by Jack Webb
Whose knowledge is riper.
He’s the Sergeant, young man,
He’s the Sergeant.
IN LAPD, THEY CALL HIM “SWEETHEART,” “SUCKER,” OR “SAINT,” but never “sir.” He’s the harried three-striper who serves as aide to his boss, the lieutenant; and as supervisor, backstopper, and departmental chaperon to his own men, the Policemen. Often he is the very first officer at the scene of a crime and unless it’s a real big one, he may be the only one out there in the mud and the rain.
Like the Army, a police department is run by its sergeants, and yet if you put all LAPD’s three-stripers into the grand ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, they would hardly fill it. There are only 650 of them. Moreover, they wouldn’t like it. Their beat is almost everything but ballrooms.
It is the birth in a taxicab, the death in a cave-in, the strangled nurse with a washcloth stuffed in her mouth, the bleeding boy left behind by youth gangs, the amnesic girl and the psychotic drunk, the half-dressed male corpse and what’s left of a sedan at a grade crossing.
And it is triviality just as much as tragedy: the stolen purse, the property line feud, the broken window, the unnecessary-noise complaint, the sonic boom, the missing manhole cover, the dead dog in the sun and the unlicensed street peddler.
It is as varied as knocking at a door to break the news of a death or sitting with a father as he tells, haltingly, how the boy went bad. It’s a catch-all job, really. It needs men like Sergeant Harry Donlon with his magpie recollection of little things about many people that sometimes trip them later. It needs men like Sergeant R. J. Long, LAPD’s paper man extraordinary, the new kind of policeman who fights crime with statistics. And in these days of soaring delinquency, it demands lady sergeants like red-haired, blue-eyed Daisy Storms.
I
For seven years Sergeant Harry Donlon was one of the happiest officers in one of the toughest slices of Los Angeles. From First to Seventh Streets, he walked a beat on Hill Street that touched the fringe of Skid Row and covered Pershing Square, the park in the center of the city.
If you didn’t know it, Harry’s beat would have made the dreariest of impressions on you: cheap rooms, small stores, some big buildings, cheerless missions, bars, theaters, an occasional restaurant, parking lots, sidewalk hamburger joints, pawnshops, flophouses, and the square block of park with some trees, benches, and fountains.
Now parks are made for lovers, and Pershing Square would have impressed you drearily, too. On the benches sat the threadbare pensioner gabbing old yarns, the empty-eyed derelict, the furtive little man whispering conspiratorially in English or Spanish to his flashily dressed friend.
But Harry Donlon did know it, right down to the names and faces of those who lived or worked there, and he made it his business to know each new transient, too.
Hill Street, First to Seventh, was fascinating, really, when you applied Harry Donlon’s street scholarship to it. Always, there were 7,000 to 8,000 persons in the district whom he could privately classify as suspect. He kept an eye on them. He shook them down discreetly, and went home each night to fill notebook after notebook with the scraps of information. Who had said what, when, where, in relation to what.
“I shook down everybody, whether they had any business to be suspect or not,” Harry says. “You do it easy. You don’t make them mad. Just a word, a greeting, and a question or two. They don’t mind.”
If any one human brain can be encyclopedic, it was Harry Donlon’s. Month after month, he averaged between forty-five and sixty-five felony arrests. He stalked Pershing Square and the entrances to bus and trolley terminals for the transients he would recognize in an instant. He picked up an average of fifteen fugitives monthly.
And he did it so gently that in all his years on the beat he drew his gun only once. He was in Pershing Square when a mountain of a man, six feet six and 275 pounds, suddenly went berserk.
“I’ll show you!” he screamed. He advanced on Donlon, five feet ten and ninety pounds lighter. “I killed a cop in New York with my bare hands. “I’ll kill you, too!”
Donlon aimed his gun to cool him down while he handcuffed the giant. Harry checked the office. Sure enough, There was a “want” on him from New York for the murder of a policeman. “That worked out fine,” Donlon says placidly.
