The Dangerous Cat

Summer nights in Southwest Los Angeles were usually my favorite time to work. By then I had three or four years on the job and was already a training officer working graveyard shift in Southwest Area. Graveyard ran from about eleven at night until seven in the morning, and whenever I was in patrol, I was almost always working either graves or swings. Those were the hours I liked. The city felt different after midnight. The air was cooler, but the city certainly wasn't quieter. If anything, it was busier. The people who lived normal lives were asleep, and another Los Angeles had come alive.

Except during heat waves.

This was one of those late August or early September stretches when some high-pressure system settled over the basin and refused to move. The days were hot, but the nights were worse. The air got heavy and wet. The whole city felt like it had been wrapped in a damp blanket. In a wool uniform and a bulletproof vest, you sweat like a pig.

Which, under the circumstances, seemed appropriate.

At roll call we learned about a series of hot-prowl burglaries. Most people say their house got robbed, but cops don't use the words that way. Robbery is taking property from a person by force or fear. Burglary is entering a structure to steal something. A hot prowl is worse because the burglar is entering occupied homes while people are inside, usually asleep.

I'm not a psychologist, but this always struck me as something more than a property crime. This guy wasn't just stealing purses. He was sneaking into houses while people slept a few feet away. There seemed to be a thrill component to it, like he got a kick out of being inside somebody's home and walking around while they were there. That kind of person always seemed unstable to me and liable to do just about anything if something went wrong. To my way of thinking, this was a real dangerous cat.

There had already been at least a dozen of them in about five days. It was summertime, and people were sleeping with their windows open. Sometimes the suspect appeared to be reaching through an open window and grabbing a purse from a chair or table. Other times he was going all the way inside. Nobody knew how many homes he had actually entered. They only knew about the ones where someone discovered something missing.

That bothered me.

The next morning I went to detectives and got copies of the reports. They had an old map, but I wanted to look at the pattern myself. I pulled out a Thomas Guide, which some of you will remember, and started plotting the locations. What jumped out was that the burglaries weren't spread all over Southwest. They were concentrated in a very small area, roughly from Coliseum north toward 39th and Martin Luther King Boulevard, and from Norton on the west to somewhere around Westside or Welland on the east. It wasn't a big hunting ground. Maybe eight blocks wide and a block or two deep.

That night I went to the watch commander.

Lieutenant Marion Hellenkamp was working the night watch out of Southwest. She had a way of communicating entire conversations with a look. One look meant, "If you say that again, something bad is going to happen to you." The other look meant, "You're clever," or, "You're a good boy." I usually knew which one was coming because it depended almost entirely on my own conduct.

"Give me a shift," I told her. "I'll catch him."

She gave me one of those looks.

Then she asked, "What are you going to do?"

I told her the plan. This guy was taking women's purses. Sometimes from outside the window, sometimes from inside the house. He had been too consistent. To me, it looked like a compulsion. He wasn't taking nights off. He was going to be out there again.

When I finished, she said, "Okay. One shift. Off the books. Off the radio. No calls. Work the problem."

That was all I needed.

My partner David and I got into our black-and-white and headed for the neighborhood. The car was an old Matador with a bench seat, one of those old-style patrol cars that feels prehistoric now. We didn't have portable radios on our belts yet. Southwest hadn't issued them to us. Everything depended on the car radio.

We turned the radio all the way down. Not low. Down. You could not hear it at all. We didn't want any sound coming from the car. The radio was only on in case I had to grab the microphone and broadcast.

Then we rolled all four windows down.

Those cars had a little switch hidden up under the dashboard, to the left of the steering wheel. You had to hunch forward to find it. If you held it while braking, the brake lights didn't come on. You couldn't just flip it and leave it off. You had to hold it. But with the headlights off and that little switch held down, you could move through a neighborhood completely dark.

So that's what we did.

For hours, we rolled through those streets in darkness. No headlights. No brake lights. No radio. The only sounds were the low hum of the engine, the tires moving slowly over the pavement, and our own breathing. We'd ease down a block in the gutter, turn a corner, stop and listen. Then we'd move again. Street after street. Block after block.

The little brake-light kill switch was tucked so far up under the dashboard that I couldn't sit normally while holding it. I had to stay hunched forward in the seat, one hand on the wheel and one hand holding that switch. After a while my back started aching. My shoulder started aching. My neck started aching. There was no comfortable position.

The windows were all down, but we were moving so slowly there wasn't much air coming through the car. The heat just sat there with us. The humidity wrapped itself around you and stayed. Sweat ran down my back and soaked through my uniform shirt. The wool uniform trapped the heat. The vest trapped even more. Every few minutes I'd shift around trying to find a more comfortable position, but there wasn't one.

Neither of us talked much.

You couldn't. Not if you wanted to hear what was happening around you.

A barking dog.

A screen door.

Footsteps.

A voice somewhere down the block.

The sound of somebody moving through a yard.

Every noise mattered.

We were relying on each other to keep our heads on a swivel. While I watched one side of the street, David watched the other. Every parked car. Every alley. Every shadow. Every figure walking down the sidewalk. We had spent enough time reading the reports to know exactly who we were looking for.

