by Jack Webb
Once, for example, Traffic set up a speed check on one of the city’s fastest thoroughfares and stopped scores of drivers. They were given three types of treatment: a mere warning, a ticket, or a ticket and a short talk on the dangers of speeding. Then motorcycle policemen tailed them to see what the effect would be on their driving habits.
Of those who had escaped with the warning, two-thirds were blithely speeding again after a mile. But in the two ticketed groups, only a third were speeding after five miles. Sadly, Traffic is convinced that tickets talk louder than words.
At least since 1873, when unhitched horses were first recorded as a problem, traffic has been a major headache to Los Angeles. In its rambling length there is practically no mass transportation, and the average Angeleno is forced to drive farther and faster to work than city drivers anywhere else in the world. He logs 10,000 miles yearly on his speedometer, and travel of thirty to forty miles daily to and from work is not uncommon.
Mostly he rides the freeways which were threaded through southern California only a few years ago to serve both as inter- and intra-urban facilities.
At first the congestion and pile-ups were spectacular, and out of the Hollywood TV studios came a spate of gags that on them you were either “quick or dead.” “Driving the freeways is like going into combat.” Between neighborhood cars, inter-city drivers, and coastwise transports, the chances seemed excellent for either a multiple-car crash or bumper-to-bumper waits while an overturned alfalfa transport or a burning oil tanker was towed out of the way.
The first city to do so, Los Angeles quickly met the problem by using its own motorcycle corps for large-scale patrol of the freeway system. Uniquely, the freeway within the city limits was deemed part of the city streets and the same traffic regulations applied with one exception. Theoretically the state speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour applied, but in practice LAPD’s motorcycle officers have tolerated whatever speed the traffic will bear. Within reason.
To avoid bottlenecks caused by accidents, Traffic relies on “Sigalert,” an electronic town crier devised by Lloyd Sigmon, now a Los Angeles radio executive. When a major traffic problem (or any other emergency) develops, LAPD throws a switch in its radio network which sets off a subaudible tone. The tone actuates a relay at all the local radio stations and, as the policeman broadcasts instructions to the driving public, receivers in the radio station record the message.
A red fight tells station personnel that a Sigalert has been received, and it goes on the air immediately, taking precedence over any program in progress. Speed in reaching the motorist is the secret of Sigalert’s success because a delay of only five minutes in diverting traffic can over-fill a paralyzed sector of the freeway with thousands of additional cars.
During one disastrous flood, thirty Sigalerts were aired in a single day to warn motorists of road hazards and brief them on new emergency routes. In fact, Sigalert has been so helpful as a sort of super-traffic cop that LAPD uses the system in all kinds of public-communications situations. Once a Sigalert “want” resulted in the capture of a murder suspect, and an explanatory Sigalert broadcast while civil defense tests were being conducted reduced the usual number of alarmed inquiries to police by ninety per cent.
Specifics.
The man behind the man who writes you a ticket in Los Angeles was born in a house which now nestles alongside one of the freeways he polices. Chief Sullivan was in the class of forty which joined the force in 1937. During their winter of training, Los Angeles almost froze over, and in the department they were nicknamed “the penguins.” It wasn’t very prophetic. Sullivan and one other rookie of ‘37 went on to make Deputy Chief, four of their classmates became Inspectors, two rose to Captain and there is a good sprinkling of Lieutenants and Sergeants. No other Academy class has produced so many departmental leaders.
The year war broke out, Sullivan was transferred from the Harbor Division to Traffic as an accident-investigation Sergeant. During the war the police shortage prevented LAPD from adopting a number of traffic suggestions made by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “But traffic looked like a good future for a young man,” Sullivan recalls now, and LAPD’s postwar traffic progress has borne him out. From almost total reliance on the man on the bike, Traffic has mushroomed into a four-division Bureau known cryptically as TED, PIC, AID, and TSD.
