Somebody Quit

There were a couple of times during the process of becoming a Los Angeles police officer when I honestly did not think I was going to make it. Looking back now, after a career that lasted almost a quarter of a century, it is easy to make the whole thing sound inevitable, as if one thing naturally led to another and I was always going to end up wearing that badge. That is not how it felt at the time. At the time, it felt like a long, paper-driven obstacle course, where every step might be the one where somebody finally looked at my file, shook his head, and said, “No, not this one.”

The hiring process in the late 1970s was long, or at least it seemed long to a nineteen-year-old who wanted the job more than he probably understood. There were no computers in the way we think of them now, no online application portal, no email update, no little progress bar telling you where you stood. Everything was paper and pencil. Files were actual files. Folders were actual folders. Notices came in the mail. If someone had to reach you quickly, they called the house, and if you were not there, you hoped somebody wrote the message down correctly. The whole thing moved at the speed of government, paper, postage, and whatever stack your manila folder happened to be sitting in that week.

I applied when I was nineteen, probably nineteen and a half, because I wanted to give the process plenty of time. You had to be twenty-one to be appointed, and I figured if I started early enough, all the testing and investigating and interviewing would line up about right. The written test came first, and from what I remember, it was not exactly the California Bar Exam. It felt like an SAT test written for an eighth grader, and I may be giving it too much credit. Then came the oral interview. I have no idea whether I did well enough that I would get hired today. Maybe I did. Maybe I did not. But in the late 1970s, I did well enough to keep moving.

The first time I really started to wonder whether I was in trouble was during the background investigation, and that took me back to Parker Center. I had been to Parker Center once before, when I was in about the third grade, on a school field trip sometime around 1967. Back then, Parker Center was still fairly new. It had opened in 1955 and was named after William H. Parker, the LAPD chief who was considered the great reform chief, the man credited with taking the department into the modern era. By the time I first walked through it as a little kid, it had only been open about twelve years. It must have looked impressive to me then, although what I mostly remember is that feeling kids have when they are taken into a serious adult building and told to stay together, keep quiet, and not touch anything.

When I walked back into Parker Center as a police applicant, the building had been standing for almost twenty-five years, and they'd been twenty-five hard years. Police buildings age differently than other buildings. They absorb cigarette smoke, bad coffee, floor wax, radio traffic, long nights, hard decisions, and thousands of cops carrying pieces of the city through their hallways. To a twenty-year-old kid trying to get hired, Parker Center wasn't just another city building. It was where cops came from. Every name I'd ever heard my father mention seemed to pass through that building. Promotions happened there. Investigations started there. Careers began there. Looking back now, I realize I wasn't just walking into headquarters. I was walking into the place where my own career might begin—or end.

I went in through the front because I did not know any better. Eventually I made my way up to the background investigator, and he took me into a small interview room. The room was dark, or at least that is how I remember it. There was a single light in the ceiling, a wooden bench, and two wooden chairs set across from each other. It had that worn government-building look, where nothing was designed to be comfortable and nothing had been replaced until it absolutely had to be. The place smelled like old walls, cigarette smoke, and coffee. It was not designed as an interrogation room, but when you are nineteen or twenty and hoping somebody lets you become a police officer, almost any small room with a man holding your future in a folder feels like an interrogation room.

The background investigator was a slight man, almost spider-like in his thinness and in the way he moved. He had greasy black hair and a mustache that was thin in shape, not thin because it lacked hair, just drawn across his upper lip like a line. At the time I thought he was about sixty years old. Looking back, he was probably in his thirties. He had one manila folder with a few sheets of paper in it, maybe five or six, and he had a mechanical pencil that he kept clicking. He clicked it when he needed more lead, and he clicked it when he did not need more lead. I think it was a nervous habit, although at the time I thought maybe he did it to bother people.

He also had a cup of coffee in one of those paper cups that came out of vending machines, the ones with playing cards printed around the side and the hidden card underneath the bottom, so you could play poker with your coffee cup after the coffee was gone. That cup had a very particular smell, a mixture of weak vending-machine coffee and hot paper. He was smoking a cigarette because, of course, you could still smoke inside the police building. He sat there across from me, cigarette burning, ashtray nearby, coffee cup on the table, mechanical pencil clicking in his hand, and he started going through his questions.

