Looking Back: Transitions

Quite a lot of current Officers on the job relate to me that they wished they existed during my era.  Everything has changed.  The LAPD used to be a tight family when everyone worked a normal 5 day work week.  Nowadays with 4-10’s and 3-12’s otherwise known as compressed work schedules, entire sections of the LAPD never come across other sectors of Officers on the job.  Whether this is a good or bad thing I really don’t know.  I do know one thing however – there was a ‘tightness’ and a real sense of family and togetherness during my time.  We were also less than half the size of the force today.  It truly was – the thin Blue Line.

We all worked out together, hit the streets together and ‘socialized’ together after watch.  If you were really lucky you got about 4 -5 hours of sleep and did it all over again for 5 days straight.  You got used to it.  It seemed perfectly normal.  You dealt with interpersonal problems face to face rather than ‘beef’ another Officer over some inconsequential problem which results in lawsuits these days.  There was an unwritten code that you handled problems amongst yourselves unless it was of a criminal nature and those were very, very few and extremely far between.  Supervisors in Metro had to have worked there before as Officers.  Even the worker bees in Metro had input into supervisors who were attempting to rotate back into Metro.  Not the case these days.  I know of line supervisors who have had to argue with field grade, slick sleeved Officers on actual field calls.  In my day, if you did that – they’d simply ask you politely to ‘step into my office’ (the alley) and you’d get ‘tuned up’ right then and there and that was the end of discussion – a major ‘attitude adjustment’ session to say the least.  I suppose that years from now, these current days will seem ‘golden’ to some young P-1 coming on in 2030!

I’m rather sure that other departments are experiencing the same transitional pains.  Maybe it goes with the territory.  Perhaps absence makes the heart grow fonder or memory slowly erases the bad parts and supplants them with positive images.  The LAPD despite some faults is still an organization to be very proud of and I am so very fortunate to have been a part of it all.