TED (Traffic Enforcement) does the dirty and hazardous job of patrol. With six thousand miles of street and only 324 men, the task is almost frightening; especially since Traffic has been forced to reduce its street patrol personnel by five per cent in a period when vehicle registrations increased by almost half a million cars.
Only with the help of his other divisions has Chief Sullivan been able to avert an accident-injury breakthrough. The 190 PIC officers (Pedestrian and Intersection Control) are especially chosen on the basis of youth, manners, and prepossessing appearance. “Everybody is an expert when it comes to pedestrian control,” Chief Sullivan says philosophically. “They all have the answer. But unfortunately there is no panacea. We need the thinking of all elements of the public—and then daily cooperation in day-to-day problems.” It is the handsome young PIC officer in direct contact with the public who tries to win this cooperation and break down the old American distrust of any regulations and particularly traffic rules.
TSD (Traffic Services) propagandizes on a broader scale, presenting more than 1,400 traffic safety programs yearly and distributing pamphlets with such titles as “How Far Behind Are You?,” “Accidents Don’t Happen!” and “So You Have a Motor Scooter.”
As a matter of fact, TSD drops to its knees to implore the Angeleno to drive more carefully. In saturation educational campaigns, the division borrows department store windows for safety exhibits which often include life-size replicas of a LAPD motorcycle policeman and offers driver-aptitude tests under laboratory conditions. In city traffic, the division preaches tirelessly, regularity in driving rather than bursts of speed gets you there sooner as well as safer. As a matter of fact, under such driving conditions, tests show, thirty miles an hour more open than sixty mph is the quicker way between two points.
An uncomfortably large proportion of Los Angeles drivers seem determined that their community will live up to its name—the City of Angels—and that is when AID (Accident Investigation) rolls.
With traffic camera, special slide rule, distance measuring devices, sketch pads, flares, and recording equipment to take statements at the scene, AID men make scientific investigations into almost all accidents, even when fellow policemen are involved. They are called out some one hundred and twenty times daily, and their reports not only fix responsibility, but also provide the raw meat for future accident-prevention work.
Thus, with colored pins and enormous wall-sized maps, Traffic follows the shifting locale of accidents, plots the time and cause and then readjusts its motorcycle beats accordingly. If, in a given street, failure to signal turns has been the chief trouble, the man on the bike there is quick to hand out tickets to such offenders. With a scrap of legal paper instead of a gun, he cleans up his variation of “the crime mile” which is the careless mile.
Fortunately for the undermanned patrol, most Angelenos are cooperative when they are caught and submit passively to the citation. A few try to challenge the ticket in court and, of these, only about three per cent are successful. Some may try to square the ticket, but Los Angeles has made its system as fix-proof as is humanly possible.
Now and then, just often enough to keep the bike men edgy, something will happen. One April midnight TED Officers Blass N. Skvicalo and Lloyd Thomas ticketed an aircraft worker in the Wilshire district for having followed the car ahead too closely. The man accepted the citation without protest, and the TED men drove off on their cycles.
Three blocks farther on, the motorist rammed them from behind, hurling Skvicalo fifty feet and Thomas twice as far. Both received internal injuries, and only their white crash helmets saved their lives.
The motorist drove on till passers-by forced him to the curb. He protested that it had been a pure accident, but he was ordered held for assault with a deadly weapon—an automobile.*
*He was later convicted for hit-and-run felony.
An open-minded man, Chief Sullivan will experiment with anything that promises to save lives or facilitate the movement of traffic on four wheels or two legs.
One innovation was “Scramble,” the pedestrian control system used in a few cities. At the proper signal, walkers can cross an intersection any which-way instead of just one way.