What I did not know at the time was that he had been my father’s partner in Vice. My father was a police officer for more than thirty years, and someday I will tell the story of the years when he and I were both on the department at the same time, because my first ten years were essentially his last ten years. But sitting in that room, I did not know this man knew my father. I did not know he and Dad had worked together. I just knew he had my folder, and he was asking me questions, and I needed to get through the interview without saying something stupid.

The questions went along. Nothing too dramatic at first. Background questions. Personal questions. Things designed to find out whether you were honest, whether you had done something they needed to know about, whether you were hiding some disaster in your past. Then, without much change in expression, he looked at me and asked:

“Have you ever had sex with an animal?”

I paused. Not because I had to think through my history with livestock, but because I was not sure if it was a trick question. Human beings are animals, right? That is what went through my mind. I was young, I was nervous, and I was trying to answer the question correctly.

So I asked a clarifying question.

“You mean like people?”

He looked right at me.

“No. Like chickens. You ever fuck a chicken?”

That was the high point or the low point of the interview, depending on how you want to look at it. The answer stumbled out of me before I could do anything with it.

“No. No chickens. No, no chickens.”

 I have to admit, of all the answers I'd rehearsed on the drive to Parker Center, none of them involved chickens.

He seemed satisfied with that. He moved on, and eventually the interview ended, but I walked out of Parker Center wondering what kind of person he thought I was. I did not know then that questions like that, or versions of them, were part of the process. I certainly did not know they could be that specific. Chickens seemed unnecessarily precise. I left there thinking my background might be questionable, although I was not entirely sure what part of my life suggested poultry was going to be an issue.

Eventually, though, I moved forward in the process and was sent to Central Receiving Hospital for the physical. Central Receiving Hospital was another one of those places that belonged to the old Los Angeles police world. Its history went back a long way, all the way to the early days of the city’s emergency medical system. The original receiving hospital system had its roots in the nineteenth century, and over the years it moved through different locations as the city grew and changed. There had been the old Georgia Street Police Station connection, and I remember that building too, because the old-timers talked about it and because it was part of the history of the police ambulance service. Georgia Street eventually became something else, like so many old civic buildings do. The place I reported to was the Central Receiving Hospital at Sixth Street and Loma Drive, the one that had opened after the move from Georgia Street in the 1950s.

For cops of that era, these places mattered. Parker Center mattered. Central Receiving mattered. Georgia Street mattered. They were not just addresses; they were shared reference points. Generations of officers passed through them, got examined in them, waited in them, stood in hallways in them, and remembered them later with the strange affection people develop for uncomfortable places that marked important turns in their lives. Central Receiving had the look and feel of an old government medical building. There was linoleum, metal desks, paper forms, nurses who knew exactly what they were doing, and that institutional smell of disinfectant, old paint, and bureaucracy. It was not glamorous, but it was part of the gate you had to pass through.

The physical examination went fine, at least as far as I knew. When it was over, before I left, a nurse asked me if I had time to take the psychological test. I had set the whole day aside, so I said sure. I was not in charge of anything. If they told me to sit somewhere, I sat. If they handed me papers, I filled them out. If they gave me a test, I took the test.

The test was long. I think now it may have been the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, but I cannot swear to that. I just remember a long personality test with question after question after question. Some of them were simple. Some were odd. Some seemed so ordinary you wondered why anyone would ask them. I have a good appetite. I wake up fresh and restored most mornings. I think I would enjoy the work of a librarian. My father is a good man. I feel anxious. I do not feel as smart as other people. I like dogs. I like cats. I think Jesus is coming back. There were a ton of them, and after a while the questions started to feel like they were circling back on themselves, asking the same thing from another direction to see if you would contradict yourself.

