Officer Down... Sort Of

Rain changes a city.

Most people think of Los Angeles as sunshine and palm trees. Cops know a different Los Angeles. Sometime around three in the morning, after a winter rain, downtown became another world. The streets glistened beneath the streetlights. Storefronts shimmered in the wet pavement. There were no pedestrians, no traffic, and almost no sound beyond the occasional hiss of tires somewhere blocks away. In the mid-1980s, very few people actually lived downtown. Once the businesses closed, much of Central Division became a ghost town.

On nights like that, Wayne and I traded our foot beat for a radio car.

The call was a Code 30—a silent commercial burglary alarm on the fifteenth floor of an office building near the Jewelry District. Burglary alarms were funny things. They were dispatched as low-priority calls because most turned out to be nothing. Rain leaked into alarm systems. Thunder rattled windows. Electrical contacts failed. You could spend an entire rainy shift answering false alarms.

The mistake was assuming they were always false.

Commercial burglaries were common in Central Division, and many of the professionals didn't bother with doors or windows. They came through the roof.

Normally we'd ask Air Support to check it. Piper Technical Center—Piper Tech to everyone on the street—was only a few minutes away on the north end of the division and housed what was then the world's largest rooftop heliport. But after a rainy night, especially around three in the morning, helicopters weren't always flying.

If you wanted the roof checked, sometimes you checked it yourself.

Some officers carried grappling hooks in the trunk of their black-and-whites, tossing them over roof parapets and climbing hand over hand to the top. I never got quite that ambitious, but I'd climbed more than one telephone pole after parking on the sidewalk so I could reach the utility pegs and step onto a warehouse roof.

This building offered something easier.

As we pulled into the alley behind it, we found the exterior fire escape hanging just low enough that, standing on the hood of the patrol car, we could pull the bottom section down.

Someone could have used it.

That was enough for me.

We started climbing.

I took the lead while Wayne followed a few steps behind. The old steel fire escape had probably been hanging on the side of that building since Roosevelt was president. Every step echoed through the metal.

About four floors up Wayne called out.

"You're walking too heavy."

I stopped and looked down.

"What do you mean I'm walking too heavy?"

"You're making the whole damn thing shake."

Sure enough, every step sent a shiver through the old fire escape.

So, naturally, when I reached the next landing, I jumped.

I landed as hard as I could.

The entire fire escape exploded into rattles, bangs, and vibrations that seemed to travel all the way to the sidewalk fifteen stories below.

There was a moment of silence.

Then Wayne yelled, "You're an asshole!"

Another pause.

"You can go the rest of the way yourself."

I laughed.

What I didn't appreciate at the time was that Wayne wasn't just irritated.

He didn't like heights.

To him, that ancient fire escape wasn't just making a little noise. It was announcing its intention to tear itself off the side of the building with both of us attached to it.

He climbed back down.

I climbed the remaining ten stories alone.

By the time I reached the roof, I was breathing hard. My heavy LAPD bomber jacket—with its synthetic shell and thick wool collar—felt like it had doubled in weight after fifteen flights of stairs. Add in the leather Sam Browne belt, revolver, spare ammunition, handcuffs, baton, portable radio, and flashlight, and every step had become a workout.

The roof was empty.

I swept it with my Streamlight. It wasn't department-issued; I'd bought it with my own money. Streamlights were expensive enough that owning one was almost a point of pride. The replacement bulbs alone cost nearly a day's pay. That's one reason I always smiled when someone claimed cops routinely hit people with their flashlights. Maybe somebody did somewhere, but not with a Streamlight. Breaking that bulb would have cost you close to a hundred dollars in 1980s money.

No burglars.

No tools.

No fresh footprints.

I switched my portable radio to the partner channel, the little toggle that let us talk without the dispatcher hearing.

"Hey, Wayne. Nothing up here. I'll be heading back down."

I switched back and walked toward the fire escape.

That's when I noticed the trash bag.

It was a large black plastic trash bag lying near the edge of the roof.

An idea immediately presented itself.

I dragged the bag over to the fire escape and stepped onto the top landing.

"Hey, Wayne!" I shouted.

"I'm coming down!"

A second later I yelled, "I slipped!"

Then I screamed.

"Ahhhhh!"

At the same time, I hurled the trash bag over the side.

From Wayne's position on the ground, all he could see was my flashlight suddenly bouncing wildly across the side of the building, hear me screaming, and watch a large dark object tumble fifteen stories toward the patrol car.

The bag hit the hood with a tremendous smack and burst open in every direction.

Wayne was convinced he'd just watched his partner fall to his death.

Without hesitation, he grabbed his microphone.

"Officer needs help!"

Then he requested an ambulance.

Still standing safely on the fire escape, I grabbed my radio.

"Wayne... cancel it."

Silence.

"Wayne... cancel it."

A long pause.

"You son of a bitch..."

By the time I reached the sidewalk, I was laughing so hard I could barely stand.

Wayne wasn't.

Not even a little.

In the space of about three seconds, he'd gone from irritated...to terrified...to furious.

Nearly twenty years later I introduced him to my wife.

She smiled and said, "Oh...you're that Wayne."

He looked at me.

Then at her.

Then back at me.

"I still haven't forgiven him."

Police officers remember shootings.

They remember pursuits.

They remember the calls that almost got them killed.

Wayne remembered the rainy night he thought his partner had fallen fifteen stories to his death because that partner happened to be the biggest smart-ass in Central Division.

Stagecoaching

We called it the Stagecoach.

The Stagecoach wasn't a horse-drawn wagon crossing the frontier. It was an RTD bus rattling through downtown Los Angeles in the middle of the night. Yet somehow the name made perfect sense.

