The Good Ol’, Bad Ol’ Days of Cop Coverage

The police beat, the exciting bread and butter of my first days in journalism, has become a tale of joyless bureaucracy.

These days, news at Parker Center, the grim glass- and metal-faced Civic Center police headquarters, revolves around the cutthroat campaign for chief and other top jobs. Or else there are stories about some top police official explaining a departmental screw-up or managerial reorganization.

These are important stories. But the trouble with this type of coverage is that it’s like reporting a war from the Pentagon without talking to the troops.

I’m not going to bore you with war stories, but this isn’t the way it was when I started out. We hung out with the cops. We drank with them. We got them out of trouble, and they did the same for us. We were in the middle of crime scenes, not behind yellow tape yards away. We looked at the bodies. We were there when suspects were arrested and even when they were questioned.

Reporters and cops had much in common. Newspapering then was, for the most part, a white male working-class business, as was policing. Our values were the same, including the racism that was rampant on the newspapers and in the police department. And, in those pre-ethics days, cops and reporters saw nothing wrong in accepting free booze or game tickets.

This was all changed by the values revolution of the ‘60s. The change was good. The old relationship papered over corruption and racial injustice. Our coverage became skeptical, critical, distant. And we lost sight of the cop as a human being.

*

That missing component--humanity-- has been supplied by my Times colleague, reporter Miles Corwin, in a unique new book, “The Killing Season, A Summer Inside an LAPD Homicide Division.”

Corwin spent the spring through the fall of 1994 with two South-Central Los Angeles homicide detectives, Pete Razanskas and Marcella Winn. When they were called out at 3 a.m, Corwin was there, as he was when they questioned suspects and notified parents of their children’s deaths, reporting it all with an eye for detail and emotion.

Razanskas, 46, is the son of Lithuanian parents, a Vietnam vet who “wears Western boots, chews tobacco and dresses and acts like a cowboy.” Winn, 35, grew up in South-Central L.A. At the age of 30, partially to help “protect her neighborhood from the forces that were destroying it,” she joined the LAPD, shocking many of her friends because of the department’s “long-standing reputation in the black community for racism and brutality.”

Early in their partnership, the tobacco-chewing Razanskas spit tobacco into his paper cup and addressed an important but, until then, unspoken subject. Some people might think he is some kind of racist, he told Winn, because of his good ol’ boy manners, because he is old school LAPD. But he had voluntarily spent his career in South-

Central. “If I was some kind of a racist, I’d be out in some Westside or Valley division jacking anyone I saw who wasn’t white.”

Winn replied, “I asked about you awhile back. My sources told me you weren’t a ‘neck [redneck]. They told me you were too silly to be a ‘neck.”

It took work, but they got along fine, two smart people in a tough, tough job.

*

Daily journalists don’t catch much of that. The gap between reporters and cops is too wide.

I thought of that recently after I stopped by a small neighborhood police substation to discuss the crime situation in the area. My visit was unscheduled, but since the subject was not controversial, I figured someone would talk to me.

A young officer came out. He was chilly and suspicious as he referred me to the department public relations office.

I was annoyed. Why did the cop treat me as if I were a threat? Then I started seeing things from the cop’s point of view.

Possibly, he had read and watched enough news to be convinced that talking to the press would hurt his career. Maybe he thought I was a jerk. Possibly he was a jerk. In any case, we didn’t know each other at all.

As I drove back to the paper, I was no longer annoyed, just depressed by the communications breakdown.

I’m not calling for a return to the old days. Reporters shouldn’t cover up for cops. Cops shouldn’t rescue drunk-driving reporters.

But there’s a lot more to the LAPD than the view from the top.