Lights and Sirens
Part 38 of A Lawman's Tale of the American Riviera
"I think if you're an accountable person and you're a leader, you're going to stand up in front of people and answer the questions when it's all over."
~Rob Thomson, Manager, Philadelphia Phillies
The Mask of Command
You had already packed your SWAT gear in the trunk, and were five feet from the pool car you had arranged a week ahead of time, and you’d just come from the business office and had a check in your hand for sniper school—a difficult slot to get—and you were headed off to the LA County Sheriff’s Special Enforcement Bureau, when the Deputy Chief walked up with his bag full of tennis rackets and that shit-eating grin he wore like a mask he’d stolen from the back lot at Paramount Studios.
“You aren’t going,” he said, in a weird and jarring display of raw power that looked ridiculous—because a man in tennis shorts, with striped socks parked mid-calf, is difficult to take seriously.
“What do you mean I’m not going?”
“You aren’t going. We have no money.”
It was the kind of nitwit stunt the brass were always pulling, as if snatching defeat from the jaws of victory was a leadership trait. Or maybe it was an absurd test to see how you might react to bad news. There seemed to be a shared belief among the brass that introducing even more friction into an organization strained to breaking by staffing shortages, with it’s seams bulging with bloated and thoroughly unaccountable leadership, would somehow make things better—as if dropping even more bombs on a ruined bunker only proved its resilience. There was a reason the roof of 215 E. Figueroa was covered with empty beer cans and the stubs of old cigars, and it wasn’t because the leadership was winning commendations for management bravery and great decision-making.
Was it a test? Who could know? Nothing was beyond these creatures who occupied their corner offices on the third floor. You had learned that much. There was nothing petty they wouldn’t do, especially if they decided they didn’t like you. Did the Deputy Chief have it out for you now? The way you’d seen him go after others? You couldn’t answer that question but you had to swallow the news without blinking, to stand there with your car keys in one hand and your school check in the other without pushing back, as if the Deputy Chief were just another crook chipping away at your discipline and bearing.
But that was never you. You are the guy who punches back. So you looked the Deputy Chief in the eye and you asked him the obvious question: How does a police department suddenly run out of money? The inference he was meant to take, and he did, was that you thought he was a fucking buffoon. Another question lingering in the air above you was the more pertinent one: why were you hearing this from him? And why now? There were at least four levels of command between him and you, and there had been at least two weeks for the news to trickle down to your lowly station, and he’d skipped every level and the clock had run out.
He didn’t have an answer, of course, because it was a lie he’d made up on the spot, and even if he did have a legitimate answer he’d never lower himself to give it to you. This was a man who had spent much of the last decade sky-lining cops he didn’t like and trying to ruin not just their careers, but their lives. And that was the problem with their Wharton School mentality. You were never going to get what you wanted from the brass, let alone anything you actually needed. At their best they were little more than splenetic impediments to actual police work, while they went about their petty internecine Game of Thrones—playing cops against each other and then feasting on the remains. What made it infuriating, and often insufferable, was their comportment, a kind of smug, deliberate, and thoroughly arrogant obtuseness that seemed to take root after six months at the FBI National Academy, where they went to get themselves lobotomized in rituals of Fed Speak, or just to cheat on their wives at Quantico’s leafy Cop Camp. They walked around the PD as if they’d just been read-in on the alien cadavers at Roswell, and the only result was to create an underground movement of department rebels looking for creative ways to subvert their authority at every opportunity. They made each other miserable, which was fun to watch, but the down side was that they were also hell-bent on making the entire department a terrible place to work.
What a shame.
But they couldn’t see it, and you couldn’t really blame the Chief, even if the proverbial buck was supposed to stop with him. He still liked cops. He wasn’t going to win any awards for spelling or elocution, but he’d been a sergeant at LAPD once, before chasing his dream to be a Chief somewhere and anywhere, and he hadn’t forgotten that cops just wanted to make cases, which was some kind of miracle. When you went to his house to get a wire-tap signed off, you saw that he was only human. He answered the door in shorts and a wife-beater, while his pack of miniature dogs were yapping and out of control and jumping all over the furniture, and while his wife was skulking around in the shadows and yelling at him from the kitchen. He looked at you with a sheepish grin, a cop’s grin, and then he shrugged and signed your affidavit. You saw him knock a fleeing subject into the bushes during Fiesta, stepping off the sidewalk in his ubiquitous guayabera to knock a jack wagon on his ass, and he once tripped a shoplifter running out of a store on the Mesa. He would even, occasionally, take a black and white out into the city and answer calls for service. It was a publicity stunt, for certain—he wasn’t taking any paper—but in a department creaking under budget cuts and rock-bottom morale the effort at solidarity seemed to matter.
