Tears in the City

A street cop’s lot, as everyone knows, is not a happy one.

He is pressured on the one hand to stop crime and on the other to protect individual rights. He is badgered from the top and harassed from the bottom.

Gangs are out to kill him, liberals hate him, kids don’t trust him, ethnics fear him and I’m not too damned sure about him either.

That’s a lot to handle for a guy just trying to make a living.

I’ve been up to my kazoo in cops lately due to a comment made the other day by LAPD Capt. Tom Elfmont. He was one of three policemen cleared of criminal wrongdoing in the ransacking raid of those apartments at 39th and Dalton three years ago.

He said the misdemeanor vandalism trial was a revelation of the “us versus them” syndrome that exists within the Police Department. And he didn’t mean cops versus the community. He meant cop versus cop.

The 39th and Dalton case brought it into the open.

Before Rodney King was worked over by uniformed goons in a feeding frenzy, the Dalton incident was what had everyone in town salivating for punishment of the louts involved.

It happened in 1988. Four apartments were thought to be gang-controlled crack houses. They weren’t. But that didn’t stop an army of cops from trashing the place. Windows were broken, glassware smashed, furniture shattered and clothing destroyed.

The apartments ended up looking like a building in Kansas after a tornado. This wasn’t police work. It was blind violence.

Elfmont was captain of the unit that did the damage and was charged with conspiracy and vandalism. He says he was the department’s scapegoat, the command officer who had to take the fall. The guys who hit the apartments were thugs, but he didn’t create or encourage them.

“I’ve been a policeman 21 years,” he told me the other day. “Five hundred warrants have been served without incident under my command. That ought to say something.”

What attracted me to Elfmont in the first place was a photograph of him sobbing when the verdict was read. He said later they were tears of relief.

But at least they indicated a degree of sensitivity rare among those who consider stoicism a display of manhood and tears a sign of weakness.

I talked with him about it a couple of days after the trial. “It was an emotional moment,” he said. “All my life I’ve wanted to be a cop. You get two master’s degrees, handle street crime, get good reports, get promoted and suddenly one day you’re on Page One and everyone’s calling you a bastard. It’s been a tough three years.”

It was during our conversation he mentioned the Us Versus Them Syndrome. The “us” are the commanders who never go beyond their office doors. The “them” are the guys in the rain at 3 a.m. chasing down a cholo with an Uzi.

There are two distinct classes of people in the department and it creates conflict, Elfmont says. He feels the division has an impact on the quality of service to the public because the street cop doesn’t trust the backing he’ll get from the top, and the command officers don’t know what the street cops are up against.

Still hoping to salvage his career, Elfmont remains circumspect about the conflict within. But he indicates that the trial was an example of street cops out to get a command officer by zeroing in on him. They were lying about his orders to them, he says, and they knew it.

He finds irony in the fact that he’s a captain once disciplined for spending too much time in the field suddenly becoming a target for those he spent the time with.

Others in the department I spoke with are less circumspect. They’re all street cops and, to a man, none wanted his name used.

Most had good words to say about Elfmont personally. They call him a bright and aggressive captain who tries hard to get along with his men.

“But there’re a lot of dolts who take him literally,” one man said. “When he gives them a pep talk and says rhetorically ‘kick ass and take names,’ that’s what they do. As a result, he’s a shooting star about to hit the ground.”

All agree the Us Versus Them battle exists. One calls it a war, the difference between those trying to save their butts and those risking them in the street. He adds: “It’ll get worse.”

Another blames the “robocrats” around Chief Daryl F. Gates. “They tell him what he wants to hear,” he says, “but only if it helps their careers. He’s become an ego in uniform who doesn’t know what the hell is going on in the streets.”

A policeman’s lot may not be a happy one, but a citizen’s lot isn’t exactly blissful when cops are either on a rampage or in the command of a chief babied by sycophants. One hopes it will get better soon, or the tears that fell in a courtroom are going to turn into a flood in the city.