butler for the Melchiors) were also identified, and an alarm went out for their capture.” Best of all, from the Melchiors’ point of view, Thad Brown found where the loot had been stashed throughout Los Angeles County, and detectives retrieved $90,000 worth of the valuables.

  *One suspect was convicted of robbery and kidnapping. Two suspects pleaded guilty to robbery. One suspect turned state’s evidence, and was released after the trial. No appeals are pending.

  When Thad Brown and LAPD observed their pearl anniversary, the Police Commission cited his forty-three commendations in every rank and assignment and formally thanked him for “the thirty years of his life he has d
edicated to the service of his fellow man as a law enforcement officer.”

  Getting back to specifics, Thad Brown says the job just boils down to “hard work and common sense” in finding the pattern and then finding the man that fits it. “It takes a persistent man and a suspicious man to make a good investigator,” he explains.

  Specifics.

  IV

  To most Americans, our only personal contact with the police comes when the motorcycle appears out of nowhere and the officer writes a ticket. If we had been really speeding instead of just doing maybe ten mph above the limit, it wouldn’t be so bad. But clearly we are being made a martyr to the police quota system. The cop hands out so many tickets a day or they take his shiny bike away from him.

  On almost any highway anywhere in the U.S.A., you can get into quite a brisk argument on this topic with the arresting officer. Most policemen piously deny that there is any such thing as the quota system; but, surprisingly, LAPD makes no bones about it. “They write tickets, or they don’t ride bikes,” Chief Harold W. Sullivan says frankly.

  Furthermore, as far as he is concerned, his men will continue writing some thirty-three hundred citations daily, more than 1,200,000 yearly. Almost half a million are for illegal parking, but nearly all the rest are for the “moving” violations which range from speeding to running red lights and stop signs. And these are what cause accidents.

  In Los Angeles, where the populace lives and often dies on rubber, there are more than 130 auto crashes daily and an injury toll of about ninety-four, some eight of them pedestrians. During the week eight of the victims die.

  Yet, by comparison with other metropolises, the carnage is restrained. One survey shows that the Los Angeles rate of traffic injuries per 10,000 vehicles is 27.7—only a third to a half that of comparable cities (Detroit, 55.9; Chicago, 75.9; Philadelphia, 90.6). And the death rate of 1.6 contrasts with 2.3 in Detroit, 3.4 in Chicago and 3.0 in Philadelphia.

  “There is a direct relation between the number of tickets issued and the accident rate,” Chief Sullivan says in defense of the quota. “We have charts to prove it and surveys to back up the charts.”