In a large city, LAPD had established, there are sixteen variations of traffic movement which must be anticipated for effective control. Hoping that “Scramble” would simplify this pattern, Traffic installed the system at twenty-two intersections. While it solved some of the eternal conflict between auto and pedestrian, in other ways “Scramble” has seemed to slow car movements. It works best when traffic is light, poorest when it is heavy. It was found, however, that because of Los Angeles’ distinctive traffic problems “Scramble” was not feasible. Early in 1958 the city’s Traffic Commission voted to abandon the plan after a trial of nearly a year.
Traffic has also tried to persuade the motorist to help himself by lightening the load on the freeways. On an average day of the week, the freeway system criss-crossing through the heart of Los Angeles hauls 600,000 cars through the downtown area. So a “park-and-ride” service was offered motorists from the San Fernando Valley. They were given a parking area near Hollywood Bowl and bus service to carry them downtown from that point. Only a thousand fainthearted drivers weekly patronized the buses, and the service had to be dropped. The average Angeleno is just too game to accept that kind of solution.
However, in most ways, Traffic has conquered its freeway problems. Accidents are being kept to a minimum, and congestion is reduced by a helicopter patrol during peak hours. LAPD was the first American police department to utilize the whirlybird in traffic control. Its three-place Hiller is manned by a crew of Korean War veterans who spot bottlenecks and potential hazards which they relay by radio to surface police units.
In fact, the way things have worked out, Traffic is a little annoyed that the stale jokes about the “quick or dead” still persist, especially among visitors. Their mathematicians have calculated that the odds against getting killed in a freeway accident are twenty-to-one, compared to five-to-three in a crash on the streets.
Now and then, to get away from it all, Chief Sullivan himself takes to the helicopter, and there his problems seem reduced to little multi-colored bugs darting in various directions. But, like the other Deputy Chiefs, he is never permitted to relax long in the abstract. The specific is always close at hand.
There was, for example, the telephone call that had to be answered politely when Traffic utilized Sigalert to avoid serious congestion on the inbound Hollywood freeway.
“I just heard Sigalert about that accident,” a woman said worriedly. “Would you please tell me what color car that is? I’m worried about my husband. He was going to Los Angeles on the freeway and…
Specifics.
V
Of all LAPD’s Chiefs, Roger E. Murdock suffers the most occupational conflicts. He stood No. 3 on the last eligibility list for Chief Parker’s job itself, and yet he runs the department’s Siberia. He feels what he is doing is extremely important, and yet he feels the proper concern of policemen is crime, not correction.
He says bluntly, “We policemen are not glamorous and we’re not missionaries.” And yet, as part of his job, he administers LAPD’s four and a half million dollar experiment in trying to dehydrate drunks.
In his more than quarter of a century with LAPD, Murdock has served with distinction in detective, juvenile, traffic, personnel, and patrol work. Now he heads the Bureau of Corrections and, like his three hundred and seventy subordinates, feels that a lot of police manpower, chosen, trained, and paid for more complex work, is being wasted on jail keeping.
Chief Parker thoroughly agrees, but so long as LAPD is stuck with the job, a big one and an expensive one, he needs a top administrator to do it. Sometimes the daily population in the city jails exceeds 4,500, and the care and feeding of the inmates approximates four million dollars yearly. Murdock operates the biggest, if not the most popular hotel in Los Angeles.
Despite LAPD’s monumental reservations about the whole thing, the police go out of their way to make jail a clean place. Thus, the department believes, prisoners can be encouraged to cling to their self-respect while repaying society. They must shower daily and keep their cells immaculate.
They eat good food and sleep on comfortable beds. As LAPD sees it, good food is not only humanitarian but also practical penology. Complaints about the food have sparked more jail and prison riots than any other cause. Even in the outlying divisions, each of which has its own jail, the city’s Health Department supervises the menus.
In cooperation with city and county health authorities, all prisoners are X-rayed for tuberculosis, and in a year more than three hundred active TB cases will thus be spotted. They are sent to a sanatorium for treatment. All newcomers are also screened for other communicable diseases, and physicians are available around the clock in case of emergencies.
