Lights and Sirens
Part 41 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.”
~Robert Peel
Finding Nemo
In 1850 the newly founded City of Santa Barbara hired a weathered sea captain named Salisbury Haley to conduct a survey and lay out the grid. Salisbury drove a spike into the dirt at what became the intersection of State and Carrillo streets where, a little more than 150 years later, you would assist the FBI by surveilling an Animal Liberation Front terrorist suspected of burning down auto dealerships in San Diego and Colorado, and who was in the city to stake out the US Bank, which he and his devout but delusional cronies planned to rob before burning down a research facility on the campus of UC Santa Barbara. You followed this scraggly nitwit and his frumpy girlfriend with nose rings and purple hair around the city—they never made their move—and were struck by Hannah Arendt’s famous comment about the banality of evil.
Salisbury worked feverishly to complete what is now considered one of the worst surveys in municipal history, a survey so off of plumb that it resulted in inaccuracies as much as 50 feet from true—because he used rawhide, which stretched and shrank in the heat and cold—to mend the breaks in his surveying chain. And so the city streets were laid down out of true, and remain so. It’s hard to lay the blame on any single man—Haley Street was named in his honor—but there are long nights on the job, when your morale is sagging under the weight of so much that is wrong both inside the department and out, that you can’t help but think that maybe Salisbury’s disaster has something to do with it, that maybe some metaphysical tension is baked into the pavement, some unresolved and underlying friction in the numbers, a skewing of divine proportion, something palpably off and perpetually out of balance.
Because the city was was pretending it didn’t have a gang problem, even if the cops all knew it—because they were on the street every day and every night, reading the signs: the gang graffiti, which is put on walls and lampposts and mailboxes for the same reason that dogs piss on fire hydrants—to mark their territory and to send a message. It was in the notable uptick in violence, a jump out here, a shanking there, and in the clumps of peanutheads growing bolder in the parks, on the sidewalks, and in their daily interaction with the cops.
Long before you landed a chair in the narcotics office, before you earned your place among the big game hunters, you were out on patrol and slugging from call to call when a street informant told you the homeys were frequently gathering at Rocky Nook Park for meetings. Meetings are like church for bikers, when the older homeys lay down the rules of engagement. Those shots are actually being called from prison, where the southern Mexicans are controlled by the Mexican Mafia. They call the green lights and red lights, and word must trickle down to their lieutenants on the street—and finally to the little homeys who roam the streets like wild dogs.
And what good cop wouldn’t want to parachute into a meeting full of titheads getting schooled on the do’s and the don’ts?