There are a lot of brass in LAPD who joined the department at the same time as Donlon and have risen considerably higher. But, they acknowledge openly, almost with a touch of awe, he has a genius for the manhunt that they could never, never equal.
“It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time,” Sergeant Donlon explains modestly. “And knowing who you are looking for. That adds up to luck.”
It was, he would have you believe, just luck, pure luck, that he put two and two together the day they called him in to work the Gamewell board. This is the telephonic instrument that receives calls from the men out on post, and it makes a cosy inside job. But Harry never did like the inside of a police station.
The morning dragged, and then about noon a “want” was broadcast for a murder suspect, male, six feet two inches, 195 pounds, blond hair. He was believed to be somewhere around Hill Street.
“Lieutenant,” Donlon said hopefully to his supervising officer, “a thought just crossed my mind.”
“What’s that?”
“If I didn’t have to work the Gamewell, Lieutenant, I think I could catch that murderer for you.”
The transparency of Donlon’s little scheme, the pious look on his face amused the Lieutenant. “That’s fine, Harry!” he said enthusiastically. “You just do that—as soon as you’re through your watch here.”
“I know that guy,” Harry insisted. “He wears his hair funny. It falls to the left side of his head.”
But he had to finish his tour at the Gamewell, and only afterwards, on his own time, could he scout the bars on Hill, between Second and Third Streets. That was where the fellow with the funny hair-do usually hung out.
Near one bar at Third and Hill, Harry encountered a couple of detectives on the same mission.
“Don’t waste your time going in there,” they advised him.
“Thanks, fellows,” Donlon said politely.
And went in. It was dim and quiet.
At the rail, a girl was sitting with two sailors. There was a fellow near the door who looked familiar; but, after a moment’s study, Donlon discarded him.
Down at the rear, a man and woman were sipping wine. Donlon took a step nearer to study him discreetly. He was big and husky like the wanted man, but his hair was black, not blond, and besides he had a mustache.
Something still bothered Donlon. He came a little closer to see better in the dull light. Of course! The way his hair was combed, it fell to the left side of the head.
Now he came up to the table. The man put down his wine glass, and Donlon didn’t miss the fresh cuts on his fingers.
“What’s your name, mister?”
“Otto Wilson. Why?” He turned resignedly to his companion, and she bristled at Donlon.
“How long you had those cuts on your fingers?” Donlon asked.
“These? A week, I guess.”
“They look pretty fresh for being a week old.”
“Well!” said the young lady. The one word made it pretty plain what she thought of nosy cops.
Then Donlon noticed dried blood on the man’s mustache. “How about that?” he asked.
Nervously the man brushed his lip. “Must have cut myself shaving,” he said.
Even in the barroom half-light, Donlon saw that he wasn’t freshly shaved.
“Stand up, mister,” Donlon said.
There was a moment’s hesitation. Firmly, Donlon helped his man stand up, shook him down, hand-cuffed him, and walked him out of the barroom.
At the Gamewell box, as Donlon was calling in for transportation, Otto Wilson asked him to please reach inside his jacket for cigarettes and matches. Donlon did so. The matchbook, he noticed, ca
rried the name of the hotel where a young woman had been found murdered.
Donlon got Homicide and told them he had their man. But Homicide was pretty busy at the moment working on another tip on the same death. If Donlon thought he had the man, he was brusquely instructed, then bring him in.
So Donlon asked for a radio car and brought in Otto Stephen Wilson, aged thirty-four, former Navy pharmacist’s mate, now a cafe worker and woman hater.
En route, Donlon got his man to talk. Sure, he had strangled one woman and butchered another. “I wanted to see how many of them I could get rid of,” he confided to Donlon. The young lady whom Donlon had just outraged by breaking up her date had been marked by Wilson as Victim No. Three.
