Second in a series. 

Re: “Bad Guys Can Exhale – Raetz Retiring” 

Even though he has logged 31 years with the Police Dept., Officer Jim Raetz looks too young to retire, and he was asked if this is a good time, a convenient time, to leave.

He has been mining and landscaping this issue for months.

“As a national police officer, looking at this from a national perspective, I would say yes,” Mr. Raetz said.”

His meaning was obvious because the news has screamed from the pages of every American newspaper for the past 11 months.

“In Los Angeles,” he said, “we went through these sort of racial growing pains a long time ago with Rodney King. It was here. This was the flashpoint.

“The ripples went across the country from here. We get the ripples back, which aren’t as strong, which is why you saw the protests weren’t as big nationwide as what occurred in Los Angeles.”

Mr. Raetz, who will devote 100 percent of his time to his law practice, starting in mid-December, said that 23 years after Rodney King “we have a much more diverse Police Dept. than we did then. Further, I don’t think people here see police the way that maybe they do in other states where they are having difficulties now.”

Police Chief Scott Bixby proudly has touted the Culver City police force as being even more diverse, ethnically, than the community, a boast that may be unique to Culver City.

Oh, yes, the department has under gone massive changes since Mr. Raetz arrived in the middle 1980s, and here, with a chuckle, is how he remembers it.

“I can’t tell you exactly how this has happened,” he said. “But we have gotten lot of young people from real diverse backgrounds. It’s good to see they have the desire and drive to do a great job.

“I joke about how when I came to the Police Dept., I am all of 5-foot-6, and I was in the bottom 10 percentile of police officers. Now,” Mr. Raetz chuckled, “I am in the whopping Top 50. So it has changed a lot.”

(To be continued)