It was good to see the back of him.
I mean our vainglorious, now former, Police Chief, Bill Bratton. I was never a fan of Mr. Bratton. He was an East Coast guy who never gave up the East Coast.
He seemed to be in Los Angeles only slightly fewer days than our attention-seeking mayor. So it is with muted anticipation that I look forward to the leadership of our soon-to-be chief, Charlie Beck.
It’s not that I’ve had a ton of bad experiences with the LAPD that led me to dislike the former chief of his department.
It’s because I’ve had almost no experiences with it at all. Despite Bratton’s promise of a “broken windows” policy, my relationship with the Los Angeles Police Dept. has been virtually nonexistent.
Why?
Because when I call them, they never come. Never. Ever. Nope, not even once. Granted, I haven’t been lying in the gutter dying. But I’d like to think that police generally intervene before then. By that point, I’d need the Los Angeles Fire Dept., an ambulance, and a prayer.
Have a traffic accident? The police don’t come. My understanding is that they come only when there is an injury.
What Are the Standards?
Now whether that’s a lying-in-the- gutter-dying injury or something milder, I have no idea.
Because they never come.
But what do insurance companies require? A police report, of course. Try filing one. No, really, try. It’s more difficult than filing a successful insurance claim—and I speak from experience.
Have a noisy neighbor who likes to play stucco-rattling music and shoot loaded guns into the air on holidays? Call the LAPD. They don’t come. Their excuse whenever I’ve made these kinds of calls is that they have real issues to deal with, like people lying in gutters, and murders and burglaries.
Crashers/squatters having a Craigslist-advertised party in the foreclosed property across the street? Call the LAPD. They don’t come. Perhaps if one of the party-goers had fallen from the balcony and was lying in the gutter . . .
Have a prostitute “working” in her car in front of your house? Call the LAPD. They don’t come. That one got a lot of chuckles from the police officer who answered the phone, but no cruiser.
You get the gist. I haven’t yet found the magic formula that will get the police to my house. Wait, I take that back. They have been to my house twice—when they had the wrong address. Nothing like a middle of the night police visit accompanied by banging on the door, lights and sirens blazing, only to find out they’re supposed to be on another street. Who wouldn’t worry that they couldn’t find your house when you really, really (no, really) needed them?
They Are Sympathetic, but…
Sure, the duty officer is usually kind when I call; he makes all the sympathetic noises, and then kindly informs me that between the nearly 10,000 police officers in all of the city of Los Angeles, they can’t possibly spare one for my problem. Even the officer who couldn’t hear me and asked me to turn the music down, and when I informed him that was a neighbor, laughed and said he was very sorry, that sounded really bad, but did I know there were murders going on elsewhere in the city?
Los Angeles is not the first large city in which I’ve lived. I realize murders, rapes and armed robberies are the first priorities for the police. But who do you call to keep the peace? When one neighbor played his wall-banging music for over six or seven hours straight, my husband wanted to know if the police didn’t realize keeping the peace would be far easier than having to deal with another murder on our back lawn.
And I don’t appreciate the scare tactics of the “community-based” senior lead officers, either. At one neighborhood meeting a few years ago, the SLO spent nearly an hour discussing all the crimes happening in our neighborhood. He even informed us, that (gasp!) the local fish fry store was a front for pot, heroin and crack dealing. I sat there the whole time wondering why in the heck he was telling me this. He was the one with the gun and the badge, and the authority to stop crime, I wanted to push him right out of the meeting and onto the den of iniquity just down the street. Surely, he didn’t expect me to do anything about it. And I know that calling the cops will yield nothing, so clearly I wasn’t necessary to the equation.
Whether the police operate as a paramilitary organization, warm and fuzzy community-based leaders, or just a group of people who get the bad guys makes little difference to me. Our new police chief-designate can choose his own methods.
I’d like a lot less gun violence, a lot less gang violence, and far fewer property crimes. For that to happen, though, the police probably don’t need to come when I call, but they will need to come when somebody calls. I’d appreciate it if that person didn’t need to be lying in the gutter.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
