Joseph Wambaugh - Hollywood Crows

Later that night, Compassionate Charlie Gilford saw Ronnie Sinclair in the report room massaging her temples, waiting for the interrogation from Force Investigation Division, knowing that this one would be handled just like an officer-involved shooting.

The detective said merrily, “I hear you really carpet bombed Chickenlips Treakle, Ronnie. Hollywood Nate told me you wouldn’t hear that many ‘motherfuckers’ at a Chris Rock concert. Way to go, girl!”

IT WAS A FEW WEEKS after the jumper incident that Ronnie Sinclair decided she’d had enough of the midwatch and Sergeant Treakle, who had only received an official reprimand for barging into her crisis negotiation and, in Ronnie’s opinion, causing the demise of young Randolph Bronson. She’d discussed her situation with an old sergeant for whom she’d worked at Newton Street Division, now officially called Newton Street Area, since the current LAPD brass had decided that division sounded too militaristic. The working cops said the brass were full of shit, and they kept right on referring to police divisions even in the LAPD union’s monthly newspaper.

Ronnie’s former sergeant suggested that in these repressive times, supervisors like Treakle were harder to get rid of than Rasputin and jock itch. He thought she ought to have a talk with the boss of the Hollywood Division Community Relations Office, or CRO, pronounced “Crow” by the cops. “CRO is a good job, Ronnie,” he told her. “You’ve done enough hard-core police work for a while. Being a senior lead officer in CRO will give you a leg up when you take your sergeant’s oral.”

It had surprised Hollywood Nate to learn that Ronnie Sinclair was seeking the job that had opened up at the Community Relations Office, a job that Nate coveted. The CRO was composed of eighteen cops and two civilian workers led by a twenty-two-year sergeant. Eleven of the officers, both men and women, were senior lead officers, or SLOs, pronounced “Slows,” and were given a pay bump and wore two silver chevrons on their sleeves with a star beneath them. The SLOs acted as ombudsmen or community liaisons for the Hollywood Division captain. Five were Hispanics and could translate Spanish as needed, and three others were foreign born and could communicate in half a dozen other tongues, but that was only a fraction of the languages spoken in Hollywood. The coppers called their bailiwick Babelwood Division.

The Community Relations Office was housed in a one-story rambling old structure just a wedge shot across the police parking lot. It was dubbed Hollywood South by the troops in the main station, to which the Crows referred as Hollywood North, and which, like all LAPD police facilities, had the architectural charm of a parking garage in Watts.

Among other duties, Crows handled calls from chronic complainers and Hollywood loons, and they could pretty well set their own ten-hour duty tours in their four-day work week. The major efforts of these cops were directed at quality-of-life issues: chronic-noise complaints, graffiti, homeless encampments, abandoned shopping carts, unauthorized yard sales, and aggressive panhandlers. Crows also had the job of overseeing the Police Reserve Program and the Police Explorer Program for teenagers and directed the Nightclub Committee, the Homeless Committee, the Graffiti Committee, and even the Street Closure Committee.

In 2007, the city of Los Angeles’s love for committees was almost as overpowering as its lust for diversity and its multicultural mania, and it would be hard to imagine anywhere with more social experimentation involving the police than LAPD’s Hollywood Division. African Americans were the only ethnic group underrepresented in Hollywood demographics, but young black males arrived on the boulevards in large numbers every night, traveling on the subway or in cars from South L.A., many of whom were gang members.

The Crows also had to organize events such as the Tip-A-Cop fund-raiser, the Torch Run for the Special Olympics, and the Children’s Holiday Party, and were tasked to help police the antiwar demonstrations, the Academy Awards, and all of the red carpet events at the Kodak Center. In short, they were doing jobs that caused salty old-timers to shake their heads and refer to the CRO as the sissy beat. Crows were often called teddy bears in blue.

They were also called much worse, but there was some envy involved in all of the pejoratives aimed at the Crows, because these officers of Hollywood South had relative freedom and the choice of wearing uniforms or street clothes depending upon the assignment, and they almost always did safe, clean work. Crows generally chose to stay in the job for a long time.

Ronnie had beaten out Hollywood Nate for the first opening in the Community Relations Office and was sent to senior lead officer training at the recruit training center near LAX. An unexpected retirement occurred a month later, and Nate Weiss ended up following Ronnie to the CRO, thinking he had found the spot where he might remain happily until retirement or until he attained show business success, whichever came first. By early summer, he had worked on two more TV movies, with a line of dialogue in each, the plots being for people who watch daytime TV. He was sure that the last one might make it to Spike TV because at the last minute they’d included lots of gratuitous blood and gore for high-school dropouts.

By July 2007, all of the Crows were future millionaires-in theory. One of them had been born in Iraq and had come to the U.S. as a child. He’d touted the wisdom of buying Iraqi dinars to his Crow partner now that the country was in chaos and its money nearly worthless. Through a currency broker, the partner bought one million dinars for $800 U.S. As the broker explained it to them, when Iraq eventually was able to get back to one dinar for one dollar and started being traded in all of the exchanges, “You’ll be millionaires!”

So two other Crows bought a million dinars. Three bought half a million each. Another bought one and a half million, figuring to buy a yacht when he retired. Ronnie Sinclair was very hesitant, but thinking of her aging parents, she bought half a million dinars.

The week after he’d been assigned to the CRO, Nate had one of his vigorous iron-pumping workouts in the high-tech weight room at Hollywood South. After the workout and a mirror examination of his impressive pecs, lats, and biceps, Nate entered the CRO office, sat down at a desk, and carefully studied an Iraqi dinar that one of the others had given to him. Looking at it under a glass and holding it against a lamp, he examined the horse in the watermark as though he knew what he was doing.

“Check it with a jeweler’s loupe, why don’t you?” said Tony Silva, one of the Hispanic officers. “It’s not counterfeit, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No, but I read in the paper that counterfeiters are bleeding out the ink on these things,” Nate said, “and using them to make U.S. currency with laser printers.”

“Aren’t you gonna buy while you have the chance?” Samuel Dibble, the CRO’s only black cop, asked Nate. “What if Bush’s troop surge works and the dinar stabilizes? We’ll all be rich. How about you?”

Nate only smiled, trying not to look too condescending, but later said privately to his sergeant, “Cops are such suckers. Anyone can sell them a bill of goods. They’ll invest in anything.”

His sergeant said to him, “Yeah, I’m in for one million.”

Later, after the new commanding general in Iraq gave a major TV interview and said that the troop surge had a very good chance of success, Hollywood Nate Weiss secretly made a transfer from his savings account, called the currency broker, and bought two million dinars without telling any of the others.