I answered all the questions and went home. Later, I received a postcard in the mail giving me a date for my psychological interview. So I went back to Central Receiving Hospital, checked in, and the nurse said they needed to give me the test. I did not know it was going to be the same test. I just said okay. I was twenty years old, and if they were giving me a test, I was taking the test. That was the relationship. They had the job. I wanted the job.

Once I started, the test seemed familiar. Then it seemed very familiar. I remember thinking, I believe this is the same test I already took. But I did not know the protocol. Maybe they gave it twice. Maybe one was for scoring and one was for comparison. Maybe I was wrong. I had no idea. So I sat there and took the test again. I did not march up to the desk and announce that the system had made a mistake. I was not there to supervise the Los Angeles Police Department’s hiring process. I was there to become part of it, if they would let me.

After I finished, I waited maybe fifteen minutes, and then they called me into a room. It looked like a hospital doctor’s office, or at least the government version of one. I remember the green linoleum floor and a large metal desk, the kind of big gray government desk you would see in a police station, a military office, or some forgotten city department. The desk was covered with papers. Not arranged papers. Covered. Files, forms, stacks, notes, and whatever else was part of the work of deciding whether young men like me were mentally suitable to carry a badge and a gun.

The psychologist sat across from me. He had sandy brown hair and sideburns, which I remember for some reason. Some images stick because you were under stress when you saw them, and his face, hair, desk, and that green floor stayed with me. He looked at me and asked:

“Why did you take the test a second time?”

I did not understand the question.

“I didn’t know I took the test a second time.”

He looked at me like that was not an acceptable answer.

“You didn’t know you took it twice?”

“You mean the test I just took?”

“Yes. You took it twice.”

“Yeah, you guys gave it to me twice. I didn’t ask for it.”

He kept pressing.

“Why did you take it twice?”

“I told you. They gave it to me. I didn’t know what it was going to be. There’s no way I would know.”

Then he asked me:

“Are you a tap dancer?”

Now I was really confused. I did not know whether he meant actual tap dancing, or whether this was some psychological phrase I had never heard before, or whether he thought I was trying to dance around his questions. I looked at him and said:

“I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.”

He said, “I think you tried to give me the answers you thought I wanted to hear.”

Maybe people do that on tests like that. Maybe everyone does it a little. Maybe some of the questions are designed to find out whether you are trying to make yourself sound better than you are. I do not know. What I knew in that moment was that I was getting angry. Not out-of-control angry, but irritated, frustrated, and insulted. I had not asked to take the test twice. I had not designed the process. I had done what they told me to do, and now the man across the desk seemed to be suggesting that I was somehow manipulating the process by following instructions.

Then he shifted to another question.

“When you get mad, do you ever break things?”

Because I was young, and because I was a smartass, and because by then I was tired of being treated like I was doing something wrong, I asked:

“Whose things?”

He looked at me.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I wouldn’t break my own things. I can tell you that much.”

He asked if I ever got that mad. I told him I got mad. Sure, I got mad. Everybody gets mad. I got frustrated. I got irritated. But no, I did not go around breaking things. That seemed to be enough for him. He said I could go. There was no reassurance, no explanation, no indication of how I had done. Just, okay, you can go. So I left Central Receiving Hospital thinking I had failed the psychological evaluation. Between the chicken question at Parker Center and the tap-dancer question at Central Receiving, I figured my chances were not looking good.

I walked out and started heading home, but I did not get far before I stopped near Sixth Street toward the Harbor Freeway and found a pay phone. That is another thing that belongs to the old city. A pay phone. No cell phone in your pocket. No text to your father. No quick call from the car. If you needed to talk to somebody, you found a pay phone, dropped a dime in the slot, and hoped they answered. I called my dad and told him I thought I had failed.

I told him first about the background interview, including the chicken question. He was not concerned.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I know that guy.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I talked to him about it.”

That surprised me. I had no idea they knew each other, let alone that they had talked. Dad told me they had worked together, and that the background investigator was not a problem. That made me feel a little better, although only a little, because I still had the psychological interview sitting in my head like a bad verdict waiting to be announced.

I told him about the psychologist and the test and being asked why I took it twice and whether I was a tap dancer. Dad did not know that guy. He could not tell me it was fine. What he said was probably the only thing he could say.

“Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing that can be done. You did what you did.”

That was true, but it was not especially comforting. I hung up the phone and walked away thinking maybe I was not going to become a police officer after all. There was nothing to appeal, nothing to correct, nothing to explain. The process was the process. Somewhere, somebody would decide whether I moved on.

About a month later, the background investigator called and told me I was going to the Police Academy in February 1980. I believe that would have been the 280 class, and if anybody from that class ever reads this, that is what they told me. I had made it. At least that is what I thought. After all the tests, the interviews, the physical, the background, and the psychological, I was finally going to the Academy.

Then, on the Friday before the Monday I was supposed to report, the background investigator called again.

“Are you twenty-one?”

It was a strange question, because my birth date was in the paperwork. It had been in the paperwork from the beginning.

“No,” I said. “I’m not twenty-one until March.”

There was a problem. You could not go to the Academy until you were twenty-one. I was only a few weeks short, but a few weeks short was still short. The way he said it made it sound almost like I had tried to pull something, although I had not hidden anything. I had applied early because the process took time. They had my age. They had my birthday. They had my file. None of this should have been a surprise.

He told me he would call me back and maybe there would be a class in April. Maybe they could get me in then. So I did not go to the Academy in February. I waited again.

By April I was finally twenty-one. On Friday, April 18—or at least that's how I remember the timing—the background investigator called again. He told me there was an academy class starting Monday.

"Show up," he said.

I asked if I was in the class.

"No," he said. "You're not in the class. But show up anyway. If somebody quits, you'll get the job."

It sounded so strange that I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly. The whole idea seemed impossible. Show up to the Police Academy, even though I wasn't in the class, and hope somebody quit? That's not how jobs worked.

In fact, I believed him so little that I didn't even quit the job I already had. I simply didn't show up for work that Monday. I figured if this police academy thing didn't happen, I'd just go back to work on Tuesday with some excuse about a family emergency or a misunderstanding. It seemed like the safer bet.

So Monday morning, I reported to the Police Academy anyway.

They called the class roster, and my name was not on it. The drill instructor looked at me and asked who I was. I told him, “Sir, I was told that if somebody quit, I could have their job.”

He looked at me like, well, all right, because it was 1980 and strange things still happened in person, on paper, and over telephones. There was no computer system instantly settling the matter. There was no email trail. There was just me standing there, not on the roster, saying I had been told to report.

They let me stay. I went everywhere the class went that morning, even though I technically was not in the class. I was attached to them without belonging to them. I followed along, did what I was told, and waited. At noon, they broke for lunch. We were in the gymnasium, sitting on the floor with everybody else, when lunch ended and somebody did not come back.

Then I heard them calling my name.

Somebody had quit. Or somebody had left. Or somebody had decided before the first full day was over that the Los Angeles Police Academy was not for him. I do not know who he was. I do not know why he left. I do not know whether he had second thoughts, found something better, got scared, got mad, or simply understood before the rest of us did that this was not the life he wanted. All I know is that he did not come back from lunch, and because he did not come back, there was suddenly an empty place.

They gave that place to me.

The drill instructor or one of the staff told me, in effect, “Somebody quit, so you’re in.”

That was how I got the job.

For most of the process, I was never entirely sure I was going to make it. There were moments when I thought my background was going to sink me, moments when I thought the psychologist had decided I was too clever, too angry, or too something to become a cop, and moments when the department itself seemed unable to figure out whether I was old enough, ready enough, or actually in the class. But in the end, none of those doubts mattered. One young man left at lunch. I stayed. He walked out of the story, and I walked into it.

I never learned the name of the recruit who didn't come back after lunch. Maybe policing wasn't for him. Maybe another opportunity came along. Maybe he simply changed his mind. Whatever the reason, his decision changed my life.

 Every patrol car I ever drove.

 Every radio call I answered.

 Every partner I worked with.

 Every promotion I received.

 Every story I've written about policing in Los Angeles.

 They all trace back to one ordinary Monday in April 1980, when another young man stood up at lunch...

 ...and never came back