Donlon presented his catch to Homicide, all neatly tied up. Otto Wilson subsequently went to the gas chamber.
Because of Harry Donlon’s amazing knack for remembering facts and faces, Captain James Hamilton of Intelligence Division picked him as the ideal man to organize the airport detail for ID.
It was a sobering assignment. At an airport, speed and certainty are imperative in an identification. Single out the wrong man, hold him up to public humiliation, make him miss his flight, and maybe you will have a lawsuit on your hands.
From the beginning, Harry Donlon didn’t like the responsibility and the carriage-trade suspects he was now dealing with. “Police work is a funny thing,” he said worriedly. “You can be wrong.”
But, like a good sergeant, he obeyed orders. He was given seven men, a fingerprint assistant, and a deadline of three months in which to get his squad functioning.
From all over the country, he ordered mug shots and background on known gangsters. He taught his fingerprint man to make preliminary classifications which could be telephoned in to Records and Identification for a “make” in three or four minutes.
From airport officials, he wangled a room, telephones, and use of the airport public address system.
As part of his own preparation, he constantly carried fifty mug shots in his pocket, whipping them out every now and then to commit the scowling faces to memory. At the end of the three months, he had memorized another 1,500 faces.
But the man from the fringes of Skid Row wasn’t happy with his new, plush job. In a way, he was like a small-town boy, lost and distrustful in the big city. As soon as he knew his detail was functioning smoothly, he asked downtown: Please, could he go back to Hill Street and Pershing Square?
Fortunately, Harry Donlon is something of a legend in LAPD, to the brass as well as to the rookies. His request was granted.
Now, instead of walking a beat, he supervises his Policemen from a radio car, noting how fast and capably they respond to their calls.
But habit and a memory like his are strong things. “I ride the car on my patrol,” he explains, almost defensively, “and I see things. If I can help out, I do.”
What that means is that rarely along Hill Street does he miss a suspicious transient or a bad native for whom a “want” is out. As he always did, he puts the collar on, but with the courtesy of a good Sergeant, he turns over the suspect to the policeman on watch for the booking.
They call him the workhorse, my boy.
II
If Sergeant Harry Donlon, riding Hill Street, and Sergeant R. J. Long of the Analysis Section, Planning & Research Division—the street man supreme and the paper man extraordinary—were to swap jobs, they would probably survive, both being good officers. But they would be dreadfully unhappy, and LAPD would lose something, too.
Donlon personifies the old-time beat cop who walked like a shepherd among the people on his watch. Long is the remote, new kind of policeman who substitutes statistics for flesh and blood. Compared to Donlon, he is unspectacular; and, at first glance, his beat among LAPD’s paper forms is prosaic. But even though you can’t fairly compare these strikingly dissimilar sergeants, Long’s work is every bit as important as Donlon’s in the complicated modern police department.
Statistics on crime… statistics on budget… statistics of arrests and manpower….
Sergeant Long had a degree in police administration from the University of Southern California when he joined LAPD. Nevertheless, he went through the break-in period, pounding a beat, riding an AID car and doing jail duty before he was assigned to Analysis.
Here, every day, crime is subjected to scholarly postmortem. Rape becomes a mathematical problem, murder a pale study in costs and larceny just a question of logistics. Drained of blood and fright, the figures progress through slide rule, tabulating equipment and typewriter and come out at the end in the department’s annual eighty-page Statistical Digest.
In a given year, how many reports of traffic property damage? 25,550…. How many sex offenses? 3,583. Suicide by gun (112) is the most popular form of self-destruction and jumping in front of a moving vehicle (one case) the least popular…. There are seven cases of sodomy; and 190 deaths from unknown causes are investigated…. In the Venice Division alone, 2,011 speeders are cited. It is the police-eye view of the community for that year imprisoned forever in the tables and data of crime, investigation, arrest.