I'm not saying the guy was armed. We didn't know that. But anybody willing to sneak into occupied homes in the middle of the night while people were sleeping was dangerous enough. If a homeowner woke up. If somebody confronted him. If something went wrong. Who knew what he'd do? That's one of the reasons these crimes bothered me so much.

The longer the night went on, the more it felt like sitting in a hunting blind.

Except our blind rolled.

Slowly.

Silently.

Through the darkness.

We weren't just driving around looking for a burglar anymore. We were hunting a prowler.

And I knew he was out there.

Sometime deep into the shift we were rolling south on Degnan. The streets in that part of Southwest don't all run clean and straight. Some of them curve toward each other and form little triangles and pockets around Edgehill and Norton. We crossed 39th and kept moving slowly, the car blacked out and quiet.

Then I heard David's door open.

After hours of silence, the sound was like a gunshot.

For hours we had been moving through the neighborhood without talking, listening to every sound around us, staring into the darkness, watching shadows and doorways and parked cars. The hunt had become almost hypnotic. The opening of that door shattered all of it. We'd worked together long enough that neither of us needed an explanation. The sound told me everything I needed to know. There was no discussion. There was only action.

I looked over and he was already halfway out of the car.

Standing right there, only a few feet away, was a man about six foot six inches tall. He had a woman's purse in each hand, and not little purses either. These were big grandma purses, the kind that probably wouldn't qualify as carry-on luggage at the airport.

His eyes were wide open.

For a second, nobody moved.

Then David moved.

The suspect turned and ran.

I reached down, grabbed the microphone, and at the same time threw the car into reverse. The passenger door was still open as I accelerated backward down the street. I broadcast that my partner was in foot pursuit westbound through the houses from Degnan, south of 39th. I shoved the microphone down between the seat cushion and the seatback so it wouldn't fly around or disappear, then slammed the transmission into drive and accelerated forward.

As I crossed Degnan, I looked down the street and saw David still running west. That meant the suspect had already crossed ahead of him. I kept moving, trying to get around them. Then I realized I couldn't hear anything from the radio because we had turned it all the way down. I cranked the volume up and the car suddenly filled with radio traffic.

I turned onto Norton, and just as I did, the suspect popped out from between two houses.

I broadcast again, threw the car into park, jumped out, and joined the chase.

We chased him through yards and over walls. At one point he went over a wall into another yard, but there was a dog on that side, and the dog made it clear that the suspect had selected poorly. He came back over onto our side.

By then the cavalry was coming.

You could hear the sirens closing in. The helicopter came over the neighborhood and bit into the sky above us. Lights were flashing in the distance, but we didn't have portable radios, so once we were out of the car, we couldn't tell anybody exactly where we were.

The suspect finally stopped and put his hands up.

I drew my gun and ordered him to the ground. David put the hooks on him. Hooks are handcuffs, for those who didn't grow up speaking police.

We walked him out to Norton, and that's when the helicopter spotted us. The light came down, and everybody knew we had him in custody.

That was the guy.

The hot-prowl burglaries stopped.

Back at the station, we confirmed he was six foot six. Then I ran him for warrants and criminal history. That's when I found out he had been arrested 108 times.

Lieutenant Hellenkamp came back in and looked at him.

"Does he have a record?" she asked.

"Lieutenant," I said, "he doesn't have a record. He's got an album."

I thought that was pretty funny at the time.

Her look suggested I was not as funny as I thought I was.

Several months later, I got a subpoena to testify at trial at 210 West Temple. By then there had already been a preliminary hearing, and the case was going to jury trial. I don't remember whether David and I discussed it or whether the prosecutor just decided, but I was the one who was going to testify.

Whenever I testified in a jury trial as a patrol officer, I liked to show up in uniform. Some officers wore suits, and that was fine. But if you're telling a jury a story about working patrol, I think the uniform matters. It helps them see you in the role. If your gear is squared away and your shoes are shined and you look like a patrol officer, it becomes part of the story. It gives the jury something to believe in visually.

I walked into the courtroom and immediately noticed something strange. There was only one person at the defense table.

I must have had a quizzical look on my face because the judge leaned toward me and said, "The defendant is representing himself, Officer."

"Oh my," I said out loud.

The district attorney examined me first. I told the story of the surveillance, the blacked-out car, seeing the suspect, the foot pursuit, and the arrest. Then the defendant stood up to cross-examine me.

His first question was, "You testified you saw a man coming out from between two buildings."

"No, sir," I said. "I testified that I saw you coming out from between two buildings."

He tried to object that I wasn't being responsive.

The judge overruled him.

From the judge's tone, I got the feeling this had been going on for a while.

The defendant kept going, line by line. We went through the chase yard by yard, wall by wall, turn by turn. He was trying to challenge every detail. Then we got near the end.

"And then you testified that I jumped over the wall," he said.

"Yes," I said.

"No, I didn't," he said. "I turned around and came back to you."

The courtroom froze.

The jury smiled.

The prosecutor smiled.

I didn't need to say anything.

The defendant had just corrected my testimony by admitting he was the man we had chased through the yards.

That's why you shouldn't be your own lawyer.

He was convicted and got sixty-five years in prison. For all I know, he may still be in prison, or he may have died there. Later, I remember getting a call from the detective.

"He got sixty-five years," the detective said.

"Who?" I asked. "The defendant or the lawyer?"

 

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.