Murdock runs good jails and clean jails, but the interesting thing about Corrections—and the project the bureau should be least concerned with—is its drunk farm. Forty miles from downtown Los Angeles in the northwest mountain-desert country, LAPD maintains a 581-acre rehabilitation center for the chronic drunk.
“Nobody seemed to be helping the alcoholics in Los Angeles, so the police had to try it,” Murdock says a bit defensively.
The venture was launched early in the war when Los Angeles’ Skid Row suddenly became the No. 1 Bowery of America. Because of the climate, more and more homeless men drifted into the city, and police found that the “alcoholic recidivists,” or common drunks, were being arrested over and over again, some as many as two hundred times. They clogged the jails and courts, and a few days or weeks after doing their routine sentences, they were back again. Of the almost one hundred thousand arrests yearly for drunkenness, some sixteen thousand individuals account for about seventy per cent of the total bookings. Thus, for each wino who can be reformed in a year, the police will have to make four fewer arrests.
From an original fifty-inmate capacity, the rehab center has grown into ten dormitories which house about six hundred men. Each week, in batches of thirty-five to forty, they are sent up by the courts to do 120-day sentences at LAPD’s “mountain mission,” and enough come out new men to make the cost worthwhile.
The average arrival is white, forty-two years old, divorced, jobless for about six months and last employed at unskilled labor. Only one in six is currently employed, and one in ten has not worked for four years or even longer.
An analysis of some 3,100 men passing through the center during a two-year period disclosed that whites led Mexicans by more than seven-to-one, Negroes more than ten-to-one and Indians by almost twenty-five-to-one. (There was one Japanese, one Filipino and one Eskimo during the period.) The divorced outnumbered the married by almost five-to-one, but there were only half as many widowers as married men. Agewise, the years between thirty-six and fifty were disclosed as by far the most dangerous alcoholic years for men.
Therapy at “mountain mission” consists of a daily, 3,500-caloric menu, eight hours of sleep, a shave, bath, and change of clothes every twenty-four hours, and supervised recreation. While the inmates are being physically rehabilitated, police social workers start a “package” looking toward a new design for living after the men’s release. Relatives and former employers are interviewed, unions and fraternal associations notified in the hopes they can ease the readjustment.
Little by little, the six hundred receive religious help, medical attention, and trade training. In most cases, they respond. For security, there is just a fence and a bicycle patrol, yet escapes average only fifte
en yearly. And when they do leave legally, almost nine in ten don’t come back again. So far as LAPD knows, they have put together the shattered pieces of their lives.
One derelict, once an expert radioman, had drunk himself out of a job and while he was on Skid Row, the progress in electronics had passed him by. He couldn’t have held a job if he had wanted to.
At the center, he was assigned to the radio shack, and there he not only brushed up on his rusty knowledge of radio repairing, but also learned TV techniques. In four months he was released and rehab has not heard of him since.
In turn, the inmates do things for LAPD. They have produced 600,000 pounds of produce, most of it for the jail system, and they operate K6QFI, the police short-wave receiver and transmitter at the center. During the Geophysical Year they maintained twenty-four hours a day monitoring of scientific data being shortwaved home by scientific explorers and forwarded the information to the American Radio Relay League, West Hartford, Connecticut, for transmission to federal authorities.
Very practically, one inmate devised a tool to extract the burned-out vibrators from police car radios. Previously, they had been replaced at a cost of $2 each. Now the rehab inmates extract them, repair them, and replace them at a cost of twelve cents apiece.
And all this is done without the services of a professional therapist, psychiatrist, or psychologist in the entire program. It is done entirely by police officers.
And yet for Murdock, too, there is always the jarring specific. In two weeks three prisoners under his charge hanged themselves. One was a transient, another a young drunk with family troubles, and the third an attractive woman airlines clerk. That was the one that caused the most trouble because an official report said she was known to have had suicidal impulses and yet had not been relieved of the cord on her dressing robe.