Both policemen and civilians labor on the Statistical Digest on a year-round basis, but complete as it is, the result has not satisfied the “corner pocket.” And that is where Sergeant Long comes in. He was handed the old form on which the 3,000 uniformed men make their daily field activity report, and was assigned to update it.
Chief Parker wanted the complicated, sprawling, unpredictable work of a policeman subjected to a true cost accounting system. How much does one police call to one house cost? Can the price of a robbery investigation be reduced? And what is that price, compared to, say, the apprehension of a pickpocket?
Many an old-timer, with a veteran’s distrust of paperwork, didn’t like the idea at all, and many a competent outside observer agreed that law enforcement could not be sliced that thin into dollars and pennies. The old field activity report with its dozen or so questions was workable, they argued, and if a cop spent his time filling in blanks on a piece of paper, when would he be catching crooks?
But LAPD’s administrative brass told Sergeant Long to go ahead. The old form had been workable, but it was not weighted by any basic rule of computation. In each of the department’s dozen geographical divisions, the commanding officer himself completed the statistical picture, using rule o’ thumb. And, division to division, thumbs weighed differently.
For weeks, Long struggled to encompass a policeman’s day into some forty questions, a few repeated, but nevertheless thrice as productive in information as the old form. Then his draft was submitted to the supervisory level for final decision on which statistics were to be included and which discarded.
Today, LAPD Form 15.52 is a revolutionary piece of police paper. For the first time in the history of American police administration, the “called for service” of any policeman is measured accurately down to the minute. At a glance, 15.52 tells every move he made during his watch. Type of call, time received, time answered, time disposed of, all are there. At the end of each day, there is overall information instantly available which previously would have taken two dozen men two and a half months to tabulate.
The brass liked it. Form 15.52 meant surer, quicker command decisions: where to send men, what they must do there, how to get them there faster and more inexpensively. The taxpayer, staggering under a record property tax load, liked it, too. Now he could see how that $35 millions, twenty per cent of the whole budget, was being spent.
But the most important man in making 15.52 a success didn’t like it at all.
Out on the watch, the policeman suspected darkly that it was a gimmick designed somehow to affect his job. Parts of it bewildered him, other sections seemed plain useless. What were they trying to do up in Planning & Research? Play quiz games?
So Sergeant Long carefully tucked his slide rule into an inside pocket where it wouldn’t show and went out into the field to sell the men. Ten minutes at a time
with an outraged policeman, he found, usually soothed him and won him over. After his missionary work, some 167 supervisors were called into the auditorium at the Police Administration Building. Down to the last decimal point on the card, 15.52 was explained and justified. This was the beginning of a long training process that brought about final departmental acceptance.
Any day now, a variation of 15.52 may be introduced in your own police department. The nation’s police statisticians, meeting under the auspices of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, were tremendously impressed by the LAPD achievement. Thanks to the dirty work done by Sergeant Long, 15.52 can be painlessly adapted anywhere.
Without headlines, Long had accomplished a critically important “front office” job of police work—one reason why the International City Managers Association has called LAPD “probably the most soundly organized large police department in the country.”
III
“Killings are cheap. They cost about $1.35 or $1.40… It’s like being on a quiz show… When you get to ten, you go for twenty… You always want more…
“When I was in Quentin, I borrowed books from the prison library. I was studying the operation of railroads. I planned to run a whole train off a bridge and watch them monkeys go swimming. I’d lie on the river bank and enjoy myself laughing at them.”
—Stephen Nash
How can you read any man’s mind? Especially that of a gaunt, toothless, six-foot-three drifter who dreams such monstrous thoughts as these? How can you believe that in less than a year a man would perpetrate five senseless murders with knife and lead pipe (and perhaps half a dozen more)?
Sergeant Larry Scarborough was just a slow-talking rookie in the Homicide Division at the time. His background was the Narcotics detail where he had worked the previous five years. You couldn’t reasonably expect that he yet would have developed that intuition, smell of blood, call-it-what-you-will, which sets the Homicide detective apart.
