What’s It Take to Get a Cop in This Town?

The streets were dark and the traffic sparse when Lori Braneon stopped Monday night at the traffic signal at Redondo and Venice boulevards.

As her car idled at the red light, Braneon’s mind was on the business meeting she had just come from. Braneon, a 32-year-old single mother and free-lance artist, was preparing to start a house-cleaning service and had spent the evening with a partner working out details.

Lost in thought, it took her a moment to notice the knot of youths standing on the sidewalk, staring at her menacingly. She glanced down at her 6-year-old son, Christian, sitting on the seat beside her and thought, Please, light, change.

Two youths suddenly jumped toward the car, crouching in what police like to describe as a “two-handed firing position.” One of them was pointing a small, black object toward Braneon.

This can’t be happening to me . That looks like a gun!

Throwing herself below the dashboard and across her son, Braneon accelerated blindly through the intersection and raced to her apartment, five minutes away. She called the Los Angeles Police Department to get help, to warn others.

What she got instead was a lesson in the law and the realities of a Police Department that complains of too few officers and too many calls for service.

After dialing 911, she was connected to a Los Angeles police dispatcher. The conversation was automatically tape-recorded. Braneon explained as calmly as she could what had just happened to her.

What can you do about this ? she asked the LAPD.

“Well,” the dispatcher said, “not much since you don’t know who they are or where they are.”

Braneon was dumbfounded.

But these guys looked dangerous. Can’t you do something?

“What do you want us to do?”

Send a patrol car.

“What are they looking for, ma’am?” the dispatcher asked, her tone incredulous.

Youths on the street. Maybe with a gun. Right on the corner of Redondo and Venice. I mean, look, if I was dead now, this would be an incident. Meantime, you’re sitting there, rather complacent.

“I’m typing everything you are saying,” the dispatcher said. “I’m going to send an officer out there, so please don’t tell me what I’m doing because you can’t see.”

Do you need my address?

“We already have it.”

It was the first time that Braneon had ever asked the LAPD for service. She hopes it will be the last.

Every day, the Police Department’s dispatchers field more than 5,000 calls for help. That’s more than three calls a minute, some urgent, some not. The important calls, the life-threatening calls, are dispatched immediately; the calls in which a dispatcher determines that a person no longer is in danger are given lower priority, and it may be minutes before an officer is assigned to investigate, according to Lt. Fred Nixon, a police spokesman.

In the case of Braneon, it took 58 minutes before a patrol car was assigned to investigate, Nixon said. The officers searched the area for more than 20 minutes but found nothing.

A few minutes later and a couple of blocks from Braneon’s apartment, the officers noticed two suspicious men. They arrested one of them on an outstanding burglary warrant. Braneon, however, is hardly appeased.

Before moving to Los Angeles nine months ago in search of work, she had lived in Dallas, Denver and Oklahoma City. She is certain that officers in those cities would have at least knocked on her door to make sure that everything was all right. No officers came knocking Monday night or anytime since.

“That’s the way it is in L.A.,” a neighbor who has lived in Los Angeles far longer told Braneon. “You’ve got to get used to it.”

She can’t. Branded in her mind are the television images and newspaper photographs of another 32-year-old woman, Dorthea Hutchinson, who earlier this month happened to stop at a red light a block from home in South-Central Los Angeles. A man walked up to Hutchinson’s car and, without apparent motive, put a bullet in her head.

That could have been me lying in that car, dead, and that’s what it would have taken to get the cops interested.

Braneon called the offices of Councilman Nate Holden to complain. She called the front desk of the LAPD’s Wilshire Station to complain. She’s thinking about buying a gun to protect herself, or maybe moving to Orange County.

After listening to the tape-recording of Braneon’s call, police officials said they are thinking of taking corrective action against the dispatcher for “an apparent lack of sensitivity.”

The watch commander working that night in the communication’s division, meanwhile, said he does not specifically remember Braneon’s call for help.

“We get so many,” he said.