“So the LAPD was placed under the leadership of one, then later a second African American chief. The first, an outsider from the Philadelphia Police Department, became the first LAPD chief in decades to serve without civil service protection at the pleasure of the mayor and city council, a throwback to the days when crooked politicians ran the police force. His contract was soon bought back by city fathers dissatisfied with his performance and his widely publicized junkets to Las Vegas.
“The next black chief, an insider whose entire adult life had been spent with the LAPD, was in charge when the Rampart Division scandal exploded, making the race card difficult for anyone to play. This chief, a micromanager, seemingly obsessive about control and cavalier about officer morale, quickly became the enemy of the police union. He came to be known as Lord Voldemort by street cops who’d read Harry Potter.
“David Mack, Rafael Perez, and Nino Durden went to prison, where Mack claimed to belong to the Piru Bloods street gang. So, we might ask: Were these cops who became gangsters, or gangsters who became cops?”
Scanning their faces, she saw nothing. She dropped her eyes again and read, “By two thousand two, that second black chief, serving at the pleasure of City Hall, hadn’t pleased the politicians, the cops, or the local media. He retired but later was elected to the city council. His replacement was another cross-country outsider, a white chief this time, who had been New York City’s police commissioner. Along with all the changes in leadership, the police department ended up operating under a ‘civil rights consent decree,’ an agreement between the City of Los Angeles and the United States Department of Justice wherein the LAPD was forced to accept major oversight by DOJ-approved monitors for a period of five years but which has just been extended for three years by a federal judge based on technicalities.
“And thus, the beleaguered rank and file of the formerly proud LAPD, lamenting the unjustified loss of reputation as the most competent and corruption-free, and certainly most famous, big-city police department in the country, finds itself faced with the humiliation of performing under outside overseers. Mandated auditors can simply walk into a police station and, figuratively speaking, ransack desks, turn pockets inside out, threaten careers, and generally make cops afraid to do proactive police work that had always been the coin of the realm with the LAPD during the glory days before Rodney King and the Rampart Division scandal.
“And of course, there is the new police commission, led by the former head of the L.A. Urban League, who uttered the following for the L.A. Times before he took office. Quote: ‘The LAPD has a long-standing institutionalized culture in which some police officers feel that they have the tacit approval of their leadership… to brutalize and even kill African American boys and men.’ End quote. This baseless and crudely racist slander is apparently okay with our new Latino mayor, who appointed him claiming to want harmony in the racial cauldron where the police must do their job.”
Andi looked again at the blank stares as she prepared for her parting shot and said, “Finally, all of the layers of oversight, based on the crimes of a few cops-costing millions annually, encouraged by cynical politicians and biased reporting and fueled by political correctness gone mad-have at last answered the ancient question posed by the Roman poet Juvenal in the first century A.D. He too was worried about law enforcement abuse, for he asked, ‘But who would guard the guards themselves?’ At the Los Angeles Police Department, more than nine thousand officers have learned the answer: Everybody.”
With that, Andi turned to glance at Anglund, who was looking at papers in his lap as though he hadn’t heard a word. She said to the class, “Any questions?”
Nobody answered for a long moment, and then one of the East Asians, a petite young woman about the age of Andi’s son, said, “Are you a cop or something?”
“I am a cop, yes,” Andi said. “With the LAPD, and have been since I was your age. Any other questions?”
Students were looking from the wall clock to the professor and back to Andi. Finally, Anglund said, “Thank you, Ms. McCrea. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your diligence and attention. And now that the spring quarter is so close to officially concluding, why don’t you all just get the hell out of here.”
That brought smiles and chuckles and some applause for the professor. Andi was about to leave, when Anglund said, “A moment, Ms. McCrea?”
He waited until the other students were gone, then stood, hands in the pockets of his cords, cotton shirt so wrinkled that Andi thought he should either send it out or get his wife an ironing board. His gray hair was wispy, and his pink scalp showed through, flaked with dandruff. He was a man of seventy if he was a day.
Anglund said, “Why did you keep your other life from us until the end?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I only like to don the bat suit when night falls on Gotham City.”
“How long have you been attending classes here?”
“Off and on, eight years,” she said.
“Have you kept your occupation a secret from everybody in all that time?”
“Yep,” she said. “I’m just a little secret keeper.”
“First of all, Ms. McCrea… is it Officer McCrea?”
“Detective,” she said.
“First of all, your paper contained opinions and assertions that you may or may not be able to back up and not a few biases of your own, but I don’t think you’re a racist cop.”
“Well, thank you for that. That’s mighty white of you, if that’s an acceptable phrase.” Thinking, There goes the Dean’s List. She’d be lucky to get a C-plus out of him now.
Anglund smiled and said, “Sorry. That was very condescending of me.”
“I bored them to death,” Andi said.
“The fact is, they don’t really give a damn about civil liberties or police malfeasance or law enforcement in general,” Anglund said. “More than half of today’s university students cannot even understand the positions put forth in newspaper editorials. They care about iPods and cell phones and celluloid fantasy. The majority of this generation of students don’t read anything outside of class but magazines and an occasional graphic novel, and barely contemplate anything more serious than video downloading. So, yes, I think you failed to provoke them as you’d obviously intended to do.”
“I guess my son isn’t so different after all, then,” she said, seeing her first C-plus morphing into a C-minus.
“Is he a college student?”
“A soldier,” she said. “Insisted on joining because two of his friends did.”
Anglund studied her for a few seconds and said, “Iraq?”
“Afghanistan.”
Anglund said, “Despite the flaws in your thesis, I was impressed by the passion in it. You’re part of something larger than yourself, and you feel real pain that uninformed outsiders are harming the thing you love. I don’t see much of that passion in classrooms anymore. I wish you’d revealed your other life to us earlier.”
Now she was confused, fatigued and confused, and her nausea was increasing. “I wouldn’t have done it today, Professor,” Andi said, “except my forty-fifth birthday is coming up in two weeks and I’m into a midlife crisis so real it’s like living with a big sister who just wants to dress up in thigh-highs and a miniskirt and dance the funky chicken. No telling what kind of zany thing I’ll do these days. And last night I got called out on a murder-suicide that looked like O.J. Simpson was back in town, and I’m exhausted. But I’m not half as tired or stressed as two young cops who had to wallow in a bloodbath doing a job that nobody should ever have to do. And when it was all over, one of them asked me back at Hollywood Station if I had some moisturizing cream. Because he surfed so much he thought his neck and eyelids looked like they belonged on a Galapagos turtle. I felt like just hugging him.”