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
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