officers - The Black Vault

•
FD-350 (Rev. 5·8·81)
. ~
(Indicate
page, name of
newspaper, city and state.)
ON CALIFORNIA
ROBERT A. JONES
Ja~kWebp
Doesn't Live
'
He~e Anymore .
(Mount Clipping in Space Below)
LOS ANGELES
I
remember the show ran on Monday
nights and I remember my father loved
it. He was the family's biggest fan of
"Dragnet." My mother refused to watch,
probably on religious grounds, but the rest
of us did, every week. "Dragnet" was part of
our routine. .
That took place in Memphis, Tenn., 1953
or '54. We had one of the first TV sets on the
block and "Dragnet" was our introduction
to California. We saw palm trees growing
out of the sidewalks and crooks wearing
Hawaiian shirts. ·
But the important part was something
else. Something we didn't recognize at the
time. We were watching the invention of
theLAPD.
0
The uniformed officers on "Dragnet"
were unlike anything I had ever seen in
. Memphis. These cops were tall, had flat
stomachs and showed respect ~t the crime
scene. They seemed professional. They
addressed detectives with a "Sir" and ·
displayed no cynicism. They visited victims
in the hospital. .
. Th~ LAPD was being created for the first
time. I am not referring here to the Los
Angeles Police Department. That's a real
police force with real people. The Los
Angeles Police Department had existed for
100 years by the time "Dragnet" first
appeared. .
The LAPD is different. It was inven~ed by
television and to this day is still being
invented by television. After "Dragnet,"
there was "Adam 12" and then "S.W.A:T."
and "T.J. Hooker" and "Police Woman" and
a dozen others. There has never been a
·television season without an LA,PD c:op
show on the air.
This invented world \Yas a place of simple ·
. moralities, simple virtues, and clean living.
Every uniformed cop had a blond girlfriend
and worried at night about the people he
was hired to serve and protect.
LOS ANGELES TH1ES
Date:
Edition: FRONT SECTION, PAGE 3
Trtle:
JACK WEBB DOESN'T LIVE
HERE ANYMORE
Character:CIVIL RIGHTS
or
Classiftcation:
Submitting
8 O _ 3 3 B
Office:
LOS ANGELES
MAR 2 '7 1991
And all this raises a question: After 30
years of having a mythical LAPD piped into
our homes and our brains, did vie come to
believe the myth? Did we buy the notion
that our clean, California cops behaved like
"Adam 12?" And that only places lik~
Philadelphia or Chicago had the other kind
of cops, the kind who would accept a $10 bill
to forget a speeding ticket. ·
I think we did believe in that invented
. LAPD, as did the rest of the world. And the
shattering of that belief explains, in part,
the sense of betrayal in Los Angeles over
the past two weeks. Those officers swinging
their clubs cannot be reconciled with the
television version.
The next time you watch the
videotape-which could be in five or 10
minutes if you have the television on-ask
yourself just why the horror bites so ·
sharply. After all, you have seen violence
worse than .the beating being administered
to Rodney G. King. Unless you have been
living on the moon, your television has ,
shown you people-real people-being·
gunned down on the streets or burned to
death.
Monks have immolated themselves in
Asia, blacks have set one another afire in
South Africa, s'occer ians have been crushed
to death in front of our eyes.
There's usually a reaction of some sort,
but nothing like this. So what explains the
Rodney G. King affair·?
I think it's this: Tl;le King beating
.....de~troyed not only the way we thought of
the LAPD but the way we thought of~
ourselves here in California. And we sense,
· ·with some anger, that there will be no going F
back. The California that was a separate
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