To understand why, you have to understand something about police culture in the 1980s.

People often think policing influenced popular culture, and it certainly did. Television shows, movies, and novels borrowed heavily from police stories, police language, and police personalities. But the influence ran both ways. Popular culture shaped police officers as much as police officers shaped popular culture.

When I was a young officer, I read Joseph Wambaugh's The Blue Knight. Like many cops of my generation, I wanted some of the experiences I had read about. Not because I wanted danger or excitement, but because those stories helped define what police work was supposed to look like. The books, the movies, and the television shows created a shared mythology that became part of police culture.

In 1981, Fort Apache, The Bronx brought the imagery of the American frontier back into policing. The precinct house became a fort. Patrol officers became cavalrymen. The streets became hostile territory. The movie didn't invent those comparisons, but it gave them new life at a time when many of us were just beginning our careers.

So when officers referred to riding the RTD bus as "taking the Stagecoach," nobody thought it sounded strange. It fit naturally into the language and traditions of the job. Whether the term came from an old-timer, a movie, or some long-forgotten story, I never knew. My partner used it, and before long I did too.

That's how police culture works.

Stories become language. Language becomes tradition. Eventually nobody remembers where it started.

We simply called it the Stagecoach.

In the mid-1980s, I worked a foot beat in downtown Los Angeles. It covered a single block on Fifth Street between Spring and Broadway. On paper it didn't sound like much. In reality, it was one of the busiest and most fascinating pieces of sidewalk in the city.

The beat was anchored by the Alexander Hotel on the northeast corner of Spring and Fifth. At the other end stood Broadway, lined with theaters, cheap hotels, storefronts, and an endless stream of humanity moving through the heart of downtown.

I worked both night watch and graveyard shifts. The graveyard shift began around eleven o'clock at night and continued until dawn.

When you worked a foot beat, you walked. There was no patrol car waiting for you. To get from Central Division to the beat meant crossing several city blocks. Rather than make the walk, we'd leave through the back door of the station, head down to Fifth Street, and board the RTD bus.

Officially, it was public transportation.

Unofficially, it was the Stagecoach.

The bus carried us to the beat and often carried us back again. Sometimes it carried our prisoners.

When we made an arrest, transportation was always a consideration. We could walk someone back to the station, although that wasn't usually practical. We could call for an aid unit to transport the prisoner. Occasionally we could get the B-Wagon—the old paddy wagon—to pick them up.

But every now and then the simplest solution was to board the RTD bus with the prisoner and ride four blocks back to Central.

Nobody thought much about it. It was simply another part of working downtown.

The Stagecoach also served another purpose.

Sometimes we'd ride right past our stop.

Instead of getting off, we'd remain seated and let the bus roll slowly through the block while we watched the street through the windows.

You'd be surprised what you could see from a city bus.

People who disappeared when they spotted uniformed officers suddenly became visible when they thought we weren't around. Drug dealers relaxed. Wanted suspects emerged from doorways. People who owed us conversations wandered into view.

One night we watched a chain snatch occur right in front of us. What looked like a quick theft was actually a robbery unfolding in real time. The victim screamed, the suspect ran, and before the bus had gone half a block we were already moving.

The Stagecoach gave us something every foot-beat officer values: a chance to observe before being observed.

And that block was worth observing.

Every street has a personality. Fifth Street had an entire ecosystem.

Some nights the air carried the smell of kimchi from nearby restaurants. Other nights the city sanitation crews would steam-clean the sidewalks and the street would fill with the scent of hot water, detergent, and decades of accumulated grime. Sometimes the smell of urine hung in the air. Most nights it was a mixture of everything.

The sidewalks never stopped moving.

Street prostitutes drifted between doorways.

Heroin addicts searched for their next fix.

Homeless men pushed shopping carts containing everything they owned.

Residents from the old hotels came downstairs simply to get out of their rooms for a few minutes.

The Alexander Hotel and the surrounding single-room occupancy hotels housed people trying to survive difficult circumstances. Some lived alone. Others somehow managed to raise families inside rooms barely large enough for a bed. Parents stepped outside for a cigarette. Workers returned from late shifts. Children peered from windows overlooking the street below.

Crime lived there.

But so did ordinary life.

That's what outsiders often failed to understand.

At four o'clock in the morning, one of the movie theaters on Broadway would empty out. Hundreds of people would emerge carrying blankets, bags, and bundles of clothing. Many had spent the night inside because a movie ticket was safer, warmer, and cheaper than spending the night on the sidewalk.

For a few minutes the entire block changed.

People flowed onto the street and moved in every direction. Some headed toward missions. Some returned to hotels. Others drifted toward bus stops, coffee shops, or wherever the day would take them.

Then, as dawn approached, the balance shifted again.

Factory workers appeared.

Janitors.

Restaurant employees.

People heading to jobs that started before sunrise.

The prostitutes and addicts didn't disappear, but they became part of a different crowd. The character of the street changed as another day began.

Standing on that block night after night taught me that a city breathes.

It inhales.

It exhales.

The people change. The smells change. The sounds change.

Yet the street remains.

And somewhere near the beginning and end of every shift, the Stagecoach would rumble down Fifth Street.

Just a city bus.

Yet for a pair of foot-beat cops working downtown Los Angeles, it was transportation, observation post, occasional prisoner transport, and a small piece of police culture.

A relic of a time when cops borrowed language from novels and movies, just as novels and movies borrowed stories from cops.

The Stagecoach.

A simple name for a city bus, and a reminder that the line between police culture and popular culture has always run both ways.